I built a ballpark once. When I was 10 years old, I wanted a place for a Wiffle-ball field on my parents' 120-acre dairy farm. Most of the land was unplayable, the hillsides and cow pastures dotted with patties that you could easily avoid when retrieving the herd, but a bit more problematic as the framework for serious sport. We could have played in the driveway, pitching toward the flat-topped garage, but the problem there was that any foul ball straight back would result in a prolonged fight with an unwavering thistle patch.
We could have played in the barn, but there were too many beams and too many holes in the floor cut out for hay drops. No, it was obvious that the best place for the Wiffle-ball field was in the square of lawn behind our house. Before asking my mother -- because I knew she would never preapprove -- I used a shovel to flatten out a dirt spot alongside the blueberry bushes. I used a wheelbarrow to haul in about four loads of dirt for the pitcher's mound, and I bought a bag of lime from the local farm supply store to use for the foul lines.
A single-strand electric fence ran along the western border, to keep the cows penned into the pasture, so I hammered in a wall of old boards about four feet high, and above that, I tacked up some posts and some extra bird netting that we used to protect the blueberries. I painted the wall green -- for the Green Monster, of course, one of the two major league baseball parks I had been to in my life (the other was Jarry Park in Montreal). This was left field, and it was all good.
To continue reading this article you must be an Insider
Buster Olney
