Decades ago, it was a simpler time during the golden age of pickup baseball. You would head down to the school yard, choose sides, and play baseball all day long.
No bases? Someone would grab an empty pizza box or a ripped shirt and anchor it down. No glove? The kid playing your position would flip you his between innings. There were no umps, no parents, and no travel teams. There was just one rule: Be home on time for dinner .....
Replies sorted oldest to newest
Yep, all we needed was an empty field. Backstop? What's that?
About the time I was 12-13 years old we lived outside a small town on a hill. Where our house was located was pretty flat though. Anyhew, there was a large empty field behind the group of houses including ours. Neighbor used his tractor to clear out a rough diamond. My sister, cousin, neighbor and myself use to play 2 on 2 all the time. Our bases were flat rocks and the pitchers circle (no mound) had a flat piece of wood. We would play for hours. Sometimes we spent hours looking for balls that were hit foul into the deep grass. LOL! We'd sometimes start out with 3-4 balls and would end up stopping when we lost all the baseballs in the deep grass and couldn't find them.
Those were the days.
I was fortunate enough to have my middle school bordering the neighborhood. We used to have some epic games on the football field. It’s a shame that with the school security concerns these days that the school is entirely fenced in now.
We used to walk about five minutes through the woods and play in the summer.
Now the game is "highly" organized. Playing "work up" game provided the opportunity to play different defensive positions and hit until you made an out.
Bob
Agree. We Pitcher, catcher, 3b, ss, 1b, 2 OF. When the game was close, balls and strikes were subject to interpretation. Could be a long inning. Making a error or striking out wasn't a big deal because you would get many more chances. You hit about 6 or 7 times per game.
If you made a error, your teammate might say you suck, then you would say "Your mother" lol. then you keep on playing until the end of the day.
Playing organized ball was easier because you honed your skills in pickup games.
Need to take away the smartphones, as for it is making them dumb. But that is a topic for another day.
It was a nice stroll down memory lane until the author brought up Adam Walsh, still bothered by it after all these years
I used to have a rule when my kids were younger. Outdoor activities earned equal indoor/computer/Nintendo/xbox....whatever. My youngest wasn't the concern. He would play anything and everything. My older son needed a push, he loved playing the screen games. One day I came home from work and noticed him walking up & down long slopped driveway. You guessed it, he was earning screen time. That only lasted while they were younger.
Interestingly, older son just moved back to the US and lives in SF where his brother lives. Older son has a brand new condo that has a state of the art gym. Younger son convinced him that working 3x per week will improve his dating potential. Younger son is his trainer, one gets a free gym and the other gets a past athlete training him. Win win for both.
I grew up in the play outdoor days during summer. We lived in an area outside Philadelphia that had plenty of kids for pick up games. We played everything, no matter how many showed up. If some more came or had to leave, we make adjustments. We would leave in the morning and did not return until dinner.
Unfortunately, those days are gone.
When I was younger, there were several other kids in my neighborhood that played in the same little league as my younger brother and I. During the summer we would be out in the mornings playing pick up baseball somewhere in the neighborhood and play all day until we had to leave for our little league games that night. We didn't use real baseballs, but something a little less dangerous around houses. But we still managed to sneak in balls that would break a window here or there. We would put tape on garage doors for the strike zone. Hit it over the house across the street, home run. Bases were on the lawn, the street, the sidewalk, etc. We had the best team of ghost runners!
Rainy days, we took the game inside. We had a pretty big family room growing up. We would take a sock and roll it up and then use a trophy mini wood bat. We would play the couches on the edge of the room was the fences. If you wanted to play a more difficult game, we create a foil ball and use a fly swatter as a bat. Home run derby all day long like this.
I think this is how kids got better. Being outside and playing every day we got to experiment with new stances, fielding with bare hands, throwing from different angles, etc. It wasn't just baseball. When the leaves changed it was football, when it snowed it was hockey, took football from the street to the yard for mud ball when it rained, basketball, etc. Almost every kid could play every sport, or was at least competent/athletic enough to play each sport. When you got to HS you did all of them, or at least 1 if you were really good at it.
That being said how many of us would let our kids do what we did? Riding bikes in heavy traffic to get to the park/field/friends. Being out all day without a phone, not eating because you're out playing all day then going to a game, etc. We are fortunate enough to live in a neighborhood with about 10 other kids within a 5 year age range. They're outside all the time. But other kids aren't doing anything. Most of the high school kids don't play a sport. Kids that would have been cut in the first week of tryouts are now varsity starters.
This is starting to sound very "back in my day" but I think a big cause of this is because kids aren't playing outside. Sitting in a house all day breeds laziness. No pick up ball, not even summer camp, nothing. By the time the kids get to middle school they are either so far behind or just so used to doing nothing that sports don't appeal to them. There are other factors that go into this like phones, parents, parental concern, organized ball, etc, but I can't believe how many kids are not playing a single sport - or better yet just doing nothing. It's not good and when I see all these new facilities being built I have to wonder how long they'll be open for
I’m from the “make sure there aren’t any worms in the hose before taking a drink” era. A summer day stated with a glove slid on the handle bars with one end of the bat through the glove and the other end over the handlebars held loosely by my hand near the handlebar grip.
As a kid we played a lot of pickup ball at the field. If we didn’t have at least five to a side we had designations for where the ball was hit as to what the result would be. We played whiffle ball and cupball in the neighborhood.
A cupball was a Dixie cup stuffed with newspaper. We created it after driving a few whiffle balls through windows. A homer was on the porch. On the porch was the kitchen window. Hitting the second floor above the porch was an automatic grand slam. My bedroom window was up there. We were ahead of our time with elevated angle swings.
In cupball we threw hard to a four square strike zone on the garage door. If the ball hit the squares it was a strike regardless of where it went by the batter. We weren’t allowed to intentionally loop the ball over the hitter. It was a one on one game. The two of us who played the most rarely struck out through our entire baseball careers. We got good at getting a piece until we could get all of it. It’s amazing we didn’t hurt our arms firing DIxie cups.
On days we had LL games by two in the afternoon we were indoors cooling off and playing Stat-O-Magic. Everything was centered around baseball. If we were at the lake (upta camp in Maine) we dove off the float for whiffle balls thrown from the shore.
One thing I had to get used to as a dad and a coach was being asked how much the change of an ounce in a bat would affect a swing. As kids we used any bat we could find. They were all wood. If it was too big we choked up. If everyone’s bat was broken and no one got to the one sporting goods store we used screws and tape to fix the bat. Sometimes we used balls with duct tape because the seams were coming apart.
My son played a lot of whiffle ball in the summer. They were thrown off the LL field a few times. There was a sign stating no games without a permit.
When I was LL age our town of 60,000 had ten 4-6 team LL’s with players aged 10-12. A handle of 9’s good enough to make LL counted as 10’s. There were four of us in my LL. Players had to make teams. Otherwise they played Farm League. The same town fifty years later with the same population now has one LL with six teams and everyone who tries out makes a team.
I was told kids aren’t leaving LL for travel. The baseball players play LL and in weekend travel leagues. The kids leaving LL are leaving baseball.
