The landscape of Boston, Massachusetts has one striking feature visible only from the air. At first you might not notice it, but the longer you peer out the window, the more you’ll see of it and the more you’ll see the big picture. Boston is positively littered with baseball fields. And as scores of them stream silently past – from manicured prep school fields to grubby and grassless dirt lots to the unforgettable Fenway Park – these peculiar green-and-brown freckles on the face of the city inform the uninitiated arriving at Logan Airport of what the residents already know in their bones. This is a baseball town.
I grew up in Melrose, a cheery suburb six or seven miles north of Boston Proper, which, for its size, contributes a decent number of those freckles. Melrose is a working class town that made good. Despite the modest single-family homes, duplexes and triplexes found in other Greater Boston towns – perhaps because of them – Melrose escaped the slow decay of urbanization endured by many of its neighbors. The commercial core is confined to one main street (appropriately named Main Street), and the rest of the place is residences, side streets, and lawns. These were my old stomping grounds.
By the mid-seventies, Melrose had developed a very nice and inclusive Little League program. Problem was, it ended when the school year did, and we kids were left to organize ourselves come summer. Playing baseball in the suburbs, however, is more difficult than it might seem. In the part of town where I grew up, the gentrified, rolling hills of what was once a series of apple orchards, there was very little open space. The entire area had long been subdivided, and there wasn’t a single unimproved lot. True, there was a golf course nearby, but that’s a generally dangerous place to play – although it’s an exceptionally good place if you enjoy getting interrupted every fifteen minutes by a lecture from a foursome of old ladies.
Playing summer baseball is fraught with a number of other challenges. First, you have to get to a ball field. They may look like they’re everywhere from the air, but it’s a different story on your Huffy. And surely you will encounter a street that one of your posse has been forbidden to cross. Moreover, those fields are big. So it’s difficult even getting enough players together to prevent you spending half your time retrieving balls that stopped rolling so long ago insects have begun inspecting them.
The biggest impediment to playing baseball, though, was our own backyards. Everybody had one, so our parents expected us to actually stay in them. ‘I don’t want you going halfway across town to a park. Play your baseball game around here where I can see you.’ Of course once you got beyond the age of, say, six, and you were any good at all, trying to play baseball in a suburban backyard was like trying to do yoga in a phone booth. Still, we were resourceful. Teddy Roosevelt once said, ‘Do what you can, where you are, with what you have.’ And that philosophy is how whiffleball became the sport of choice on Sherwood Road.
Whiffleball has a number of distinct advantages over baseball, particularly if you’re ten. For example, you can play whiffleball with as many players as you like (or have). You don’t need a glove or a catcher. (In a pinch, you don’t really even need a pitcher!) Nothing breaks and no one gets hurt when hit with a whiffleball. And the ball usually stops quickly after it hits the ground. Yet whiffleball never failed to offer us the best parts of baseball. The game retains all the drama and tension of the national pastime. Bases loaded, two outs, bottom of the ninth still carries all the majesty of Fenway, even if the batters box is five feet from your back door.
As I look back, I realize that whiffleball taught us the fundamentals that would help immeasurably in Little League and beyond. We learned bat speed and base running, and honed our eye-hand coordination. We learned how to throw accurately. And there’s no better tool than a whiffleball for learning how to throw a curve. Thanks to whiffleball, I had the skills and confidence, at age 12, to pitch both a regular season no-hitter and a shutout in the Little League Championship.
It was astonishing, later in life, how quickly those skills I learned as a boy came back. At my 10th high school reunion, someone started a pickup whiffleball game. Without a lick of practice in more than a decade, I hit the ball onto the (thankfully) sloped roof of our 4-story high school half a dozen times. And at an advancing age and a stature that’s far from imposing, I have discovered that outfielders in my softball league frequently fail to give me much respect, often to their chagrin. Thank you, bat speed.
* * *
We always played in my front yard, because it had a number of features that made it highly conducive to whiffleball. To start, the house served as a backstop, which, believe me, is an enormous luxury. More importantly, the yard had reasonable landmarks to use as bases. An ancient crabapple tree served as first base. We used one of those old, green storage mailboxes for second. A short, hapless bush at the end of the front walkway was the natural choice for third. (The bush on the opposite side of the walkway lived a carefree and robust life while its mate, mere three feet away, struggled to survive under the pressure of several whiffleball summers.) Home plate was a small patch of dirt in the grass near the back door, bordered on two sides by a right turn in the walkway. Due to erosion, home plate got bigger every year, much to my Mom’s frustration. She still teases me that it took her ten years to grow grass there after we outgrew whiffleball.
