The rules that govern a baseball field’s shape are about as loose as the rules that govern the state of Florida right now. It’s a free-for-all.
Major League Baseball mandates a minimum of 250-feet but recommends 320-feet at the left/right field foul poles and 400-feet in Center Field but these are just recommendations. At the College, High School, and Little League levels anything goes.
If you played baseball as a kid then you already know this. Without a doubt you rolled up to some field and thought to yourself ‘WTF even is this???’ You might’ve even played on an oblong field with a pool in left field and hill in right.
About a week ago on the /r/Baseball subreddit, people started sharing pictures of the weirdest baseball fields in America. I’ve embedded some of those images right here for you to feast your eyes on but there’s a really excellent video from Jomboy Media where he uses Google Maps to track down the strangest baseball fields in America. Given that we don’t have actual sports to watch right now this is the next best thing for me today.
Check out the pics with the video below:
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As a Tampa Bay Rays fan, I know a thing or two about weird-ass fields. It’s not the shape that makes Tropicana Field so strange as much as the live stingray touch tank in Center Field and a tiki bar in left field. But The Trop has nothing on the bizarre Long Island University-Brooklyn field that looks like something you’d see in a movie about people playing baseball in prison.