I’m a purist when it comes to sports. I hate the designated hitter, the defensive 3-second rule in basketball bugs me, and I think synthetic grass is an affront to humanity. When I went to last week’s Patriots/Bears football game at Gillette Stadium, a field that was grass at the beginning of the season, but has since been changed to synthetic turf because of problems with the real stuff, I was ready to act like a scorned lover and denounce my Patriots. How could they do this? Football should be played in the mud and the blood and the beer! Not on recycled tires and Coke bottles. But then I saw the field. It was pretty. Then I saw how the players moved on it. Wicked nice! Overwhelmingly the players liked it. I’ve heard others say that the new turf is good but I refused to believe them, thinking there was some sort of Astroturf-conspiracy going on. So I decided to do some research. And you know what? The stuff, specifically FieldTurf, is actually pretty neat. Not like the bone-breaking carpet-on-concrete stuff from yester-decade. Even FIFA endorses it! Here’s a link to the field turf site. Here are some of the players’ reactions to the new field at Gillette. Though I’m not a full convert yet, I no longer despise synthetic surfaces or the teams that install them.