David's Blague

Edit: I opened this post up for comments, by request. After five or so years with five or so comments, I turned them off site-wide, but perhaps it's time to revisit. Without further ado...

Baseball can be played with three people. Dan and Doug and I did it when we were kids, on Spring Creek Farm. One person pitches for everyone, also fields. The other two take turns hitting and fielding. The batter has to retrieve missed pitches, usually from a big tree that is a backstop. Once the hitter gets on base, he shouts "ghost runner on second" and goes back to hit again. Hitting a double sends the ghost runner home, and leaves another ghost runner on second.

That's what I was thinking about the first time I saw the baseball diamond that will eventually become our farm: ghost runner on second. How a baseball diamond came to be there is still fuzzy to me, but there was a semi-professional league that played on Sundays at 3PM, and this was one of their fields. Home plate can still be made out through the grass, and perhaps we'll leave it that way. Other relics include ten or so thousand brown glass bottles, formerly containing beer.

The back of the visiting team's dugout, has names of all the teams tacked up, with one coming off- teams from all over Southern Maryland and DC.

This one was our "home team" until recently, but now I'm not sure who to root for. Ghosts of teams past will eventually be supplanted by, well, plants. A process that has already begun, but not yet in earnest.

The Google map view was our first indication that the place had a baseball field on it, but it's hard to get a feel for just how big it is without stepping out into it. I guess a center field home run would need to be hit nearly five hundred feet, putting us into big-league territory. With that much space, I think fielding a team would take at least four people.

A brief digression: I was terrible at baseball. My brothers were mostly pretty nice about it, but I was the kid who would get stuck in right field, and hope desperately no ball would be hit out there. Amusingly, I now live in a house in right field.

If I listen carefully, I can hear the crack of a wooden bat on an often-hit ball, no throwing it out after a home run, baseballs are expensive. I don't have to listen so carefully to imagine the rest of the festivities, which left more of a mark than the home runs, the triples, the doubles, and the singles.

I guess there were snacks, too. And beer, by the looks of the dump. I imagine the hard liquor bottles that find little ferns growing into or out of them were strictly BYOB. Or maybe they were sold in the concession stand, too.

I hiked down in the canyon at the end of the morning, where I found the ghost of a Volkswagen Beetle, carrying home the ghosts of fans from watching the ghost runners and ghost hitters. I dreamed of fields.