Posted on 05/19/2010 9:17:40 AM PDT by JoeProBono
Bobby Valentine remembers the days when he would ride around his neighborhood on his bike and round up the guys for a sandlot baseball game.
Or two games.
Or three.
"I was the ringmaster," said Valentine, an ESPN analyst and former major league manager who grew up in Stamford, Conn. "All the kids in the neighborhood kept their gloves on my handlebars, so I'd just ride down by their houses hollering that it was time to play. Usually, I didn't even knock on doors. I just hollered. We'd play until dinner was on the table."
No coaches. No uniforms. And no umpires.
No crowds. No parents. And no pressure.
It was where kids learned how to run pickoff plays with their next-door neighbors. Where they learned to field ground balls on infields littered with rocks and debris. And where they discovered the high school kid from two blocks over really did have a mean curve ball.
It was where baseball instincts were honed, not by instruction but by trial and error.
And repetition.
Yet while it's easy to find a pickup basketball game almost anywhere in the country these days, informal baseball games have become a rarity.
Baseball is suffering because of it, according to University of Virginia baseball coach Brian O'Connor.
"If there isn't a scheduled practice or game, kids aren't playing baseball," O'Connor said. "They are playing PlayStation and Xbox. Heck, they aren't even playing catch with their dads. That's got to change."
These days, kids are paraded to T-ball fields at the age of 4, thrust into AAU play as early as 8. Some say they are overinstructed, at times by adults who weren't very good themselves and can't lend a lot of basic know-how.
"How often do you hear that this player or that player is getting personal hitting instruction from some so-called expert who's charging $60 to $80 for an hour-long lesson?" O'Connor asked. "You want to become a better hitter? Go shake a crab-apple tree and spend your summer hitting every crab apple that falls out of it with a broomstick."
Compared with yesteryear, today's youth baseball environment is almost test-tube in nature.
You have no idea how right you are.
Informal, unplanned games organized and played by children teach life lessons that no teacher, administrator, social worker or bureaucrat could ever properly impart.
When I was a kid, these were almost a daily event (weather permitting). And what did we gain? Both independence and a sense of community. Organizational skills. Responsibility for obeying one's one rules and learned fairness in their administration. Everything our present leaders seek to crush, and replace with central control.
I guess my town is an anachronism, but the kids play baseball all the time. My son might be out front or back throwing himself popups, or having a catch with me, or a couple kids going to the lot to play. They make up imaginary distances for single, double, triple, home run, and play until they are dragged in.
Terrific post. Thank you.
ML/NJ
No one wants to let their kids out of their sight anymore, and it’s hard to find enough kids in a lot of neighborhoods. Families aren’t that big anymore.
"Michael Squints Palledorous walked a little taller that day. And we had to tip our hats to him. He was lucky she hadn't beat the CRAP out of him. We wouldn't have blamed her. What he'd done was sneaky, rotten, and low... and cool. Not another one among us would have ever in a million years even for a million dollars have the guts to put the moves on the lifeguard. He did. He had kissed a woman. And he had kissed her long and good. We got banned from the pool forever that day. But every time we walked by after that, the lifeguard looked down from her tower, right over at Squints, and smiled."
Absolutely classic!
The kids are either at after-school care or at planned activities (learning centers, dance, piano, karate, etc.), and no one is home to play baseball.
My kids wanted to play baseball every day, but it was hard to find other kids who were available to play, even though we lived in a middle class, suburban neighborhood that was chock full of kids.
When I was a kid, we played kickball every day except when it rained or snowed. The neighborhood was much like the one I described above, except the mothers were home and the kids were outside.
The empty lot we played on is about 100’ from my backyard. Unfortuately about 10 ears ago a church built on it. You could still see the diamond cut into the grass from all of the years of use. Ah the memories. :)
You are so right. I remember how I felt the first time I was allowed out until the streetlights came on.
I grew up in a small New England town (pop 1,800) during the 50’s and 60’s. My experience was just like in the article. We did have 3 little league teams where we wore hand me down color jerseys, but most of our time was spent in pick up games down at the field. Three games in a day was not that unusual. I don’t live in New England anymore, and I doubt if the kids there now play like we did. Oh yeah, baseball was just one activity. Other activities involved swimming at the local pond, playing ice hockey at the same pond, building tree houses, building rafts, playing in barns, kick the can, playing horseshoes, exploring in the woods, picking blueberries, rasberries, and blackberries, bringing in the hay, fishing, climbing trees, etc...etc...etc... Those truly were the good old days.
If you only had three kids, you played ‘21’. If you had 6 or more, you played ‘rounders’. When I coached LL in the 90’s, it was important to me to teach these versions. 21 helped teach aggression on the field. The kids on the other teams never even heard of these games.
I love The Sandlot! Just watched it again the other day. Growing up, we had lots of kids in our neighborhood and played baseball, football, basketball, went “exploring”, built forts, went fishing at the canal down the street. And I’m a girl! LOL
Spent summers of 68 & 69 playing pickup games in Manchester, MO for hours on end. Played all day at the local ballpark till they kicked us for for the leagues.
I was born (1953) and raised in the city of Chicago (north side), and growing up, baseball was THE thing: whether watching it, in person at Wrigley Field or on TV on Channel 9 (WGN), or playing it. And we played it more informally than formally. Yeah, I played Little League at Thillens Stadium, but mostly us boys just played any way we could, whenever and wherever we could: whether hitting and throwing the ball around on a park field, or playing “fast pitch”/”line ball” on a schoolyard with a rubber baseball, or playing “running bases” on the sidewalk in front of the house. Besides baseball, there was also 16-inch softball, which we played at school. (No kids—I mean, none, except those weird foreigners—played soccer.)
One of my Jr. High teachers “invented” T-ball. Outside of that, we played lot-ball (empty lots in the hood) as the weather allowed, both baseball and football.
Boomer generation, so we always had enough kids to play. Sometimes girls were drafted to even-up the teams, a number of whom went on to decent high-school athletic careers.
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