This is The Triangle. It’s 420 feet from home plate—the furthest point on the field—and
its tight corners mean that any well-placed hit will bounce around long enough to secure
a likely triple. It’s the bane of outfielders everywhere, and by everywhere, I mean only…
Boston, Massachusetts, because like many horrible things, The Triangle only exists in Boston.
Fenway Park, the home of the Boston Red Sox, is the only MLB field shaped like this, and
it’s the only one to feature The Triangle. But it’s not unique in its uniqueness—in
fact, all 30 MLB stadiums across the country are completely different. They have different
sizes, different shapes, and yes, even slightly different rules. But why aren’t there standards
governing the size or shape of a ballpark, and how do they keep the game consistent when
the stadiums aren’t? Well, before we get into the very weird ways
that the MLB deals with this problem, it’s worth explaining why this sort of problem
is unique to baseball. Just as an example, let’s talk about the standards that your
average NFL field has to meet before a bunch of very large anthropology majors can concuss
each other on it. As laid out in the NFL Rule Book, every single NFL field is exactly 120
yards long and 53 and ⅓ yards wide, with goal lines established ten yards in from each
end line. Within 72 hours of any game, they measure the firmness of the field, and then
measure the depth of infill—that carcinogenic confetti stuff—in 40 different places to
make sure that the ground is perfectly level. The fields are regularly tested for moisture
level, grass coverage, and even the strength of the grass roots to ensure that every NFL
game, with very few exceptions, is played on an essentially physically-identical field.
And similar standards apply to pretty much any professional sport you can think of…
that is, except for baseball. The reasons for this are… complicated, but
that’s why you’ve got YouTubers like me to simplify it just enough that everyone who
actually cares about baseball will absolutely eviscerate me in the comments section. Basically,
baseball is old. It’s the oldest professional sport in the United States, apart from shooting
British people, and as such, it’s carried with it some quirks of the past. When baseball
stadiums were first being built in the late 19th century, Americans hadn’t yet realized
that they could all be living in really ugly identical housing developments in the middle
of nowhere, and were being forced to live in tightly-knit walkable cities instead. As
a result, baseball stadiums were being built the only place that they’d be easily accessible:
in city centers, where they could be reached by foot or horse or Flintstones car. The problem
with this, however, was that urban land was limited; these stadiums were being built in
the middle of pre-existing neighborhoods and designed around complicated municipal infrastructure,
so much like an insecure NYU student, these parks had to get really weird to fit in in
the big city; these were later dubbed “jewel box” parks and were known for their unconventional
shapes—two of which are still in use today: the previously-mentioned Fenway Park and Wrigley
Field in Chicago. As suburbs started to develop in the 40s and stadiums could be built in
less-claustrophobic conditions on the outer edges of cities, you started to see large,
multi-purpose stadiums like the Oakland Coliseum—these tended to be more symmetrical, but weren’t
optimized for baseball. This meant that they had other sorts of quirks, like huge foul
territories in parts of the stadium that weren’t meant to be used. Then around the 60s and
70s you started to see smaller parks pop up designed specifically for baseball, like Dodger
Stadium, and by the 90s and 2000s, quirky asymmetrical parks like Camden Yards came
back in fashion, because Baltimore had no other way of convincing people that they were
cool again. The point is, baseball stadiums have been around for a long time—much longer
than stadiums for most other sports—so there’s been a lot of architectural inconsistency
over a century’s worth of urban development, cultural revolution, and fluctuating interest
in watching men in tight pants run in circles. And while there have been pushes in the past
to standardize, it would mean spending an obscene amount of money to abandon some of
the sport’s most iconic and beloved venues, so instead, the MLB opted for the simple solution:
create 30 slightly different versions of baseball that are impossible to memorize but technically
account for every single difference in every single stadium—easy!
These unique variations on the game are called “ground rules,” a stadium-specific rule
set for each different ballpark in the MLB. Now, some of these rules are used to determine
what exactly is part of the field, and what isn’t—for example, a ball that hits this
camera in Oakland is out of play, but a ball that hits this camera in Baltimore is in play.
But there are also rules that can completely alter the way that the game plays out on a
given field—hitting this ladder at Fenway Park, for example, awards the batter an automatic
double. Same goes if they get the ball stuck in this ivy at Wrigley Field. Hitting the
upper catwalks at Tropicana field means the ball is still in play, but hitting the lower
catwalks is an automatic home run. If you bat a ball into the top part of this wall
at PNC Park and it ricochets over this other wall, that’s a home run. But if your ball
hits the bottom part of the wall and it makes the same bounce, it’s only a double. And
if you knock the ball out of Nationals Park in DC and it careens all the way into the
West Wing of the White House and hits Joe Biden in the head, killing him instantly,
then you technically score a home run but you also probably end up going to prison.
So the next time your friend thinks they know all the rules to baseball, they don’t, and
you should just smugly bring up this video to prove them wrong and ruin your friendship
for no reason. So, I have to do a lot of the research for
these videos while I’m traveling, and especially when you’re dealing with highly-local information
like the stuff in this video, doing that research abroad can be a huge headache. I’ve mentioned
this before, but back in 2018, the EU rolled out a new set of internet regulations to protect
European citizens’ data, but American websites that didn’t want to meet these standards
just ended up blocking all of Europe instead, and that would’ve made writing this video
impossible, if we didn’t have NordVPN. With Nord, we were able to change our location
to the US with just a click—it was effortlessly easy, and there would’ve been no other way
for us to access those… kind of sketchy websites. And better yet, with their threat
protection features it can alert me when one of those emails from my bank or social media
is in fact a sketchy phishing attempt. I was a little skeptical about using VPNs before,
I figured that they’d just slow me down and get in the way, but my experience with
Nord has been totally seamless—it’s the fastest VPN on the planet, and you’d hardly
notice that it’s there. If you use the internet outside of the home at all—at the coffee
shop, on the train, at a coworking space—and are worried about the security of your accounts,
you should really consider trying out NordVPN. And, hey, if it doesn’t work out or you
don’t get enough use out of it, you don’t need to worry—Nord offers a 30-day money
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