There Are No Strikeouts on DeJarnette Lane
A shift's worth of Murfreesboro firefighters turned up at the Miracle Field this week, not in any official capacity, but to do the one job the place cannot run without. They came to be buddies.
If you have never been out to 120 DeJarnette Lane on a game night, the word needs explaining. At the Miracle League, every player is paired one-to-one with a volunteer. The buddy is not a coach and not a helper in the condescending sense. The buddy is the person who stands a step behind, who holds a wheelchair steady through a swing, who runs the base path alongside somebody who has waited all week to run it, and who gets out of the way the instant they are not needed. It is a job that consists almost entirely of judgment about when to do nothing.
The surface is the whole idea
The thing most first-time visitors notice is the ground. There is no infield dirt at the Miracle Field, and no grass lip where the outfield begins. The playing surface is a custom rubberized turf, poured flat, designed specifically so wheelchairs and other assistive devices can cross it without catching. Home plate and the base paths are level with everything around them.
That sounds like a small engineering decision. It is the entire premise. A conventional diamond quietly disqualifies a large number of people before anyone throws a pitch, and it does it through nothing more dramatic than half an inch of loose dirt. Take the dirt away and the game opens up.
The format follows the same logic. Every player bats. Every player gets a turn on the bases. The outcome of the swing does not determine whether the turn happens. Nobody strikes out, because striking out was never the point.
How it got built
The field opened on May 6, 2017, the product of a partnership between the City of Murfreesboro and Project One Four, a foundation established by David Price — the Major League pitcher who grew up here, and who has been a supporter of the Miracle League cause for years.
What went up was more than a ball field. The site includes covered seating, a restroom building, a concession building, a conventional baseball and softball field, a synthetic turf area, and an inclusive playground built so that siblings and cousins are not stuck watching from a fence. At the center of the main plaza sits a kugel ball — one of those granite spheres that floats on a thin film of water and turns under a hand — carrying Price's signature. There are donor walls, picnic tables, and benches, because the people who built it understood that a game is also a place where families sit for two hours.
The part that runs on volunteers
None of it works without bodies. A league that pairs every single player with a buddy needs, by definition, to field two rosters for every one team. That is why the buddy pool leans so heavily on people who show up in groups — high school teams, church groups, coworkers, and this week, firefighters.
It is a low-barrier way to spend an evening. You do not need to know baseball. You need to be able to walk, pay attention, and be pleasant company for a couple of innings.
Registration and the current schedule both run through the city's Miracle League page, and the field can be reached directly at 615-907-2251. If you would rather test the waters at something with a scoreboard and a raffle table, Murfreesboro keeps a steady supply — the Serve It Up pickleball tournament is on the fall calendar, and the Greenway Art Festival at Old Fort Park is later this month.
But the DeJarnette Lane version has a particular quality to it. There is a moment, somewhere in the second inning, when a player rounds third and the entire set of bleachers stands up for somebody who is not going to win anything. It is worth seeing once. Most people who see it once come back.
