Killing Fields : Track infields, jutting bleachers and rutted ground. It is the unlucky lot in life for some ballplayers to have to contend with these discomforts of home.

Ever since Abner Doubleday turned the game of rounders into the national pastime, baseball fields have ranged from the sublime to the ridiculous, from big-league glitter palaces like Dodger Stadium to slapdash school playgrounds where a math book stands in for first base, an old jacket fills in for second and Johnny’s little sister subs for third.

In celebration of the ridiculous, the Valley area has been scoured for high school baseball fields that have not yielded to the strict uniformity of suburbia’s master-plan communities.

Among the high schools found to have the worst home-field disadvantages are North Hollywood, Camarillo, Faith Baptist and Canoga Park. Playing at these diamonds in the rough is often treacherous, always unusual and never boring. They may make up in character what they lack in design but their peculiarities often transform baseball into a mutant game.

North Hollywood, easily the most booby-trapped field in the Valley, has more amendments to the rules than the U.S. Constitution.

“It’s a chamber of horrors,” said Coach Brian York, who is trying to cope with his fourth macabre season at the monument to individuality and bad planning.

A baseball purist--the kind of guy who even thinks AstroTurf is an aberration--will be horrified at his first sight of North Hollywood’s homage to “Nightmare on Elm Street”--the “Terror on Magnolia Boulevard.”

What is the dirt running track doing in the infield? What is the band room doing in right field, a scant 300 feet from home plate? Why, in the name of Peter Ueberroth, were those huge trees planted in the outfield? And who told those truck drivers they could cut across the diamond?

“It’s extremely, extremely frustrating,” York said. “Especially after coaching three years at Kennedy, which has a truly beautiful field. You wouldn’t believe our ground rules at North Hollywood. They’re amazing. The band director doesn’t close the door to the band room. If a ball goes into the room, it’s a ground-rule double. If a ball hits the trees, it’s a ground-rule double.

“Shall I go on? It gets worse.

“We had to tell the custodian not to clean up the band room during games because a ball was hit into his trash barrel once.” You guessed it. “It was a ground-rule double,” York said.

The way the rules are structured at North Hollywood, failing to hit a ground-rule double is almost impossible. When notsmashing balls into tree limbs, vehicles, classrooms, lockers and bike racks only a half-swing from home plate, a batter always can blast one off students who wander through the outfield.

The field, of course, is not hidden in some far-off corner of the campus where it wouldn’t embarrass the school board. It is situated between two large classroom buildings, and even students who don’t take geometry know that a straight line is the shortest distance between two points, and so what if nine guys in uniform are trying to play a game?

“We often have anywhere from 100 to 250 students on foot, bikes and skateboards coming across the field. If a ball hits one of them, the ball is dead and the umpire has to determine where the runner is placed,” said York, who has to conduct pregame seminars just to explain the ground rules.

York does have an advantage over his players: He doesn’t have to play on the field. “It’s a joke,” said Nino Cuccinello, the Huskies’ second baseman. “You have to pay extra careful attention out there because of all the students and the band and the track guys who keep coming through all the time.

“We’ve got a thing called the ‘Husky Homer,’ which is a shot past third-base that skids over the track and keeps rolling all the way to Chandler Boulevard. It’s the worst field in the city.”

The track is a certainly hazard, both to runners and fielders. To play a ball, fielders have to learn to step gingerly over the track’s cement curb, which runs around the inner circumference. And if the ball hits the curb, they must have as much knowledge of angles and caroms as a pool hustler. But some don’t.

“We’ve had guys with broken noses from ricocheting balls and we’ve had guys trip over the curb and break ankles,” York said.

York also has had to deal with neighborhood joggers who insist on using the track during games. Talk about distractions: bases loaded, full count on the batter, and here comes Judy Jogger rounding second heading into right-center, oblivious to the fielder in her path. What York would give just then for a well-placed liner.

“When we tell them not to use the track, they say, ‘I’m a taxpayer,’ so we have to call security to get them off,” York said.

Poetic justice to York would be a maintenance truck running over a taxpayer on the track. Trucks really get on his nerves. They gain access to the field through a large gate near the third-base line, which apparently is easily mistaken for an entrance to the Hollywood Freeway. Despite York’s efforts to stop them, the trucks pretty much come and go as they please, often gouging ruts in the well-groomed infield that he and his assistant, Rich Allen, painstakingly care for.

Once, York said, a truck ran over third base, mashing the sunken concrete hook that anchors the base. “And we had to stop a game when three big trucks drove across the field,” York said. Does that ever happen at Yankee Stadium?

Trucks are a problem in Camarillo, too, but not because they do wheelies on the field. Trucks, as well as thousands of other exhaust-spewing vehicles, thunder by on the Ventura Freeway, which is only 20 feet behind home plate. No one knows what harm the carbon monoxide is doing when the westerlies blow fumes and baseballs into deep center, but the traffic causes enough racket to drown out normal conversation on the field.

“It’s hard to communicate,” Coach Ken Wagner said. “I’ve heard people say, ‘You guys do a lot of yelling.’ Well, we do. But we have to yell to be heard. And we have to use a lot of sign language.”

Even a 30-foot-high row of thick shrubs paralleling the foul lines doesn’t diminish the buzz, which has grown louder and longer over the years. When the field was built in 1956, freeway traffic was a trickle compared to the deluge that arrived as Ventura County expanded.

Noise aside, what makes Camarillo High really unusual is the truncated center field. Looming 320 feet from home plate--a less-than-Ruthian poke--is the back end of the football bleachers. In contrast, the power alleys in right- and left-center are a deathly 370 feet away. Balls orbiting into the seats on the fly are home runs. Balls landing underneath the stands are ground-rule doubles.

