There’s been all kinds of crazy stuff found on Google’s new StreetView application, which we wrote about before – guys who appear to be peeing on the side of the road, climbing fences into houses, and so on. While D.C. won’t be getting StreetView for a little while longer, there is still some strange stuff to be seen with good ol’ Google Maps.

Joyriding has long been a problem in D.C., where (usually) kids steal cars and drive them around before dumping them, but rarely do we actually see it, and ever rarer do we see it from the air. Browsing Google Maps, we spotted this, a car that looks like it was driven all over the baseball diamond at the Douglass Recreation Center in Southeast. When the photo was taken (2005 according to Google Earth, which shows the same image) the center was closed.

In other photos, the car is in different locations around the field. For example, this one from Microsoft’s Local Live website, which seems earlier based on the construction, shows a car in deep centerfield, parked on some kind of gravel lot or sandbox, while in this shot, which seems to be the most recent, a car is near the playground. (The Local Live site doesn’t work on Firefox, which we’re sure is not on purpose).

It’s also possible these are different cars altogether. They all look like four door sedans, but one in the earliest image the car looks reddish and appears to have its hood open, while in other shots the car looks yellow or white. The different colors could have come from the time of day the aerial photos were taken, but it’s also possible this was the cool spot to ditch cars in 2005. It’s too bad these photos are so old, otherwise Google Maps or Local Live could theoretically be more useful in locating stolen cars than D.C.’s crime cameras.

Image from Google Maps