The best part about the lot, though, was that it was at the intersection of two lightly used streets, on the crest of a hill. Imagine a wide X across the top of a melon. The infield, in the bottom quadrant, was a natural diamond shape, while the outfield– the street– wrapped around it. Beyond the street were other people’s yards, which served as the walls of our park. We generally didn’t use right field because we rarely had enough players to cover that position. Fortunately, the phone company had generously provided us with an extremely convenient telephone pole near second base that we pressed into service as a foul pole. Only balls hit to the left of it were fair.
One of the great things about whiffleball, and pickup sports in general, is the existence of house rules. We had lots of them. Foremost, considering we didn’t have a ton of players, was that you could put out a baserunner by hitting him with the ball so long as he wasn’t safely ensconced on a base. If the play was a force, you could just throw the ball and hit the base itself. We used to say that the crabapple tree actually played first base for both teams. Also, to avoid constant bickering, there were no walks and only fouls and swinging strikes counted. Because there were no called strikes, you had to pitch at a reasonable speed in order to get anyone to swing.
Since right field was foul, all the playable fly balls went to left. It was a busy position. Once you crossed the street in left field you were in the Bleilers yard. The Bleilers were a sweet old couple that enjoyed the presence of young kids at play. If they didn’t, our field would’ve suffered a serious setback, because balls were forever being hit into Mrs. Bleiler’s bushes, and we’d frequently stomp around in them looking for them. If you hit one onto the roof of the Bleiler’s single-story ranch house, it was a homer. We declared that if anyone hit a ball over their roof it was an Automatic Grand Slam– four runs on top of whatever was scored on the home run. Nobody had ever done that until someone’s cousin, visiting from out of town, pulled it off. But he was fourteen, and after he went back home we decided that he didn’t really hold that record because he was too old. Certainly no one our age had ever done it.
Without question, the best part of whiffleball was the fantasy. We imagined ourselves, as did countless boys across the country, as our favorite players executing big league highlight plays. My next-door neighbor, Arthur, was my constant whiffleball companion. Whenever he would field a ground ball, he would call out the play like a sportscaster, undoubtedly a specific sportscaster he’d recently heard. With a lilt in his voice, Arthur would announce, ‘The flip to Turrialba…’ and underhand the ball off the apple tree for the putout. To this day, I don’t know who Turrialba was (or, for sure, how to spell his name) nor can I say which team he played on, although I can definitively tell you it wasn’t the Red Sox. Still, Arthur must’ve said it 500 times in the course of a certain summer. My parents still live next to his parents, and whenever my Dad sees Arthur, he calls out, ‘The flip to Turrialba!’ to Arthur’s continued embarrassment.
For my part, I was partial to Dwight Evans. In the ‘75 World Series, Evans made the best catch I’ve ever seen. Against Fenway’s short, right field wall, he planted his feet on the warning track and arched his back, glove extended high over his head, caught a long fly ball, and somehow managed to not fall backward over the wall, thereby robbing the Cincinnati Reds of a home run. Even better, he had the presence of mind to double up the great Joe Morgan who, believing the ball had not been caught, had advanced around the bases. I had loved Fred Lynn all year, but when I saw Dewey do that, he became my idol. I spent the next two summers practicing diving catches and long extensions into Mrs. Bleiler’s bushes.
And then there was Ben. The Fat Kid. I think every sandlot squad has a fat kid. We didn’t like Ben a whole lot. First off, he was a couple of years younger than everybody else, and playing with younger kids wasn’t exactly cool. Plus, he lacked charisma. It’s not that Ben was a bad player; it’s just that he always seemed to say the wrong thing at the wrong time, or make the crucial error that cost his team the game. On top of it all, he was just plain fat and ten year-olds are merciless. But Ben kept showing up to play, day after day, all summer long, plucky and optimistic that today would be different.
