As the great baseball novelist WP Kinsella noted in The Iowa Baseball Confederacy, there’s no rule stating that the foul lines end at the outfield wall. Technically, they run on forever, making just about all of America part of a baseball field. This print maps the foul lines of every major league stadium, letting them run to infinity.
This latest print by PopChartLabs could very well be their most beautiful. The Infinite Baseball Fields of America is a map of professional baseball stadiums across the United States, each with their home plate’s line of site reaching into the abyss, like a loosely banded confederacy of lighthouses looking for something. What’s flat-out humbling is that it’s actually just sheer data–location and position information–yet the design finds some aesthetic pocket that harkens back to baseball’s glory days, a certain Field of Dreams mysticism, while being perfectly appropriate in a modern den.
Can you learn anything from all the information? Maybe. It’s notable that most stadiums tend to point a bit east, no doubt to protect the batter’s eyes during late-afternoon games. Those poor outfielders, though, have it tough.
s a m h o c h b e r g - m e t i c u l o u s l y r a n d o m i z e d 