When I was a wee lad, I remember spending each and every summer day outside and roaming free around the neighbourhood. Neighbourhood, back then, spanned several blocks of real estate. I lived in a small town with the typical gridlike layout so I was usually never within view of the homestead.
Indeed, once I was pedal-powered the whole town (pop. 4500) was my realm and I was free to move about it.
Today, I see that world of children has changed. From other parents, and from my observations in our neighbourhood, I don’t see kids running and whizzing up and down the streets in great numbers. More alarmingly, I don’t see kids forming impromptu group activities, especially baseball and road hockey.
When I was young, my cronies and I were so geared up for sports that we would play in any open space and improvise the rules according to what the location allowed us to do.
For example, in my old church parking lot, it was only ever used on Sundays. That left the other six days to have an empty, paved, open area with fences surrounding the perimeter.
We would use this space to play one of our various formats of “Backyard Baseball”. In this case, the game involved minimum 3 but ideally 4 players. So right from the get-go, you can see how easy it would be to get a game together! 3 or 4 chums is easier to round up on summer evening than 18.
The rules were liberally based on the only sport we knew about at the time: baseball. Unbelievably, not knowing anything whatsoever about it, the game could actually be drawn more closely to cricket. Which leads me to believe that cricket is in fact a more intuitive and natural sport.
Here’s how it went assuming 4 players
– three outs per inning. Innings are decided upon at the beginning but can be extended based on wagering throughout the game. E.g. – “You guys are up by 3….let’s play 2 more innings and if we beat you, you owe us both a Coke”. Or, you play as many innings as you want until a team reaches X runs. If the top of the inning reaches X outs, the bottom of the inning has one last opportunity to match it to prolong the game or to outright win it.
– The defense consisted of 2 players: a pitcher and one fielder. Here is the layout of the field and its surroundings:
The north edge of the perimeter was unfenced, but the edge of the pavement was lined with 50 foot pine trees space about 10 feet apart.
The east end was fenced but with two openings for cars
The south line was fenced
Fencing for both east and south sides was about 7 feet high. Perfect for leaping up against to snatch away potential homeruns
The west end had about a 3 foot cement buttress that played a perfect stop for pitched balls.
The church was approx 20 feet from the cement wall. The space between was a nice grass lawn, perfect for the fans who would often come out to watch.
One tree on the north side was designated as the foul ball tree. It was opposite in line with where we put the only base required for the game.
Here is how the game was played:
Pitcher throws tennis ball to batter. Similar to baseball – 3 strikes your out. 4 Balls you walk. Rarely were there any of these events since instead of a bat, we used a tennis racket.
When batter hits ball, for it to be fair it must go beyond the foul ball tree or the base. Imagine drawing a straight line from where the batter hits to each object. Since there were no lines the determination of fair/foul was always open for debate sometimes leading to fights.
Most of the time the ball was fair. When that happened, for the batter to score a run, he must be able to run to the base AND BACK to home BEFORE either the pitcher or fielder can retrieve the ball and either touch home 1st or throw it to the other defender who catches it before the batter reaches home. A twist to this is that if the batter makes it safely back to home he may choose to attempt the base again.
You can imagine how high the scores could get when you consider the playing area was probably about 200 feet long by 80 feet wide! And the batter is using a tennis racket!
But it was all about the glory in most cases. Everybody almost exclusively swung for the fences. Which often resulted in defensive glory as well. The length of the lot, for young kids, was the perfect length such that most home runs did not clear the fence by much. There were many times when the ball was caught at the fence, or a leap was made to rob the batter of the HR. But there were also times when the ball was hit so far that it cleared the fence, the street and landed on the roof of the house across the street, or into their yard, or once, only once, through the window of the house. We were forced to take a little vacation from the game for a couple weeks until that incident settled down.
If the ball were hit into the northern field, but past the foul ball tree the batter was OUT! This was an interesting rule. The effects of it were that the fielder typically played closer to the south fenceline since it was hazardous for the hitter to punt one towards the trees. But if the hitter were daring, he could try to place one towards the treeline that with the perfect touch, never made it to the treeline and allowed for 2 or even 3 runs at the base. The reward was more lucrative than the homerun (which only counted for one run) and was a risk/reward tactic that was often played towards the ends of games from the team that needed to catch up.
The other strategic play was to hit the ball through the open entrances. If the ball went over the fenceline it was an HR. If it went through the entrance (but not above the fenceline), the ball remained fair and the fielder had to track it down no matter where it ended up. This sometimes resulted in the super-cash-in windfall. Sometimes the ball would roll WAYYY down the street and the batter could score upwards to 9 or 10 runs! Oh, one risk for the batter with this strategy: If the ball went through the open entrance but above the fenceline he was OUT.
The game was a blast and we played it endlessly. We were often driven away by the priest since he didn’t want his stained glass windows to get broken (it almost happened once). He eventually gave up since he recognized at least we weren’t doing something worse.
This was only one flavour of the game. Depending on who’s house we were at that day, we would use real bats. The playing space would dictate the rules. The foul lines, the basepaths, how many fielders, etc. etc. I remember one backyard had a garage to define the homerun area….but a fielder was allowed to play on the other side of the garage. If he could catch the ball, the batter was out. The trick was that he had no idea of when the ball was going to be hit since he couldn’t actually see what was going on. Different teams had different tricks to alert the fielder: The pitcher would yell just before pitching for example. Or, we would strategically place another player who could see the batter hit the ball and be able to guide the blind fielder.
This was only a fraction of the sporting life. We had variations of every common sport. Along with baseball, we would play endless hours of tennis, swimming, hockey. And inevitably we would bastardize the game to suit our needs.
Back to today….I don’t see any of this going on anywhere. And it concerns me. Especially since I want my kids to enjoy sports the way I did and to hone their skills so that they can perhaps excel. Without early exposure and endless practice/repetition I wonder how difficult it will be to pick up any of these sports later in life? In general, are sports like baseball going to disappear?
The time has come for me to now work even harder at giving the kids every opportunity possible to swing the bat, swing the golf club, throw a frisbee, hit a tennis ball. This summer, I pledge to focus on this.