Watching cameras chase balls into the corn was a reminder

We built it and they came.

The South Avenue A All Stars spent a summer building a ball field and the attendance at pick-up games in the neighborhood increased greatly.

The vacant lot we decided to locate our field on didn’t actually belong to any of the local kids’ parents but that didn’t matter. It was vacant, no one was using it and it was across the street, therefore it was the perfect spot for a baseball diamond.

We descended on the field with mowers, racks, hoes, shovels and wheelbarrows and mowed the infield close and cleared base paths. We took the wheelbarrow to the far end of the lot where there was a pile of dirt. We moved the dirt to the middle of our diamond and began crafting a pitcher’s mound. Chicken wire and two-by-fours borrowed from someone’s dad was fashioned into a backstop.

The infield was pretty close to Little League specs as far as distances but we soon learned the left field fence was too close. Fortunately one family from our team called the space just over the fence their back yard.

It wasn’t the only spot converted to a baseball field as we grew up, but it was one of the more memorable. Eventually we got tired of that not too predictable infield and the base paths became the start of a killer bike course. The pitcher’s mound was a killer jump. That was before they called it BMX by the way.

I really liked baseball as a kid and I watched baseball on TV but I don’t very often anymore. I’m so disconnected with the game these days I didn’t even realize there was going to be this Field of Dreams game last week on TV until a couple days before it happened. They decided to play an actual Major League Baseball game on the site where the fictional movie “Field of Dreams” was filmed in Dyersville, Iowa.

I was aware that the movie field had been preserved as a tourist site, I had no idea that MLB would get serious enough to actually build a regulation big-league field next to it — what a stroke of genius. Something that ostensibly is about love of the game, though I’m sure they probably did cash in on the game.

Unfortunately, I didn’t get to see all of the game but I did see three homerun balls disappear into the corn field (the outfield is a corn field in the movie and they actually had corn in the outfield last week).

I’ve actually played baseball where we had to chase balls into the corn so when the TV cameras tracked those dingers until they disappeared into the corn it reminded me for a minute what the game used to mean to all of us.

Call me if you ever want to “have a catch.”

Karl Terry writes for Clovis Media Inc. Contact him at:

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