Luke Sharrett for The New York Times  Mike Yastrzemski is hitting .333 this year.  NASHVILLE — The left-field wall at Vanderbilt’s redbrick ballpark is 310 feet from home plate, just as it is at Fenway Park in Boston. It is 35 feet high and green, and if you stand beside it you can see the dents of a thousand doubles.  Hard by the left-field foul line, wedged between the bullpen and the football stadium, is a two-story building with offices for coaches and a classroom and clubhouse for players. This is where Tim Corbin, the coach of the Commodores, met an idol before a game in 2011.  Corbin, whose team is ranked No. 2 in the nation behind North Carolina, was born in Wolfeboro, N.H., in 1961, Carl Yastrzemski’s rookie season for the Boston Red Sox. Baseball captivated Corbin, and in his backyard, he copied Yastrzemski — hands held high, cocked shoulders, bat pointed to the sky. He admired so much about him, the way he played caroms off the wall, his crisp one-hop throws to second base, his disciplined approach to batting practice.  “Everything that guy did was about skill, about playing the game right,” Corbin said. “If you looked at Carl Yastrzemski, I don’t know if you’d say ‘five tools.’ Well, no, probably not. But everything he did was a winning play.”  Now Corbin coaches Yastrzemski’s grandson Mike, a senior right fielder who opened the weekend hitting .333 and has started every game since the middle of his freshman season. Carl Yastrzemski has seen two games in person, against Louisiana State in Mike’s sophomore season.  That weekend, Corbin told Yastrzemski that he did not think his grandson, who bats left-handed, had the power to put a ball over the Vanderbilt ballpark’s Green Monster, just outside the window.  Mike heard the conversation and walked off, silently. Then he faced Kevin Gausman — who would be the first pitcher taken in his draft class the next season — and lifted a fastball over the wall.  Mike autographed the ball and gave it to his grandfather, who told him, simply, “Nice swing.” But for all his highlights across 23 major league seasons — the Triple Crown, 2 World Series, 18 All-Star Games — this may have been Carl Yastrzemski’s proudest moment.  “I think it was more fun for me than for him, to see that happen,” he said over the phone last week. “You get more of a thrill out of your grandkids’ accomplishments than what I accomplished. I started working with Michael Andrew when he was 14 or 15. His father did a great job with him. I’m very proud of him.”  Michael Andrew Yastrzemski was born in Florida in 1990, the only child of his parents, Carl Michael Yastrzemski Jr., who also went by Mike, and his wife, Anne-Marie. Mike had been a switch-hitting outfield star at Florida State and reached Class AAA in a playing career that ended in 1988. He wound up one credit shy of a degree and never finished.  The couple divorced when young Mike was 6, and mother and son moved to Massachusetts, surrounded by grandparents, uncles, aunts and cousins. Three years later, Mike’s father moved up from Florida and found work as a manager in the produce department of a supermarket.  Carl Yastrzemski hit 452 home runs in the majors. Mike averaged eight a season in the minors. He told his son that he would rather hit a triple, anyway, because it gave him a chance to run with abandon. On their weekends together, he taught him to play hard, all the time.  “He was just always a guy who wanted to have fun — always laughing, pulling pranks on everyone, a jokester,” the younger Mike Yastrzemski said of his father. “He was a little bit of a wild man, hearing from my uncles. They’d go fishing in the Keys and he’d go diving in the water with sharks around, trying to swim under and catch fish, just enjoying where he’s at in the moment.”  One September day in eighth grade, when he was walking home from school, Mike saw his maternal grandfather, Charlie Wesson, pull up beside him in a car. Wesson had always been there for Mike, attending his games, winking when he faked a fever in grade school so they could spend the day together. This time, the news was bad. He needed to go home, immediately.
Mike Yastrzemski, the grandson of Hall of Famer Carl Yastrzemski, is a senior on Vanderbiltâs baseball team and is expected to play professionally.