From a bird’s eye view, the baseball diamond at Lutheran West High School in the Cleveland suburb of Rocky River, Ohio, doesn’t scan as especially strange. There are cinderblock dugouts, a concessions stand and chain-link fences. There’s a turf infield and a grass outfield. And there are dimensions of 356 feet to left field, 428 to center and 318 to a tree-lined short porch in right.
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But those who play there know the field is anything but orthodox. The outfield wall, from the left-field corner to straightaway center, is the side of the school. A home run has to carry the distance and the 20-foot wall to land, irretrievable, on the roof. Along the wall are windows, an alcove for a school entrance and a glass greenhouse jutting into center field. The specter of broken glass hovers over every pitch. Then there’s the magnum opus of this perilous park: a drainage gulley in left-center inviting bad bounces and rolled ankles. Ground rules and common sense say any ball in the ditch is declared dead.
David Hrusovsky, 22, played at that field for four years in high school. “It’s really weird,” he says, yet he says it fondly. Most who played high school ball, like those currently headed to state championships around the country, have played or practiced on a field that was beautifully, extraordinarily weird. There’s a collective soft spot for them. In April 2020, a Reddit post about a bizarre baseball field spawned scores of similar threads, with users sharing their most curious finds from memory or from Google Maps. It eventually got the Jomboy breakdown treatment, a video with more than 2.5 million views.
All of this unspooled as Hrusovsky was back home in Cleveland after his freshman year at Bowling Green was cut short by the pandemic. He had an affinity for quirky high school fields, a personal connection to one and way too much free time. What he felt the threads and videos lacked were context and comprehensiveness. How, he surmised, can you know which fields are true outliers without analyzing all of them? Hrusovsky shuddered at the idea of a wacky field going unremarked upon because it was in the middle of nowhere. So he created a spreadsheet with a row for each high school field in Ohio and opened Google Maps.
“I just went down a rabbit hole,” he says.
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Over the next eight months, Hrusovsky searched for and plotted 753 high school diamonds in his home state, measuring distances and noting oddities — like the Monroe Central (Woodsfield, Ohio) field with a maximum distance of 510 feet from home plate to the outfield fence, or the since-renovated field at Open Door Christian (Elyria, Ohio) with a max distance of only 256 feet and also shortened basepaths. Hrusovsky didn’t have an end goal for the project. “I had this information but didn’t know what to do with it,” he says. But then another thought occurred to him: I should do this for the whole country.
Utah was completed next, then Hawaii, West Virginia, Alaska, Rhode Island, North Dakota, Delaware, Maine, Connecticut and, as of earlier this month, New Hampshire. Pennsylvania and Colorado are currently underway.
By now, Hrusovsky has cataloged more than 1,800 high school baseball fields and worked his way through a quarter of U.S. states, though the lift grows heavier as he moves into more populous ones. Once he wraps up a state, he makes infographics to share on social media featuring the strangest fields in each state, pointing out abnormalities and calculating each field’s percentile rank in total area, average outfield length and outfield variability. He also creates a visual overlaying all fields from a state and another combining them to make the longest and shortest possible fence distance combinations.
Just finished the HS fields for the state of New Hampshire. Here's an updated "Weird Field %" with NH included now. It's the third-weirdest state I've completed so far, with 10/84 fields plotted to be weird. pic.twitter.com/3Jl8pdv3hR
— David Hrusovsky Sports (@davehrus) May 30, 2023
In his little corner of the internet, Hrusovsky’s obscure obsession is celebrated. His infographic drops spread rapidly from Twitter to Reddit and beyond.
But it wasn’t always that way. Initially, Hrusovsky sat on his mountain of data, unsure of how to share his results or if anyone would care about them. He thought about writing an article or making a video, then decided against both. He didn’t start making infographics until December 2021 and didn’t share any until May 2022, more than two years after he started the project.
“I was questioning myself, I think as most people do when they’re making something,” Hrusovsky says. “One day in May, I was like, screw it, I’ll just post it. If it bombs, it bombs.”
A while back ago, I measured the specs of every single Ohio high school home baseball field in the search for the weirdest fields to play on in an official game. Here are, in my opinion, the four weirdest fields you can play on in an Ohio HS baseball game. pic.twitter.com/5tONurC6zU
— David Hrusovsky Sports (@davehrus) May 4, 2022
It did not bomb.
“I was like, oh, I should keep doing these,” he says.
Since then, Hrusovsky has perfected his process for each high school field — outline the diamond, measure total acreage and outfield distances, note any peculiarities — so that each now takes him five to 10 minutes. Multiply that by 1,800 fields and you’re talking about 150 to 300 hours of research time. If only it were that few, Hrusovky says, because the data collection for each field is often less time-consuming than the first step: “Finding the field at all.”
