My own little Fenway

It was bad enough as a kid that we totally wrecked my mother's lawn with our wiffle ball antics by laying down sand for our foul lines and batters boxes by scooping out the neighbors sandbox, but I think I pushed her too far when I went and bought a gallon of green paint and offered to paint her garage "Fenway Green" so we'd have our own little Green Monster in the front yard. Needless to say, a single green wall on a white garage wasn't my dear old Mom's idea of bumping up the re-sale value.

Now that I'm a little older and slightly wiser (debatable) I was thinking of approaching her with the idea of re-seeding her lawn with this sweet Fenway Grass seed to again make the front yard seem more Yawkey-ish. Of course over the last 20 years some trees have grown, the house and garage have been painted (not green) and there's a flower bed where first base used to be so it won't have the same feel like it once did but you can't ignore the fact that there's still no grass where the right handed batter's box was. That's a sign that this needs to happen. That or my mom still takes fools out in wiffle ball in the front yard. Who knows?

This is not wiffle ball.

While searching for more baseball than a weak Mark McGwire confession can offer me, I turned my lonely eyes to NESN where I found some people playing some serious wiffle ball. I've caught bits and pieces of The Yard before but tonight I got to see pretty much the whole thing and it was disturbing on a bunch of levels.

Saying this as a straight guy, they do some crazy sh*t with those balls. Back in the day in my front yard you could throw a curve, a slider and some variation of a combination we commonly called "The Diesel". Maybe now there are more holes in the ball or half these guys are double jointed because they throw some rising, dropping, bending, double curve, split finger somethings. It's crazy. It looks like the mound is about 12 feet away from the plate and they play on these mini fields, sometimes replicas of larger ones. One of the parts of the documentary that bothered me was what is commonly referred to as the "frat boy" anger that these guys play with which kind of made me hope I didn't play wiffle ball like that 20 years ago. Chances are since I had no clue what a "frat" was at 8 years old I'm guessing I didn't act quite like that.

Also, I couldn't even dream of hitting one of their crazy pitches.