In the olden days, Stadiums were ALWAYS situated so that home plate was on the west end of the stadium, so you always got that dramatic shadow creeping toward the pitcher. One of my favorite visuals. Remember this from Thomas Wolfe?
"The scene is instant, whole and wonderful. In its beauty and design that vision of the soaring stands, the pattern of forty thousand empetalled faces, the velvet and unalterable geometry of the playing field and the small lean figures of the players, set there, lonely, tense, and waiting in their places bright, desperate solitary atoms encircled by that huge wall of nameless faces, is incredible. And more than anything, it is the light, the miracle of light and shade and color-- the crisp, blue light that swiftly slants out from the soaring stands and, deepening to violet, begins to march across the velvet field and towards the pitcher’s box that gives the thing its single and incomparable beauty.
The batter stands swinging his bat and grimly waiting at the plate, crouched, tense, the catcher, crouched, the umpire, bent, hands clasped behind his back, and peering forward. All of them are set now in the cold blue of that slanting shadow, except the pitcher who stands out there all alone, calm, desperate, and forsaken in his isolation, with the gold-red swiftly fading light upon him, his figure legible with all the resolution, despair and lonely dignity which that slanting, somehow fatal light can give him."
It is also why left-handed pitchers are referred to as southpaws. Anyone who builds a stadium with home plate anywhere else save on the west end is a communist.