A roundup of bizarre high school baseball fields started with a quirky one in Kentucky, where right field is comically shallow and left field stretches forever. The setup is so lopsided that fielders could stand yards from the plate and still cover the entire side. Guardrails on the outfield fence look oddly out of place, like someone expected dramatic catches that clearly aren’t happening there. Then came Toms River High School South in New Jersey, where a building juts directly into right field. The host jokes about a fly ball bouncing off the wall, reversing direction, and sending the confused right fielder scrambling. It’s short enough to encourage some odd home runs right over the roofline.
Things only get stranger out west. El Camino High School in South San Francisco wedged its field between tennis courts and a football field. Center field is just 250 feet, and a section of fence acts as a built-in ground-rule double zone. There’s even a cemetery just outside the foul lines, so a foul ball could land among tombstones. In Burbank, California, there’s a field so short it’s likely only used for lower-level games. Right-center is barely 250 feet, and there’s no warning track—just dirt. It’s so small a home might catch foul balls from the porch.
The wildest one might be in Panama at the now-defunct Panama Canal College. A massive 10-story bridge looms directly above the field, and a tower stands where left field should be. No one ever cleared the bridge with a home run, but it wasn’t for lack of trying. Back in the U.S., Hackett Field features a running track that overlaps with the infield dirt. A concrete lip on the track could send ground balls bouncing in unpredictable directions. The video wraps up with a visit to the creator’s middle school field in Illinois, which by comparison looked boringly normal.