Sandlot baseball RIP

http://www.comcast.net/articles/sports-mlb/20080719/20080719040101230000101/

Of course, the truth is it's been dead for a long time.

 

Re: Snadlot baseball RIP

Snadlot?

 

D in typing.

 

In 30 years, people are going to cry about the video game coaches, and the structure of video game travel ball. They'll wonder, "whatever happened to the hours of unstructured video game playing?"

 

Good post.

 

Been dead for a while. When I was younger we rarely played pickup baseball. But we'd play street hockey, touch football and basketball all the time. Of course it didn't help that our only local field was at a senior citizen center with a sign that said "No Ball Playing," but still, it was too hard to get 15 kids to play baseball. It would usually be about 10 kids and the scores would be 23-21 in the first inning. Then everyone would quit because they were sick of chasing the balls down.

 

Without sandlot ball, who's gonna pickle the Beast?

 

Actually, this is true in all sports: Kids rarely, if ever, just play for the fun of it. It is entirely possible for kids to advance from the playpen to the major leagues and never set foot on a field/court except in organized leagues or practices. Even schoolyard basketball has fallen off dramatically in the last 20 years.

I think in fact this is responsible for the much-belabored "lack of fundamentals" endlessly ranted upon by commentators in all sports.

The problem is not that the players are not getting good coaching in the fundamentals: in fact, they're getting more and better coaching in the fundamentals than they ever did years ago.

What they're NOT getting is experience in how to play the game, how to think and creatively come up with things that work on the court/field, how to do anything without a coach/manager standing there with a clipboard in his hand. They know how to do exactly what the coaches tell them to, and that's it.

 

In my town's recreational area, the pickup basketball courts are in near continous use until it snows. The postal workers have a particularly intense mid-afternoon game.
The high school baseball field nearby will occasionally have 3-4 guys having BP. It does have organized summer leagues and practices.
Just some data points for y'all.

 

A big reason you don't have sandlot baseball is it's usually hard to scare up enough kids for a game. Post-Baby Boom, how many neighborhoods have enough kids to pull aside who are interested in playing?

A sad thing about playground ball is that a lot of cities and suburbs equate it with, ahem, thugs and have taken down rims as a result. In a DC suburb of a friend of mine, the subdivision came with a hoop, but it was taken down because the neighbors complained there were too many teens there. Actually, there's a big problem with sandlot play right there -- a lot of immediate adult distrust when a large, unsupervised group of kids gather.

 

I'm in my mid-20s. I lived near a very small college in the middle of the country and there were a dozen kids in the neighborhood that played sports. We very easily could've used the college's baseball field to play. It was open and no one would've stopped us (I don't say that because we would've stood up to anyone who told us we couldn't use it. I say that because no one at the college would've cared if we used it). I can recall one time playing on that field.

However, we'd play wiffle ball on a small patch of grass in a backyard. And we'd play 3-v-3, 4-v-4 touch football and basketball all the time. It was easier to find 4-6 to play football or basketball.

 

wiffle ball counts as sandlot ball IMO.

When I was a kid all we needed was 6-8 kids to get a game going.

3-4 on each side. One pitcher, two or three fielders, no catcher, no walks, no steals. Seemed to work out ok and we'd play most of the day.