Bye bye to the green box

By blake timm

The Forest Grove News-Times, Feb 28, 2007, Updated Oct 30, 2009 (1 Reader comment)

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It may not have been as nostalgic as shutting down Comiskey Park, Ebbets Field or even Yankee Stadium when it hosts its final game in 2008, but it did bring the memories back.

Last Thursday, I took my last walk-through of the Bond Field press box.

Granted, it didn’t take much time to walk through the one-room box, all of 10 feet wide and 20 feet long. One last walk-through to make sure all my stuff was out before a bulldozer reduces the venerable box to a pile of sticks.

Like the Major League parks above, Bond Field is making way for change. With the Forest Grove City Council’s approval of Pacific’s Lincoln Park Complex improvements, the location of the press box and home plate will be about where the future finish line is for a new nine-lane track.

Over the last eight years, I have spent many a spring day in that dark box watching over 100 Pacific baseball games. I sat there in 2003 and watched Matt Lengwenus hit one of the longest home runs in school history, a moon shot that hit the apartments beyond the left- center field fence on a bounce.

I sat there in 2005 when hurler Adam Azril put together an infamous performance, setting an NCAA Division III record by hitting seven batters on a cold, rainy March night. Amazingly, he went on to pitch a complete game two-hitter and beat Lewis & Clark 7-1 in one of the weirdest pitcher’s lines in college baseball history.

The good moments are definitely balanced out by its share of bittersweet moments. Most recently, I sat there last season when George Fox’s Dan Wentzell smashed a three-run homer in the bottom of the seventh before his teammates ended a bases-loaded rally in the ninth to beat the Boxers 10-9 and end Pacific’s chances at a Northwest Conference title for the second time in four years.

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