RandBall: ‘The Sandlot’ meets ‘Field of Dreams’ in a south Minneapolis backyard

Organized youth sports with official jerseys, structured practice times and adult supervision are good.

Unorganized youth sports with unofficial jerseys, knocking on doors to find players and very little adult intervention are the stuff of memories.

Just ask members of the Fremont Avenue Wiffle Ball League, a collection of kids on the same south Minneapolis block who have spent the summer playing a game that is both intimate and bigger than themselves.

More than a dozen kids have rotated through the two-on-two Wiffle ball games in their backyard gathering spot. They made a loose set of rules. They paint baselines, mow the field, and then most importantly they play ball (settling the inevitable disputes along the way).

“In the era of iPads, Fortnite and Messenger Kids, there exists a real-life ‘Sandlot’,” a neighborhood parent wrote to me in describing the scene, “on a perfectly sized, semi-lit backyard field of dreams.”

To capture the spirit of the league, which culminated this week with its own version of the World Series — spoiler alert: the team called the Yankees won, though not because they spent their way to a title — I talked to several of the young players for a long segment on Thursday’s Daily Delivery podcast.

My favorite part was hearing all of them talk about what they loved or will remember the most about the league.

That’s what it’s all about, right?

It gave me a deeper appreciation for a smaller but similarly loosely organized Wiffle ball game — our kids call it “bat and ball” — that came together with some other neighbors earlier this week.

In my youth, I played on multiple organized baseball teams a lot of summers but some of my favorite memories were a group of four of us and a game we simply called “pitcher, hitter, catcher, fielder.”

We played with a tennis ball, the bases were trees, and a home run was either the sidewalk to straightaway center or the “upper deck,” which was the slanted roof of a low-slung apartment building roof in left field. We played almost every day for a couple summers, and I can still remember the feeling when I hit my first upper deck shot.

It seemed like it would last forever, but of course it never does. The State Fair started Thursday. School and the end of summer aren’t far behind.

But don’t worry. The big plans and good times haven’t stopped for the kids of Fremont Avenue.

They’re already talking about a home run derby on their school field with added friends, and maybe a full-on fall league to follow.