If you believe in the Church of Baseball, you may soon meet some fellow worshipers at the Historic Durham Athletic Park. This weekend, April 27-29, the Bull City will play host to the Third Annual Sandlot Revival, an event that draws teams from as far as New York and New Orleans.
The event—which includes casual baseball camaraderie alongside some beer-slinging and barbecue-eating, with fare from Lawrence BBQ—is fundraising for the Long Ball Program, a nonprofit that helps local youth through baseball and academic coaching. Ahead of the event—alongside images by photographer Alex Boerner of the past two Sandlot Revivals—we spoke with Boerner and Tyler Northrup, the event’s main organizer, who is also a photographer.
INDY: Could you tell me a bit about the vision behind the Sandlot Revival and what’s coming to Durham this weekend?
BOERNER: A party where there’s some baseball happening, is the short version. It’s a gathering of old friends and new friends and just a celebration of baseball. And a chance for people to play on an iconic baseball scene, for lack of a better term. You know, to get the chance to play on the Bull Durham movie site is pretty cool.
NORTHUP: We invite Sandlot from all around the country to come and play our teams. [It’s] almost less about the baseball and more just a chance for our teams and their teams to come and get together and get to know each other and have a good time. It’s also for the community to come out and see like what sandlot baseball is because it’s different than what a lot of people have experienced with baseball in the past. It’s not not competitive, but it is competitive second. It’s about community and camaraderie first.
It’s almost more fun than going into a Bulls game, for instance, because you know what’s going to happen in a Bulls game. In a sandlot baseball game, a routine play could look like a routine play, or it could be just this insane series of errors, or someone could make the best play of their life and could be on cloud nine. There’s so many things that can happen.
Tell me a bit about your involvement.
NORTHUP: I’m one of the primary organizers of the Carolina Sandlot Collective, so the photography, especially relating to the event, is really secondary. It’s very much like—can I even like mentally fit it in, and timewise can I even do it? That’s why I’ve done outdoor studio portraits the past two years because I can kind of set that up and leave it and then come over and then go back to what I was doing rather than carrying my camera around the whole time. It’s oftentimes hard because Sandlot is kind of the escape from the [photography] day job.
BOERNER: Tyler [Northrup] is a fellow photographer. He had seen some work that I did photographing the triple-A team in Fayetteville, and he was looking for somebody to photograph the revival.
I was going to go photograph the event, documentary-style. Tyler’s intention was to do portraits of the players out there, so he set up an onsite studio, where he would grab people after games and take portraits and so, combined, we had this kind of documentary-style photography and portrait photography to tell the story of the event and highlight the people and the personalities.
I don’t want to get too philosophical, but why does baseball work in this way that it can be so fun and so non-competitive?
NORTHUP: I’ve thought about it so many times. Baseball is not a sport that requires you to run constantly, like soccer, football, or basketball, so it’s easier for a lot of people to get into it. There’s [less of] a barrier to entry there
I also think just about everyone has a connection to baseball, even if it was like playing church T-ball as a kid and that was it. It’s so ingrained in Americana, that everyone has a connection to baseball in some shape or form. And I feel like baseball might be unique and how it turns kids off at a relatively young age. Because they get to a certain point, it starts getting very competitive and very serious and that schedule is crazy. And that’s when a lot of kids are falling out of it and stop loving it. And so a lot of people were able to come back to it and pick up right where they left off. They don’t have to deal with any of the parts of it that they didn’t like before
Can you tell me about the logistics of sandlot in the triangle?
In the Triangle, there are six teams. Three in Raleigh, one in Durham, one in Chapel Hill-Carrboro, and one in Wake Forest.
There is another sandlot team in Durham called Carolina Crawfish, they kind of do their own thing. And then as part of the Carolinas Sandlot Collective, we also have friends in Wilmington that we consider part of our group. The Carolinas Sandlot Collective teams play every weekend but only play typically one game a month. All the other weekends are just open pickup games where anyone can join and we don’t play as teams. From Valentine’s Day to Thanksgiving every Saturday or Sunday that’s not raining, we’re getting together.
Is there anything I didn’t ask about that’s important for these photos or sandlot?
BOERNER: I’ve heard Sandlot be described in a couple of ways that always stood out to me. Daedelus Hoffman, who used to live in Austin, Texas, called it “punk baseball.” Barry Yeoman [a writer from Durham] said it’s very “democratic baseball.” There are no umpires. The teams call balls and strikes themselves. Sometimes the rules are adjusted so that people can play the way they want to play, and it’s all agreed upon. There’s no third party like an umpire that’s kind of dictating how things are happening, so there’s got to be an understanding between the teams playing.
It’s a free event so people can just kind of come and go as they please. I’d be walking around the stadium photographing and see people that I knew just come in, stay for a little while, have some barbecue, and then take off again and maybe come back again later. People just come hang out.
Reach Reporter Chase Pellegrini de Paur at chase@indyweek.com. Comment on this story at backtalk@indyweek.com.