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The states Hrusovsky has sailed through are ones where the state athletic association provides a list of schools and addresses for their baseball fields. That’s the holy grail. And rare. For the others, Hrusovsky says, “it’s a scavenger hunt.” He’ll inspect each ballpark in a certain radius of those high schools and try to whittle down to the right one. “You just have to do detective work and make really, really educated guesses.” He once searched a school’s name and “baseball field” on Twitter and found two students discussing where their upcoming game would be played. Another time, there were more than a dozen fields in relatively close proximity to a West Virginia school. Hrusovsky finally matched the backstop color from a photo on the baseball team’s Facebook page to one of the fields on Google Maps. “That one took me a whole day to find,” he says. And the kicker. “It was the most common field you’ve ever seen.”
Some strange features aren’t apparent from simply taking measurements of a field, so Hrusovsky looks for tells from the aerial view — like a long shadow from an especially tall fence, or slight changes in terrain and elevation — and jots down anything that catches his eye, then circles back later to look at photos and videos taken there. At this point in his project, he also receives submissions from people eager to nominate their favorite weird field.
Occasionally, one that seems too strange to be true actually is. Cosgray Field in Hundred, W.Va., is 376 feet to left and 152 to right, and the two yellow uprights are in play. That’s because it’s a football field. There’s an orange line spray-painted on the side of the mountain beyond the right-field fence to differentiate between a ground-rule double and a homer. However, after running that graphic, Hrusovsky learned the baseball team no longer plays there. He corrected the record, but reality didn’t keep Cosgray Field from becoming one of his favorite (former) high school baseball fields.
Every student in Bowling Green’s Digital Arts program has to complete a senior thesis prior to graduation. There are few constraints. It can be animation, game design, interactive storytelling, digital images and illustrations, almost anything at all. For some, like Hrusovsky, that freedom can also be a hindrance. He struggled to settle on a project that seemed worthy of a senior thesis.
“A lot of students don’t know what to do,” says Bart Woodstrup, an associate professor and division chair of the Digital Arts program, “because they’re so used to us giving them all of the assignments and parameters that once they get their senior thesis and have no parameters they really are lost in what to do.”
In teaching a class called “Art and Code,” Woodstrup had come to learn two things about Hrusovsky. First, he excelled at using code for creative purposes. A CMYK orb clock he created for a class assignment later won an award at the school’s undergraduate art show. And second, he was obsessed with sports — particularly Ohio sports. This was clear in his data visualizations and in his classroom conversations. One day, Hrusovsky was wearing a Justin Fields Bears jersey. Woodstrup, a native Chicagoan, said, “You’re a Bears fan, too?!” Hrusovsky shook his head. He’s a Justin Fields fan because he played college football in Ohio.
So Woodstrup was unsurprised when Hrusovsky first mentioned that he’d created a series of infographics analyzing all the high school baseball fields in Ohio. “I was like, of course you did,” Woodstrup says, laughing. Hrusovsky hadn’t considered turning the weird fields project into his senior thesis until a friend mentioned the idea. So he first showed it to Woodstrup and his class.
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“First off, they were very confused,” Hrusovsky said. “Then they were like, yeah, you should do this.”
Next he presented the proposal to the Digital Art faculty. Woodstrup, a fan of both sports and data visualization, was on board with the idea. Others needed to be sold. Did this data visualization qualify as art? Did it meet culture in an intriguing way? Was there a story to be told about which schools had strange fields and which didn’t?
“What I encouraged him to do was to allow the people viewing his artwork to complete the story,” Woodstrup says, “because every person who sees this piece and loves baseball will relate their own story based on his work. And I said, ‘That’s your connection. That’s the art. Let the audience complete the work for you.’”
Eventually, as his proposal evolved, Hrusovsky got the green light. He made a poster that showed the Ohio field outlines and also featured the state’s top 10 weirdest fields off to the side. He interviewed coaches and alums to collect their stories. Then he drove to his top four strange fields in Ohio, including his own high school, and took 360-degree photos that he later turned into an interactive program to give a first-person perspective from each field.
This spring, family and friends of Bowling Green seniors stepped into the school’s art gallery and were greeted by projects of all shapes and sizes. None, however, was remotely like Hrusovsky’s. It was unorthodox. It was an outlier. And those are two of his favorite things. Hrusovsky knew it was a project made more for the internet than for a gallery, but it had an audience there, too.
“At the show, I seemed to take a strong hold on the dad demographic of the art exhibit viewers,” he says. “There was a giant huddle of dads hanging out.”
These days, Hrusovsky is back in Cleveland rooting on the Guardians — he’s also the SpongeBob Kid, but that’s a story for another day — and interviewing for jobs. Ideally, one day soon he’ll be creating graphics for scoreboards or broadcasts, but mainly he just wants to work in sports. And however that works out, Hrusovsky still plans to spend his free time searching every high school baseball field in the country to find the weirdest and wackiest ones around.
(Top photo of Hrusovsky: David Hrusovsky)
