Swinging for the Suburban Fences, but Not Too Hard
BELLAIRE, Tex. — It's not just one, two, three strikes you're out at the old softball game in Feld Park.
Belting one over the fence will do it, too.
Home runs are outs in this otherwise all-American Houston suburb about nine miles west of downtown, where encroaching development has upended one of the sport's most hallowed rules, even, for a time, getting home run hitters ejected from the batter's box.
(Inside-the-park home runs — what the Amateur Softball Association soothingly calls "four-base awards" — are still O.K.)
It is not as if this city of 17,000 — named perhaps for the gulf breezes and swallowed by the Houston metroplex nearly 60 years ago — has anything against the American pastime. The bulbous white water tower that looms over town like a giant onion still celebrates Bellaire's two baseball legends, the 1999 high school national champions and the Bellaire Little League All-Stars that took the American pennant in 2000, making it to the World Series in Williamsport, Pa., only to lose a heartbreaker to Maracaibo, Venezuela, 3-2.
But when the love of green space and recreation ran headlong into property rights amid a homebuilding boom, something had to give.
"I don't want to be in the backyard to be clunked on the head with a softball," said Lee Decker, a builder whose new and yet-unsold $721,000 two-story house overlooking left-center field lost two windows late last year to homegrown sultans of swat in the park's Optimist Club league. Mr. Decker has since been mollified by the long-ball sanctions and a 50-foot-high fence-and-net barrier that has proved impervious to all but one improbable blast of 300 feet or more several weeks ago that broke another window.
If I was a kid down there, all of that dude's windows would be busted out.
On the iPod:
Tom Petty, She's the One
full article available at http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/16/us/16bellaire.html?th&emc=th
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