“Playing center field is tough,” Wagner said. “The fielder has to learn to play the bleachers as well as a light pole out there.” And the outfield ground itself appears to be undulating like a gently rolling sea.

To keep foul balls from bounding onto the freeway, a canopy of chicken wire has been strung 25 feet above the plate like a safety net. Although the screen has kept freeway damage to only a couple of broken windshields a year, Wagner says, it also catches potential infield flies, turning them into foul balls rather than outs.

“There are never any pop-ups to the infield,” Wagner said.

A corner of the track, which circles the nearby football field, is only 330 feet from the plate down the right-field line. If a track meet and a baseball game are scheduled simultaneously, the hop, skip and jump takes on new meaning for track competitors.

“The people on the track start having to dodge baseballs,” Wagner said. “We can really disrupt a meet.”

Wagner, who has been coaching baseball at Camarillo for four years, won’t have to worry about noises and nuisances after this season. Next year, his Scorpions will get a new field--presumably a normal one--on a larger parcel elsewhere on campus.

Faith Baptist also wants a new home for its baseball team, but the owner of the vacant property next door to the school won’t sell, Athletic Director Brian Neely said. So the Contenders have to live with the shortest right-field foul line in the Valley--225 feet from home plate to the cars on Farralone Avenue.

“We’ve claimed some car windows,” Neely said, pointing out, however, that while the church across the street often has been struck by baseballs, God has seen fit to spare the stained glass.

This season, it won’t be as easy to hit a ball out of the park because Faith Baptist has erected its version of the Green Monster in Boston’s Fenway Park --a 20-foot-high screen running from the right-field foul pole to center field. Only the presence of telephone wires limited the height of the barrier--Neely would liked to have gone up a few more feet.

The addition of the screen, however, has not changed the ground rules.

“Any ball that clears the screen to the right of the telephone pole is a double,” Neely explained. “To the left of the pole, it’s a home run. That really cost us in a game against La Verne last week. We trailed, 8-5, and had two runners on when one of our guys hit one over the fence, just to the right of the pole--it was only a

double.”

Despite the beckoning right-field wall, the Contenders hit only seven homers at home last season, 21 the year before.

“We’ve had one decent left-hand hitter in the last five years,” Neely lamented.

While most high schools in the Valley can blame themselves for deformed and misshapen fields, Canoga Park can cast an evil eye on the city Department of Parks and Recreation. Canoga Park, unlike most schools in this story, resisted the urge to stuff the baseball field into a nook on the school grounds. Along with Crespi and Van Nuys, Canoga doesn’t have a field at home and is forced to play at a public park.

For the Hunters, it’s Lanark Park, which has been validated as a strangely arranged field by North Hollywood’s Brian York, obviously the area’s leading expert on the subject.

“I hate that place,” he said.

With no pitcher’s mound, no infield grass and no fences, Lanark is no landmark as a baseball field. In addition to a rock-hard infield that can send routine grounders skipping into eternity--balls hit through the gap are called “tweeners”--players also have to contend with derelicts, dogs and other distractions like picnickers and mothers pushing baby strollers. Center fielders can get mugged and bitten in the same inning.

Canoga Park baseball Coach Doug MacKenzie has been enduring sandlot conditions for 37 years. He has learned to station team managers along the outfield foul lines to keep interlopers away. He has learned to control his temper when strangers pick up rolling baseballs in fair territory or when the game has to be stopped to shoo humans and animals off the field. And he has learned to keep his criticisms to himself.

“I have to be careful what I say about the field,” MacKenzie said. “I got in trouble with the head groundskeeper last year when I complained about the infield. I know he does the best job possible considering the circumstances. The field gets such a tremendous amount of play what with T-ball, softball and senior-league games. It’s not his fault the field is packed like concrete.”

When MacKenzie began coaching at Canoga Park, the campus had a softball field. It was suggested to him that he try to stretch it into a baseball field. MacKenzie, however, knew the potential dangers.

“We couldn’t play baseball there,” he said, “unless we wanted to kill a few track men.”

Not only do MacKenzie and his players have to travel to Lanark Park for games and practices, but they can’t get the school to provide a bus.

“The park is 1.9999 miles from school,” he said. “If it was two miles, they’d authorize a bus. So we have to take cars.”

Still, there’s no place like home, and even North Hollywood’s chamber of horrors is better than the alternative--no field at all.

WHERE THE BALLPLAYERS ROAM

The Valley’s unusual high school baseball fields in order of quirkiness

North Hollywood--Running track curves around second base, the band room is only 300 feet from home plate in fair territory, two large trees lurk in the outfield.

Camarillo--Football bleachers are in center field only 320 feet from the plate, noise from nearby the Ventura Freeway limits communication to a yell, and an overhang above the plate makes infield pop-ups a virtual impossibility.

Faith Baptist--The shortest right-field fence in the Valley is only 225 feet from home plate.

Lanark Park (home of Canoga Park High)--No mound, no infield grass and derelicts and dogs roaming the fenceless outfield.

Taft--The right-field line is only 283 feet but the left-field line is 431.

Van Nuys Park (home of Van Nuys High)--A cement drain in the outfield makes fielding treacherous.

Reseda High--Parking lot in right-center field and a short left field.

Granada Hills--Ivy on the ground around the outfield walls is out of play because of sprinklers and drains.

El Camino Real--Track is dangerously close to the right-field line and houses are only a 335-foot home run behind left field.