Baseball is a
sport both beautiful and cruel. In
Sunday night’s game at Fenway Park, Aaron Judge, the Yankees’ 6’7” rookie
phenom, hit a ball so hard that microphones actually picked up the proverbial
crack of the bat. Anywhere else in the
American League and Judge would’ve had his 31st homerun of the
season, best in all of baseball. But Red
Sox centerfielder Jackie Bradley Jr. denied him (oh, another Judge pun), thanks
in part to one of Fenway’s many quirks.
Judge hit the
ball a few feet to the right of dead center, where there’s a kind of notch some
420 feet from home plate formed by where the grandstand and bullpen jut out;
this exists nowhere else in baseball.
The 5’10” Bradley—mind you, one of four Sox starters who stand under
six-feet tall—raced into the notch, jumped and caught the ball over a
railing. Goodbye two-run homer in what
ended as a 3-0 Red Sox win.
This could never
happen on an NFL field or NBA court; each and every one has same regulated
dimensions. Fenway is different in the
same way Wrigley Field is different, and Cmiskey Park and the Polo Grounds used
to be. Long live that part of baseball’s
past.
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