Whenever a ball player moves to Boston from the south or the west, or the midwest or the southwest or basically anywhere that is not New England, one of the first questions we get asked is, “Where are the softball complexes?” My standard answer, after catching my breath from laughing so hard, is “any two fields in the same town is a complex” This is Boston, if we don’t have room for a 20th century (that’s right 20th, not 21st) Major League ball park, we certainly don’t have room for a softball complex! What we have are quaint Old Town fields with short right field porches and short left field porches and short…well you get the point. Between 60 and 70K cars a day pass 250′ away from home plate at Teddy Ebersol Field along Storrow Drive. That’s how close our fields sit from a major traffic artery. This is no Big League Dreams town, a complex so big that the town is actually named League City, TX. This is Boston, where you know at some point you are going to be playing center field and you will be FACING the center fielder playing on the field behind you, and that center fielder might be playing baseball! You will be playing with sandlot style ground rules, requiring you to “throw up your hands” so the ump can see that you lost the ball in the trees. Or a home run is to the “left of the light pole”.
But what the city lacks in mid western style softball complexes it makes up for in hearty New England infields and pretty tree lined outfields. So we may not have the Field of Dreams that dot the American Landscape, but what we do have is Boston ball players who can go toe to toe with any midwesterner who has played on manicured turf fields their whole life. This is Boston we don’t know what a turf field is… seriously Robert Kraft can you build a Turf complex in Foxboro we don’t know what a turf field is!
HUB MAIL
