By Michael Letendre
BRISTOL – If you build it, they will come.
Unless it’s a fence for your scholastic baseball field that is.
However, that all finally changed on the campus of Bristol Eastern High School over the past couple months.
This past fall, a fence around the baseball field was finally completed.
Clem J. Roy Field is now fully entrenched – making it the unofficial ‘Coach Mike Giovinazzo chain link fence” in center and left fields.
Plus, the field now has dugouts, finishing off the project that was long overdue.
Those improvements were badly needed amenities a player, coach and opposing teams should expect to enjoy when suiting up for a scholastic game in Connecticut.
At one point, Clem J. Roy Field had an incomplete fence that stretched out from right field, went directly in front of the scoreboard and about twenty feet after that, it abruptly stopped.
It didn’t make sense and allowed for some really long balls to end up going for inside the park home runs outside of right field.
From center to left field, the lack of a fence truly hindered both players and opponents at BEHS but those days are now gone.
How far is the new fence in left?
Well, the new fence, measured by a certain former Bristol Eastern head coach, fell just short of 290 feet – not exactly a long alley for fly balls.
But if Eastern senior Ben D’Amato is going to be hanging around left field this coming spring, he certainly won’t have to run as far (his dad, Chris D’Amato, would have been out of breath taking just two steps from the shortstop position into left. I’m not making that up). “
And the dugouts provided needed shade and protection from weather elements, overzealous fans, and the like for the players.
The field at Bristol Eastern has always been wide open over the years while Bristol Central enjoyed a fully enclosed facility with dugouts.
However, when the field was flipped at Eastern (Central coach Bunty Ray always laughs, noting that the third base coaching box is where he was playing in the outfield for the Lancers scholastically), a fence was constructed around certain parts of the outfield but never completed.
Now, with the new “Coach Mike Giovinazzo chain link fence” surrounding the entire field, it’s a tremendous improvement and D’Amato and other outfielders around the Central Connecticut Conference will certainly appreciate it.
About Clem J. Roy l
The Bristol Eastern baseball program has only three coaches in all its rich history.
And it started with Coach Roy in 1960, the first ever mentor of the program.
Roy navigated the tough waters of the CCIL, playing the likes of Bristol Central, Platt, Maloney, Wethersfield, Windham, Hall and Manchester as regular opponents.
He was 128-120-1 overall, winning nearly 52-percent of his games.
In 24 games against Hall of West Hartford, Roy won 16 of those contests while tallying a 17-7-1 ledger against Windham – the program he defeated the most.
Roy won 10 games in 1960 and had four other campaigns of 10 of more victories.
With future minor league player Bobby Jones in the mix during the mid-1960s, the Kingstreeters went 16-2 overall in 1966 – the best season Roy enjoyed scholastically.
After a 10-10 finish in 1974, Roy made way for a young upstart by the name of Mike Giovinazzo.
His first season, in 1975, Giovinazzo went 14-3 overall as a rookie coach, guiding the team to its first Colonial Conference title.
Giovinazzo helped the Lancers to one state championship (1986) and a runner-up finish in 1981 (18-4-1) while Steve Gaudet took over for Giovinazzo in 2021.
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