Ben’s favorite player was George Scott, the Red Sox’ first baseman-slash-DH for a while in the 70’s. His nickname was Boomer, which of course, was morphed by Boston parlance into ‘Boomah’ before the ink on his Sox contract was dry. Ben had chosen, not incidentally, a hero who matched his own proportions. Boomah was a power hitter, a fact that permanently enamored Ben, but as Boomah aged, his dimensions clearly became a liability on the base paths. My Dad once told a (perhaps apocryphal) story about how George Scott was so slow that he was the only player he’d ever seen hit a single to right field and get thrown out running to first. Boomah’s velocity notwithstanding, he was a god to Ben. Some of the boys would tease Ben about his weight and disparage Boomah for also being fat (ultimately a tactical error, as few other guys would support someone running down any of the Red Sox), but Ben stood by his man. Ben would occasionally drift off into fantasy, swing his bat and call out, ‘Home Run, Boomaaah!’ He would do this at completely random and frequently inappropriate intervals, which would have pushed him further down the social totem pole had he not already been at the bottom.
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I remember an endless day during the heat wave of ‘77 that must’ve seen ten games of whiffleball on our field. The evening was so hot that all the neighbors were outside and their kids had joined in what would be the day’s final game. We must’ve had twelve kids in that game– even the girls were playing. It was well after dinner and slowly the parents assembled with their younger kids to socialize and watch. We had an audience!
Normally, whiffleball scores are very high, but with that many fielders, we had ourselves a regular pitcher’s duel, and the outcome of the game seemed to hinge on every play. As fifteen or so people cheered the kids on, we played out the most momentous game of the summer, full of drama and emotion. Arthur threw someone out at the plate in the bottom of the ninth to stop the winning run. I made a sensational catch into Mrs. Bleiler’s juniper bush, an act which elicited a huge gasp from the crowd as much for my fielding prowess as, I imagine, for the bush’s well being. Still, I emerged, covered in prickers, beaming gloriously with pride, and holding the ball aloft like it would someday fetch a million dollars.
There were two outs and nobody on in the bottom of the tenth inning (The tenth inning! Whiffleball never went to extras!). With the daylight fading and his team trailing by a run, Ben stepped to the plate. I remember watching this at bat from left field, and though I was playing on the opposing team, I actually remember feeling a little sad for him. Ben rarely succeeded under pressure. With the game on the line, he was certain to fail in a spectacularly undignified way. I imagined him striking out in front of twenty-five people and injuring himself at the same time. Since Ben lived several blocks away, his mom would’ve had to drive over and get him while he’d have a choice of things to cry about.
Arthur was pitching harder than decorum allowed, but he couldn’t help it. He smelled blood in the water. He wasn’t going to lose, not to Ben, not under these conditions. Some of his teammates began to complain, but Ben remained silent and stood firmly in the batter’s box, determined not to look weak. Even I almost said something, and Arthur was my pitcher. Before the issue of unfair pitching could fully evolve, however, a small miracle occurred. Ben hit a towering shot to left field, twenty feet over my head. I instinctively moved back for it but I knew I had no play. The ball cleared the peak of the roof by an easy three feet and vanished into the Bleiler’s backyard—the Automatic Grand Slam!
Ben trotted around the bases with all the dignity of a big-leaguer while his teammates went wild. The parents didn’t know the rule and thought he had only tied the game. Some of the kids excitedly told them what this meant: that Ben had won the game and accomplished a feat worthy of a fourteen year-old. Everyone made a big deal about it, even Arthur. After a while, the glow of excitement began to dissipate as parents and kids said their goodnights and retired to their own homes.
Putting away the bats and balls, I remember seeing Ben head home down the lane that led over the hill. Every ten steps or so, he’d swing his whiffle bat and finish by dramatically extending the bat out in his left arm, striking a silhouette against the twilight. He’d freeze in this position for just a moment, as if admiring an invisible home run, and call out for no one but himself, ‘Home Run, Boomaaah!’ Then he’d take another few steps and do it again. ‘Home Run, Boomaaah!’ I watched him walk home this way, slowly sinking over the crest of the hill, his voice fading in the distance but still clear. ‘Home Run, Boomaaah…’
I stood at home plate, exquisitely weary from the heat and the long day of playing ball. I took in the sight of the yard, the street, the whole field in the fading light, while Ben, gone now from view, faintly serenaded the tableau. I felt fulfilled. And I remember being truly happy that I would get to wake up tomorrow and play this glorious game again.
Copyright 2003. Reprinted with permission.
