Mays playing stickball
Ahhhh, stickball played with a Spaulding. Kids could be kids without the hovering parent wannabe coaches interfering every 45 seconds. That my friend, was an early taste of freedom.
Neighborhood sports are one of the most valuable and memorable activities most of us ever engaged in. The interaction, socialization, etc. teach countless skills and coping strategies. In, short, they toughen you up. If more kids played sports the isolation and alienation that result in behavioral disorders (which used to be called needing a kick up the backside) would greatly diminish.
Youth sports leagues are better than nothing but the helicopter parents are way too involved.
We had baselines worn into the grass of our local park and a couple more places on the elementary schoolyard. That’s just from the days when we couldn’t get on the other two regular ballfields in town.
It was the 60s when myself and the kids I knew would play baseball pretty much all day long in the Florida sun. If you didn’t have enough to field two teams, you played Home Run Derby. If you didn’t have enough for HRD, you played catch. Those were some fun times.
It’s a sad reality that drives home to me that I’m becoming an antique.
As a kid we played ball all the time, it’s all we had to do. Pitcher’s hand, closed field, ghost runners, we could play a game with 8 kids, 4 on a side, and we did.
We’d also play wiffle ball when we didn’t have enough for a “real game”. That only took 2 people, one to pitch, one to hit. Stand in the front yard, and over the street over the hedges was a home run.
Those days are gone, probably forever. An xbox is far too slick, and way too appealing to kids. I feel sorry for them.
Rent the movie “The Sandlot” sometime. GREAT movie, (it’s a kid’s movie), and it wasn’t far from my childhood experience.
This is a disturbing situation. How do we correct it?
Here are some of the things that made it difficult for us when I was growing up in the 70s, early 80s to get a pickup game going:
1. Mean-a** retired cop on the block always complaining.
2. Homeowners in the subdivision who never came out of their homes except to b*tch when a ball landed in their yards.
3. The local ballfields kicked us off when we were older than 10 because foul balls were going over the fences into homeowners’ yards, and they then complained.
4. The local ballfields kicked us off when we were older than 10 because we were starting to hit the ball hard (ie, homerun), and, again, homeowners complained.
5. We could never get on a field that teens used because the field managers complained that their grass and dirt was messed up for league play later that day.
6. We could never get on a field that teens used because there was a league game happening.
That really sucks when you’re a kid, and you don’t understand why adults aren’t more accommodating and have so little patience. Yeah, there will be those guys on here that will come and b*tch about getting their windows broken, but how do you think a kid is going to react if he 1) doesn’t know you as a neighbor, 2) or knows your an a-hole, 3) knows you’ll probably come out screaming wanting to kill him over a window?
Those experiences are part of why I bought 1.7 acres in a small 20 home subdivision where everyone knows each other so my little son can grow up with room to play and not have to deal jerks.
Wiffle bat, tennis ball. Hitting the garage door was a hit, hitting the basketball backboard a homerun. Hitting the square inside the basketball backboard was a grand slam. Batter was out on any “decent” throw. Only two bases (incl. homeplate).
There is nothing like the sound of a well thrown baseball smacking the webbing of baseball mitt on a hot summer afternoon.
One of the highlights of my travels was meeting Willie Mays at the Oakland airport while we were both waiting for a flight out. We got to talk a bit...he of the hated Giants and me a diehard Dodgers fan. I asked him who he considered to be the toughest pitcher he ever faced. His answer: Sandy Koufax....yeah, those were the days.
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.
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.
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. :)
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.
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.)
ping
And it's not hard to see why: you only needed a ball plus two well-defined goals to get a game going--the simplicity made it extremely popular everywhere it was introduced, mostly by British sailors exporting around the world in the late 19th Century.
I used to play a lot of soccer during PE class in high school and you better be in good running shape, especially since there's no break in the action (I played mostly defender positions because I didn't want to be essentially jogging non-stop during the game).