or “The Rich Aren’t Like You and Me”
Two years ago I, the great and wonderful Ernie Boch, III, chastised the state for allowing Tom Werner and the Red Sox to build a little league filed on the Esplanade in the memory of Teddy Ebersol, the son of a very high powered NBC network executive who was killed in a plane crash.
Today’s Boston Globe reports, just as the Great Ernie predicted, it is a bust. Nobody uses it. What’s more, they keep it locked. You heard me. The neighborhood ball field is Gated. WTF
But anyway Tom Werner did get a pilot picked up by NBC. (It sucked. Lasted about 20 seconds. John Lithgrow is a tired act. I could have told you that Tom)
Couple of angles here.
1. The Boston Globe is starting to, in its own way, bust the NYT balls. (Remember the NYTimes ordered the Globe publisher to editorialize in favor of casino gambling?) They started with the front page story on the Fenway health code violations. Now they mock Tom Werner’s pet project.
If only they would report on the mega steps backwards the Sox new ownership has made in minority hiring. The pictures in the media guide don’t lie fellas.
2. Perhaps Governor Patrick will order the DCR – the state agency responsible for the park – to unlock the gate and open it up to everyday people. I have never seen a public ball field gated during the day. That’s un-American.
After they do that they can think of a practical solution for a very unnecessary and underused ball field sitting on one of the most beautiful pieces of urban parkland in the country.
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p>2. The DCR et al have done a lousy job of getting the word out that the fields are available for reservation. Furthermore, the permit windows [six week window, twice a year] are insufficient. If I apply on Jan 16th for a summer game and the slot is open, just process the damn application, don’t tell me to go elsewhere.
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p>3.
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p>Asinine. It’s a public park, and it ought to be treated just like other public parks. This isn’t a public-private partnership, and it shouldn’t be. Get rid of the board and put the field in with the rest of ’em, in the name of fairness, efficiency, and streamlining bureaucracy. If Vaillancourt and Ruiz want to feel useful, they can recreate the board to accept applications to play baseball at Fenway Park or any other private facility.
Are ballfields even remotely the appropriate use for that exquisitely located public space anyway?
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p>They don’t fill a need for any particular family-dense neighborhood.
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p>Adult ballgames are very exclusionary of other uses.
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p>It smacks of this city’s jockocracy and its narrowminded belief that baseball is as important to everyone else as it is to them.
Ball fields are important — be they soccer, football, baseball, or basketball courts, tennis courts, bocce courts [see North End], and let us not forget hockey rinks.
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p>These sports are part of American culture, and places to play organized sports do serve a need in family-dense neighborhoods.
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p>And, since you obviously don’t know, these particular fields are youth sized, not adult sized.
Of course ballfields are important and part of American culture. So are lots of things. But the design of this park, w/Ebersol’s comments, make it all about youth baseball. Which is exclusionary. You can’t do all those other things you listed there.
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p>”places to play organized sports do serve a need in family-dense neighborhoods”
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p>My point exactly. The esplanade is not such a neighborhood. It’s a downtown destination for the whole city and region.
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p>”And, since you obviously don’t know, these particular fields are youth sized, not adult sized.”
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p>Why the animosity? And that’s wrong anyhow. Adult softball baselines are 60′, rubber is 50′, same as Little League. From the Globe story today: “a smattering of adult softball teams have booked the space on weeknights, most of them from well-heeled investment and law firms such as Lee Munder Capital Group and Ropes & Gray.”
Baseball fields are specialized, much like tennis courts or basketball courts. Given baseball’s part of American culture and the inability for youth to use 90′ basepaths, building some junior baseball diamonds is reasonable.
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p>And where would you suggest the people who live here play youth baseball? Just because the park has regional appeal doesn’t mean it doesn’t also serve the needs of the neighborhood and, given it’s proximity to MBTA stations and the easy ability to walk and bike on the Esplanade, an even larger neighborhood.
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p>There’s no animosity, but you did write that “Adult ballgames are very exclusionary of other uses.” which is both factually true, not particularly useful or insightful, and muddies the fact that the fields were designed and are marketed specifically for youth sports [which admittedly bugged me; I felt they should have built one field with 90′ paths].
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p>What is your beef? That they built baseball fields at all, that they built them at the Esplanade, or something else?
In a huge park with lots of room for other uses (like the Common, which does have Little League ball), or in small parks that are among many in a nbrhd, building LL diamonds is very reasonable, even necessary. This isn’t such a park. It’s the eastern tip of the Esplanade. You’re not going to have regular league play there. At best an annual city championship. It’s not easy for entire teams and their parents to get to, with equipment and all. And their own neighbors won’t be there.
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p>The map you link to runs from MGH to govt. center. Do downtown residents expect prime, iconic public space to be dedicated to parochial uses? Are there enough children there to justify it? I don’t think so. That’s not what downtown is about.
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p>It does bug me that this space be devoted to any particular sport. It shouldn’t be that kind of space, IMO.
How about Back Bay? Kenmore? The link didn’t work quite like I intended, but look between Cambridge and Beacon Streets… tons of residential units.
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p>And frankly, every group of residents should expect — and deserves — some local area for parks, and some local areas for ball fields. The Esplanade isn’t a postage stamp sized park — it’s quite large, albeit narrow. It’s also worth noting that most of the folks who live near it (and there are quite a few) don’t benefit very much from the hundreds of acres of the Esplanade dedicated to Storrow Drive. I believe they do deserve a few acres for ball fields.
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p>This is the same argument that EB3 made in the thread ages ago. I disagree. If you live in Back Bay/Kenmore and you don’t have a car, getting to the Esplanade is far easier than getting to any number of ball fields in the City of Boston that aren’t on a subway line, equipment or no. I agree that it’s not so easy to drive to, but given that there are many fields that are “drivable”, what’s the harm in a field that isn’t so drivable but is accessible by subway, foot, or bicycle?
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p>As for what kind of ball field, well, I have no idea what the local “demand” is in terms of soccer, baseball, whatever. As for “general field”, it does seem that there’s room in the outfields of two adjoining fields for a soccer pitch or whatever.
An eight-person “advisory committee”?
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p>I just want to play some ball.
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p>Pathetic.
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p>It’s one person for each baseball fielding position, and the Government couldn’t even get that right.
Lugo was the 9th. He flubbed a bunch of the meetings so they just dropped him.