When your son or daughter starts to rip home runs out of the park, you'll know it's soon time they will be moving up to the next level of play, outgrowing their current baseball/softball field.

I saw it happen a few weeks ago. Dan Quinn, a seventh-grader, hit a nice homerun for the Auburn Braves junior high team during a home game. Then it happened again last Tuesday when my son, Brandon hit a homerun well above the trees outside the center field fence. Another player's father, Nick Kamaridis and I searched for the ball, but it was out in the swamp somewhere, 75 to 100 feet past the 280-something foot center field fence. It was tagged!

What does it mean when your kids are blasting the balls into the next county. I think there's two things going on here. Bats are getting better. It is true, you get what you pay for in baseball/softball bats. The better bats, made of composite materials, are driving balls farther and faster than every before. Pitchers and infielders are having to catch faster moving balls.

The second thing happening here is our kids are growing, and outgrowing the diamonds they're playing on. As they move from Little League to Babe Ruth or AAU teams, they will find the pitching mound has moved back, and the bases are much longer as well as the fences.

My son and I use Auburn's juniors field for batting practice often. I'm finding his hits are going farther each year. We lost more balls so far this year than all of last year. Next year he will move up to the high school field at Memorial in Manchester. He's accustomed to using the high school and college fields for AAU games. But, I'm wondering how long it will take before he begins to outgrow high school size fields with fences?

-Bob Hammerstrom