Baseball sandlot style with a bit of Fenway

Now the “Circle” may have been the place to play football and baseball when we were little, but it was clearly too small for the big bats as we grew up. For that, we needed to go to Sinissippi Park about a mile away….past the golf course, past the flowers, past the “real” 90 ft base diamond, to the area just south of the tennis courts. It was perhaps 150 ft x 150 ft. The west and south sides were bordered by trees and the east side opened into left field of the ”real” diamond. The key feature, and the one that kept us coming back again and again, was the left field “wall” – a 12 foot high wire fence along the tennis court. It could easily have been Fenway! We loved playing left field and robbing someone of a double by leaping high off the fence for a catch (probably 3 inches). As a batter, hitting to left field was a bit of a fool’s paradise… an easy double, but very hard to hit it over for a HR. Hitting to right field, on the other hand, was where you made your money. Right field had the worst player, and if the ball got past him, it rolled forever – an easy inside the park homer! We were not skilled enough to use an “inside-out” swing to hit to right, so we all experimented with hitting lefty....and the embarassing, yet inevitable strike out.

Rules changed to fit the number of players – rarely more than 6 or 7. Pitcher’s hand was “out” if no first baseman. Right field could be “out” on some days and often a base runner had to score from first or second base on a grounder because he might be up next.

Of course we had only 2 or 3 “sacred” wooden bats. When they splintered or broke, we glued and screwed them back together. On rainy or wet days, our baseball (singular) would get water-logged and throwing it was like “putting the shot”. When the cover came off (as it almost always did eventually), we used electrical tape to bind it up. But we were a happy bunch. We would ride our bikes over in the morning (bat across the handlebars), home for a quick lunch, and then back again until it turned dark…….day after day after day.

When I went back to Rockford in 2009, I drove through the park looking for the tennis courts, but couldn’t find them. In a way, this was probably a good thing. I think the image in my mind is so much better than what it would look like today.