My Life in Baseball
MY LIFE IN BASEBALL My earliest memories of baseball haunt the side yard of the "farm" I grew up on in Troy, Michigan. Most of our 12-acre property was a corn field or lay fallow, but about two acres was laid out like the diagram below. On this field we played softball . . . carefully. Breaking windows in the house in shallow center field could result in the neighborhood season being canceled, at least until the window was fixed and paid for out of our meager allowance. So, we all, including we right-handed hitters, learned to hit to right field (a skill that came in handy later in church league softball!). You could also pull the ball to left field, but not too deep, so you wouldn't get a muck ball from the leaky sewage drain field. (How did we not get hepatitis, dysentery, hoof and mouth disease, or some other noxious crud? But we didn't.) The barn made a decent backstop, though you had to stay out of Mom's rhubarb that grew along the barn near home plate. ...
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