Grass, or Astroturf, will finally grow in the garden.

Mayor Bloomberg announced yesterday that New York is getting an indoor professional lacrosse team and that the team will be playing some of its games at Madison Square Garden.

“I know you will all agree with me that there’s nothing quite like a middie clamping down on a rock on a face-off, scooping it up, and cradling it with his wand and then dishing it off to a crease attackman who stuffs it into the back of the cage,” Mr. Bloomberg said, packing in as many lacrosse vocabulary words as possible.

The team, which starts playing in January, will be the 13th club in the National Lacrosse League, a men’s organization that is in its 21st year. The franchise, which is owned by several New York business executives, is planning to draft players via conference call today for its new team in New York.

Mr. Bloomberg, who often wakes up early to jog on his treadmill before work, said yesterday that he played intramural lacrosse while he was an undergraduate at the lacrosse powerhouse Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

“It’s a very fast, a very physical game,” Mr. Bloomberg told reporters during a news conference at East River Park in Manhattan.

The team is the first professional sports franchise that New York has scooped up since the WNBA brought the Liberty to Madison Square Garden in 1996. And while New York may be more associated with pickup basketball than lacrosse, a number of public and private high schools here have lacrosse teams.

Yesterday, players from the Tottenville High School team and the Midwood High School team, which won this year’s city championship, were on hand for the announcement with lacrosse sticks by their sides.The new team, Mr. Bloomberg said, is not getting any public subsidies.

Officials with the National Lacrosse League said they are aiming to bring in 10,000 fans for each home game. They will play the eight home games in both Madison Square Garden and Nassau Veterans Memorial Coliseum. Tickets are expected to cost between $20 and $25 a game.

The commissioner of the league, Jim Jennings, said New York will play in the league’s Eastern Division. The other teams in the league are based in American and Canadian cities, including Chicago, St. Paul, Minn., and Philadelphia. The league is holding a contest on its Web site to come up with a team name. The Web site is www.newyorknll.com.