America Has Some Seriously Weird-Looking High School Baseball Fields
America Has Some Seriously Weird-Looking High School Baseball Fields
And one guy is on a mission to document every single one of them.
About two months ago I became aware of a guy on Twitter named David Hrusovsky. His account featured lots of annotated images of high school baseball fields with unusual outfield configurations. Some had really short outfield distances, like the bizarre center field in the graphic shown above. Others were just the opposite, with really long outfield distances.
Still others had fairly conventional distances, but their outfield walls followed jagged paths due to adjacent buildings:
Hrusovsky’s Twitter profile said he was trying to document every single high school baseball field in America, one state at a time. As he finished each state, he created a graphic with all of the state’s fields overlaid on each other, which looked really cool.
As I investigated a bit more, I learned that Hrusovsky had become somewhat locally famous in Cleveland last fall for wearing a SpongeBob Squarepants costume to Guardians games.
Between the baseball field project and the SpongeBob thing, I definitely wanted to know more, so I got in touch with Hrusovsky and requested an interview. We spoke via Zoom about a month ago. Here’s a transcript of our discussion, edited for length and clarity.