Sandlot baseball RIP

Yer killin' me, Smalls.

 

It turns out my backyard this summer has become the de facto sandlot for the neighborhood, with the most popular sports being wiffle ball, kickball and dodgeball.

In fact, my kids can recite Patches O'Houlihan's five principles of dodgeball.

 

The Sandlot is a fantastic movie.

I miss backyard baseball. The story and this thread really bring back memories. I'm in my mid-20s and, at least in my neighborhood, we always had at least 6-8 kids for a game. We'd jam stakes into the ground and tie rope to them for the home run markers/"outfield wall" and had orange cones for the bases. Always played with a tennis ball. The one time we did use a real baseball, the first pitch was lined back into the pitcher's face, resulting in a bloody nose. If we were short on players, we'd use ghosties as baserunners.

Also played a lot of backyard football and pickup basketball, too. Shit, I still venture up to the parks and play pickup basketball.

 

I played more wiffle ball than most people ever will as a kid. During the summer, we'd tear up a ball every two or three days from throwing it against the concrete. The best place to play was an old school, or an old garage that had an alley and a chain link fence bordering a backyard. One kid's parents got pissed when we'd climb the fence to get home run balls, and some adults would shoo us out of the school from time to time. Last time I was there, there was the dreaded "no ball playing" sign.
In fall, we'd play touch football in on a dead end street. Pretty much the length of the block. Two completions for a first down. Until an old man who lived on the corner thought we were having too much fun and told us to scram. He'd come out yelling that out running "sounded like an earthquake" in his house. What an asshat. Never mind that it was a public street and we were playing in the middle of the day. Fucker got a few well-deserved eggs tossed at his house, IIRC.

For wiffle ball we played what we called "single, double, triple" even though there were no triples. Over the fence was a homer, hit it on one bounce is a double, any other ball that gets by the fielders is a hit/error. If the pitcher or fielder gets it cleanly (not always easy to do with a spinning wiffle ball) or catches it in the air, it's an out. We were able to play 1-on-1 with that setup. Rarely had more than 3-on-3 or 4-on-4 games.

 

We lived in a subdivision with 1/2 acre lots; there was no fence between us and the next-door neighbor's yard. The two yards together were 220 feet wide.

Using an adjustable lawn mower to cut out the field outlines, we laid out a touch football field in the back yard, about 50 yards by 25 yards wide. We also laid out a softball diamond with about 40-foot bases. The home plate was deep in our yard, and the outfield fence was the opposite fence of our neighbor's yard.

The field was actually shaped very much like the Polo Grounds. Foul lines about 100 feet, power alleys on each side about 220 feet, about 200 to straightaway center.

 

LOL. Brocreole shouldn't have thrown at me! And I rarely beat him, and since the game I guess was official when I charged the mound, I guess that cost me a possible win.