Home Plate to Left Field: Artists & Writers Game in a New Herrick Park

I am on the board of the East Hampton Artists & Writers Charity Softball Game. This is the famous softball game played once a year in East Hampton on a Saturday afternoon in August. Willem de Kooning played in the first game in 1948. So did painter Jackson Pollock.

Over the years Paul Simon played in the game, as did Alec Baldwin, Bill Clinton, Roy Scheider, Christie Brinkley, Dustin Hoffman, Carl Icahn and tons of other accomplished persons. It raises money for charity. This year is its 75th anniversary.

In recent years, (well, in the last half century), the game has been played in Herrick Park on the sandlot softball field behind the Stop & Shop supermarket in the very center of downtown East Hampton. This year, it will be played there on August 19 at 2 p.m.

Between last year and this, however, the Village of East Hampton has done a complete rebuild of Herrick Park. It includes the ball field. Will the ball field still be behind the Stop & Shop? Or in the park but elsewhere?

Coming out from New York City on the Hampton Jitney late last Friday evening to our car in the lot next to Stop & Shop, I saw into the park that indeed the work was finished. The ball field was still there, in the same spot, but all spruced up.

Looking closely into the darkness, though, it seemed there were more tennis courts out beyond left field, into which, at many prior games, some of our more muscular hitters have plunked long home runs over the chain-link tennis court fence.

“Hitting it into the tennis courts” is the phrase used to express this awesomeness. I recall one hit by Dale Berra, a former Pittsburgh Pirates ballplayer at bat to start the first inning of a game some years ago, where his father, catcher Yogi Berra, threw out the first ball.

I’d been told last winter that the plan was to add pickleball courts out there. They’re smaller than tennis courts. But such a fuss got kicked up by folks living next door to the park angry about the loud banging noise made by pickleball paddles hitting pickleballs and, maybe, the yelps and cries of the elderly, many of whom love this game but get injured playing it. So, no pickleball. Instead, more tennis courts. Pock, pock.

But something seemed wrong. It appeared to me that the chain-link fence of the new tennis courts was closer to home plate than it had been before, thus shortening left field. Would that be a problem? Would people be hitting home runs all over the place? That could play havoc with how the game was played.

The old chain-link fence was 10-feet high. This new fence looked to be 20-feet high. Maybe it was closer but nevertheless okay. The Green Monster, the 37-foot-high left-field wall at Fenway Park where the Boston Red Sox play, though closer, is harder to hit over.

Well, I’ve got to make a report to the board about all this. And it needs to be accurate.

How do I measure the new distance between home plate and the new chain-link fence? In Little League, I knew, the distance would be at least 220 feet. And this was a Little League field. Maybe I could tape measure it. But tape measures do not zip out hundreds of feet. Well, I could pace it. But pacing would not be accurate.

Then I thought about golf, specifically golf at the Atlantic Golf Club where I’d been a member, remembering that caddies sometimes carry little telescopes they peer through that gives them the distance from the ball to the hole. Maybe Dennis Suskind, the president of the club, could send somebody down with such a telescope.

Or maybe I could call the village and the clerk there could tell me the number of feet from a set of plans. Or tell me who to call to get that measurement.

But then I thought, why bother these busy people?

I could Google it. Or better yet, I could ask Bing. With AI, you can ask Bing just about anything. So I asked:

“What is the distance between home plate and the left field fence at the new sandlot baseball field in Herrick Park, East Hampton?”

Response: The distance between home plate and the left field wall at the new sandlot baseball field in Herrick Park East Hampton is not easy to find online, but I can try to estimate it based on some information I found.

According to the East Hampton Village website, the new design, based on the conceptual designs by LaGuardia Design Group, looks like the left field line of the field line will be close to the edge of the park, and using Google Maps to measure the approximate dimensions of the park, I estimate that the left field line of the baseball field will be about 250 feet from home plate. This is just an educated guess, and it may not be accurate.

If you want to know the exact distance, you may have to visit the park and measure it yourself.

“Please give me the phone number for the LaGuardia Design Group in New York.”

The phone number in New York is 631-726-1403. This is their main office in Water Mill. They also have an office in Manhattan, but the same number applies.

I dialed the number and left a message. But they never called me back.

Two days later, I decided to call the village. They told me the distance was 225 feet, according to Landtek, who designed the new park. (The LaGuardia proposal that Bing saw had not gone forward.) And Mayor Jerry Larsen had this to say about the game.

“The game is very important to the village, and we want to make sure it happens here. We give it our full support.”

So yesterday afternoon, I took a bat and two softballs down to the park and hit them out into the sunshine of left field. The chain link was not 20 feet high. It was 10 feet high. It had just seemed higher in the dark. And the distance to the fence was fine. So this was a whole lot of nuthin’.

Want to get tickets or play in the game? Apply at awgame.org or at facebook.com/artistswritersgame.