“. . . a lyric little bandbox of a ballpark.”

— John Updike

CLOVER HILL — Folks keen to the melding of baseball and the literary muse know that Updike was waxing “lyrical,” as it were, about Boston’s beloved Fenway Park.

The great novelist could just as easily have been writing about Buck Bowman Park, aka “The Clover Dome,” west of Harrisonburg.

“The Clover Dome” is home to the Clover Hill Bucks of the Rockingham County Baseball League, and for years Winchester diamond savant Jeff Milburn has been after me to join him on a journey to the “best place you’ve never been.”

On Sunday, I decided to take Jeff up on his offer, and take in a game of import — Clover Hill’s mission to stay alive in the best-of-five RCBL championship series against the Stuarts Draft Diamondbacks, winners of the regular-season pennant and defending tournament champs.

I was not disappointed, more like enchanted. Jeff was right: This place — and this league — is special. It’s like taking a step back in time, when so many towns boasted community teams and baseball, as Jeff says, was “serious stuff.”

It’s still that way in Clover Hill, and, as longtime PA announcer Bill Phipps told me, it all starts with the ballpark, built by team namesake Buck Bowman. It sits in a dell behind the Clover Hill Market, surrounded by cornfields with the distant Alleghenies just visible over the treetops beyond centerfield.

The park opened July 1, 1954, and not much, it seems, has changed since — particularly the chicken-coop grandstand behind home plate. Its setting evokes “Field of Dreams,” but the stadium itself — to this Red Sox fan at least — screams Fenway, with green as the overriding color and a high leftfield fence just 300 feet from home plate resembling a mini-Green Monster.

And, to be sure, the “Dome” has its unique peculiarities — a padded light pole rises in deep left field, an impediment to unwary outfielders — and even its signature food, what Phipps calls the “best burgers you’ll find anywhere.” Eating before coming to the “Dome,” says RCBL commissioner Mike Burtner, is a “rookie mistake,” one I did not commit.

All this contributes to an atmosphere so timelessly beguiling that not even the occasional whiff of surrounding poultry farms, summoned by a night breeze, detracts from the “Dome’s” simple joys. Or maybe that’s part of the charm.

Fans come early, either bearing lawn chairs or taking a seat in the grandstand. Bluegrass music blends easily with the players’ pre-game rituals, and the continuity of the eight-team, community-based league dating to 1924 is observed and extended — baseball as it ought to be.

“I know it’s cliche, but it’s a family,” says Phipps, who’s been announcing Bucks games since 1996 and “loving every second of it.”

Family though it may be — the players, from fuzzy-cheeked high school standouts to grizzled vets like 33-year-old catcher Addison Bowman, grand nephew of Buck, are largely home-grown — these Bucks are also a juggernaut. Their park may suggest Fenway, but their record — 15 regular-season pennants, 16 tournament titles — bespeaks Yankees.

On this night at least, the Bucks are true to their pedigree, pounding their way to 5-0 and 9-1 leads before withstanding a late D-Back rally to prevail 13-10 and knot the series at 2. The season finale took place Tuesday night in Stuarts Draft.

Next year it will all start anew, gently reminding folks at the “Dome” and elsewhere that, as Terence Mann (James Earl Jones) observed in “Field of Dreams,” “The one constant through all the years has been baseball.”

That sure seems true in this tiny corner of the world where you can almost hear the whispers: “Is this heaven? ... No, it’s Clover Hill.”

Adrian O'Connor 

Editorial Editor - The Winchester Star