The Front Row with MARK NELKE July 24, 2011

The pitcher was throwing a pretty good game, I thought, when the manager came out during the middle of an at-bat and sent him out to another position.

Ah, the almighty pitch count has filtered its way down to the Little League baseball level.

Well, not exactly.

As it was explained to me on Friday night, while I was watching a few innings of the state Little League baseball playoffs at Croffoot Park, if the pitcher throws under a certain amount of pitches, he is eligible to pitch the next day. If he throws between a certain number of pitches, he has to rest a day. If he exceeds a certain number of pitches, he can't step on the mound again until Erik Bedard does.

Well, not quite that long, but he wouldn't be able to come back the remainder of the tournament, which runs through today.

I remember when I was 12 years old and pitching in my last meaningful baseball games (not counting some pickup games at my grandparents' farm, where anything hit to the left of the cow was foul), where the coach would hand me the baseball while I was lacing up my cleats and wish me luck.

So with those memories in mind, I wandered out to Hayden to watch how the current 12-year-olds (and younger) were playing the game I enjoyed all those years ago.

IT HAD been a while since I had been to Croffoot Park, and it has been aged nicely over the years. The two fields being used Friday were finely manicured, with the home plate area and coaches' boxes outlined in red and white.

A squadron of volunteers shuffled out in their red Hayden Little League shirts and "spruced up" the fields after the third inning. (If they're still in the mood after the tournament, my yard could use some "sprucing up.")

In the spirit of the Green Monster at Fenway Park, a couple of years ago Hayden Little League raised the fence in left field from four feet to 12 feet, put a red cover on the fence which stretched into left-center field, and called it “BIG RED.”

As the story goes, a couple of years ago when Hayden hosted the state playoffs, a team from Boise liked it so much they went back and built a “Blue Monster” of sorts on their field.

A few have cleared “BIG RED” over the years, they said, but many line drives have been batted down by the fence.

The fences at Croffoot Park are 200 feet from home plate. In the league that I played in, in Salt Lake City, some of the fields had fences, but most didn’t. If you hit a home run, it was either a liner down the right-field line that the outfielder dove at and missed, or a liner up the gap in left-center that rolled into the other game that was taking place at the other end of the park.

OUTSIDE OF the park was a patch of grass dubbed “Designated smoking area.” Back in the day, sadly, everywhere was a designated smoking area.

On Friday, music blared from the loudspeakers before the games, and between innings. I don’t remember hearing music when I played — either because I was so focused on the game, or nobody had fresh batteries for their portable 8-track player.

A flock of youngsters raced after a foul ball between the two fields at Croffoot Park. Turns out the prize for returning a ball to the concession stand was a piece of candy.

Back in our neighborhood, there was a Little League park on the next street. Our prize for returning foul balls, I believe, was a snow cone, and the pursuit led to some mad scrambles at times. One time, a group of us gave chase after a foul ball, and as the kid in front of me was bending over to pick up the ball, I gave him a little nudge and sent him careening into the side of an outhouse, and I scooped up the foul ball.

Yes, I felt bad, and I wound up giving him the ball.

But I felt even worse years later, when I returned to the neighborhood and saw the baseball field had been replaced by houses.

Fortunately, that doesn’t appear to be happening any time soon at Croffoot Park.

Mark Nelke is sports editor of The Press. He can be reached at 664-8176, Ext. 2019, or via email at [email protected].