Word Acre is a little plot of cyberspace – 4,840 yards square – that will serve as a kind of virtual backyard, a playground existing exclusively for fun and games. Which is appropriate, as Word Acre is also an anagram of Rod Carew, whose legend — born on a train in Panama, flirted with .400 over the summer of ‘77, name-checked by the Beastie Boys on “Ill Communication” — dominated my actual backyard for the better part of a decade.

That summer, if you were a right-handed 9-year-old posing in front of a chrome toaster — lunchmeat wadded into your left cheek in lieu of Red Man tobacco, a mop handle held delicately between two oven-mitt stand-ins for his signature red batting gloves — you could literally mirror Carew’s left-handed stance. But you could never replicate his brilliance.  “Carew doesn’t make hits,” wrote Jim Murray, whose week-old Los Angeles Times columns my father would bring home from business trips, “he composes them.”

Murray writing about Carew was like DaVinci’s self-portrait — genius sketching genius — and it’s the rare athlete who can spark a child’s interest not only in sports but in writing.

And it wasn’t just me. One night this month, as the Beastie Boys sang “Sure Shot” on the Summerstage in Central Park, Mike D rapped: “I got more action than my man John Woo and I’ve got mad hits like I was Rod Carew.”

In response, a fan held up a sign that read, “Rod Carew Begs to Differ.” He turned it over, revealing: “3,053 Hits.”

This space doesn’t aspire to get mad hits like Rod Carew, though that is the beauty of the internet: With even just a few hits, words sown on a single acre can be scattered across the world. There are multitudes in an acre, which is why thought of his own death and burial made Samuel Beckett smile.

“Just under the surface I shall be,” he wrote, “all together at first, then separate, and drift through all the earth and perhaps in the end through a cliff into the sea, something of me. A ton of worms in an acre, that is a wonderful thought, a ton of worms . . .”