Field of Dreaming.

I am not a baseball fan. Mostly because, I can think faster than mold grows. I was  an avid sports fan who always felt that baseball didn’t qualify as an actual “sport.” Growing up in Boston where the Red Sox are worshiped made life here pretty tough The fact is that, I think playing baseball is something you do while you wait for something to do. So, while standing around during a baseball game and not having to use my brain much during the game, I always tried to think of ways to improve the game.

During one of those impossibly tedious afternoons I spent standing around with a baseball glove pretending I was actually playing a game where I might get to use it once or twice, I pictured an outfield that more resembled the outfields in the parks we played in growing up as kids. I decided that these changes would bring a lot of fun to the game.

Professional baseball players spend their entire career standing on a huge lawn with no obstacles to navigate as they run and catch a ball. But any kid knows that REAL outfields aren’t anything like that. The outfields that city kids know are littered with all sorts of imperfections that can be seriously dangerous. What the MLB needed to do was come up with a model of an outfiels reflect  what an outfield for urban kids looks like.

Remodeling outfields so that they resembled actual public parks would be a way to give the pro game a little more feel of real life and bring a local park feel. Planting some shrubbery along the foul lines or the walls and make it a lot more like the fields and parks city kids play on. There's nothing like a hedge or small swampy area to give the ball a place to hide when it lands.

When I was a kid, it depended on the field we were playing in as to what a home run was. If you had to run into the tall rough surrounding the field and find the ball quickly it wasn't an automatic home run. In some parts of town it was only a double.

In some fields, trees and bushes were pretty close. Without some qualifying rule, guys would be hitting home runs all day. Scores of 76 - 54 were exciting but falsely inflated by Mother Nature. It let a lot of kids feel like power hitters when actually the ball only went about 100 feet.

Having some natural obstacles sprinkled around the field, a few large rocks, a huge patch of dry dirt or some sunken spots would lend a lot more challenge to making a simple catch of a routine popup. We could put some thorny bushes in spots and add the sense of daring and danger into the game. Or maybe mow paths throughout the outfield and require players to stay on them when they chased fly balls.

Depending on the location we could sprinkle some cow pies or dog droppings and disqualify players that step in them some points… somehow. All I know is, we need something to distract us from all the time wasted watching a guy missing hitting the ball 7 out of 10 times at bat.

In my opinion watching guys stand around out on a big wide open lawn for half an inning and then sit down to wait his turn to stand around on a big lawn for the other half… is a big yawn.