From: wall@cc.swarthmore.edu (Matthew Wall)
Subject: Re: Old-fashioned hitters (was Best Playes (sic) of All Times)
Followup-To: rec.sport.baseball
Organization: Swarthmore College Computing CenterCenter
Date: Thu, 24 Dec 1992 15:20:23 GMT

In article <BzpwL1.7G1@mentor.cc.purdue.edu>, poutsmaj@mace.cc.purdue.edu
(unknown) wrote:
> 
> In article <1h7l5mINNbs5@meaddata.meaddata.com> dougr@meaddata.com (Doug Ritter) writes:
> >>	What are they doing the rest of the time?  Probably playing
> >>basketball.  You don't need organization, you don't need a bunch of
> >>neighborhood kids, if you want to go out in the driveway to shoot some
> >>hoops.  You can do it all by yourself.  But if you're a kid in America
> >>today, you're not going to be able to find enough people to go out and
> >>play baseball every day, even if you want to, and even if you have
> >>someplace to play.
> >
> >Whoa, wait a minute!  When I was a kid, 3-on-3 baseball was the rule and
> >*not* the exception!  When we had 9 guys on both sides, it seemed like
> >half the free world was there.
> >
> >We even played 2-on-2 sometimes.  It can be done, trust me!
> >
> >Maybe kids today just aren't imaginitive enough.  All we needed was a
> >ball, a bat, a dead-end street and 6 people.
> >
> >No dibs on windows, though.
> >
> 
> I used to play 1 on 1 with my neighbor all the time.  All we needed was 
> a bat, a tennis ball and a wall to throw against.  Granted, we spent a lot of
> time chasing hits, but we had fun.
> 
> I would think that the introduction of wiffle ball would make 1 on 1 even
> more popular.  When we played, anything that got by the pitcher was a hit.
> 
> paul

Ditto. Or Ibid or something. When I was a kid, we had vacant lots and a
fair number of kids around - but I lived in a football-crazed part of the
world. We'd occasionally get a really amazing nine-on-nine going, but that
was almost always reserved for little league. We had rules for *every*
combination of players from 1 on 1 and 1 on 2 on up. I can remember a lot
of them; prominent rules features included reduced numbers of bases, extra
bases, pitcher's hand, one-hop outs, foul ball outs, right field foul,
ghost runners, ground rule singles, doubles, and triples, ground rule outs
(like hitting a house!), dropped-ball outs if there weren't enough gloves,
thrown-ball outs (playing with a rubberized ball - usually), batting
"opposite" (righties bat left and vice versa), playing to a set number of
runs instead of innings, playing until dark, etc. Teams were almost always
evenly matched because everybody knew everybody else's skill level.

The other thing about my childhood pick-up ball is we had several girls who
played regularly; this at a time (late 60s and early -mid 70s) when it was
unheard of to have girls in the actual little league. They tended to
disappear around age 12. But their presence made the sandlot games a lot
more competitive than most of my little league team games. (We actually had
a *draft* for little league teams, and the two or three coaches who
**scouted** - yes, scouted - ended up drafting all the good players while
the other coaches took players randomly. My first two years in little
league my team always stunk, and I was on a champion every year after that
up through junior high, when we moved and I switched leagues and was back
on a bad team for a year and back on a champion the year after. Kind of
scary when I think back on it. But the games were too easy - you won big or
lost big.)

I don't think the problem is that kids don't have enough imagination, it's
just their imaginations are diverted or captured to a lot of other things
these days, a lot of them more structured indoor activities (you know,
Nintendo, dance lessons, and so on). My observation of sports around my
town is that it's *always* organized; you NEVER see kids playing anything
on their own, with the exception of two-on-two touch football every now and
then. I suspect one of the reasons you have only organized sports is
multiple working parents - parents have to keep track of kids nowadays when
they're not home, and there's more organized after-school stuff and less
unstructured time in general in a kid's daytime hours. More so in summers
than before, too.

And if you think about the fact that prospects entering the low minors now
were sandlot kids in the - shudder, damn I'm old - early 80s, when
electronic entertainment started to take off, I think you've found your
villains. 

- Matt

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