One of the truly unique aspects of baseball is that no two fields are exactly alike.
Whereas basketball, football, soccer, lacrosse, volleyball, field hockey, soccer and every other sport have exact field dimensions, baseball has refused to conform.
In the Major Leagues, all the newer stadiums have far less eccentricities than back in the days of the Polo Grounds or even Fenway Park but the high school fields have remained truly unique. On Long Island, while many schools have upgraded to artificial turf and portable fences to normalize the dimensions, some have withstood the test of time.
The common theme is that the truly bizarre ones are impacted by the football fields. Not every school has the luxury of unlimited space so they had to make due with what they have available and football fields need to be 100 yards so it winds up making for quirky dimensions on the baseball field. Then you have Commack, who just hasn’t put up a fence for some reason and Calhoun, which has a very unique triangle in left center field that makes it very rare to see a home run.
Obviously, these are fun eccentricities until it’s your ERA that’s impacted by a home run or your batting average that suffers when the outfielder tracks down a 410 foot fly ball. At Centereach, we had a very short porch (270 feet) in left field but ironically not many home runs go there because it’s only about 20 feet worth of fence and then it juts out significantly.
Let’s take a look at these:
Carey
West Islip
Plainedge
Commack
Port Washington
Babylon
Roslyn
Calhoun
