Strikeouts are killing baseball

Don't think we ever could play it at school, always was after school at the park or someone's yard.

 

Smear The Queer was my first encounter with heightened language sensitivity (it wasn't called political correctness yet). We had to change it to Kill The Man.

 

7 players hit grand slams in one day

That follows this from the WaPo earlier in the week:

Analysis | The statistical revelation that has MLB hitters bombing more home runs than the steroid era

It was thought that after the implementation of strict leaguewide drug testing, such offensive fireworks would be an anomaly of a PED-fueled past. But it turns out that homer heyday pales in comparison to what we are seeing today: 14.2 percent of all hits in 2017 are home runs, the highest rate in baseball history. This time, it appears statistical analysis deserves some of the credit.

. . .

According to MLB’s Statcast data, the average launch angle in 2015, the first year data is available, was 10 degrees. That has jumped to 10.8 degrees in 2016 and 10.9 degrees in 2017, causing the frequency of extra-base hits, also known as isolation percentage (ISO), to spike to .165 in 2017, which is closing in on the record mark set in 2000 (.167).

This is very good news for my 15-year-old son whose swing resembles a Mike Tyson uppercut. That used to be a bad thing!

 

We played a pretty similar stickball game--except pitched on a bounce (into the painted strikebox), and hit with wiffleball bats, stuffed with newspaper and wrapped in electrical tape.

The "value" of each hit depended on which "field" we were playing at, but at my home "park"--the elementary school down the street--a single was anything not fielded cleanly, a double was anything that hit the first story, triple was anything that hit the second story, and a homerun was anything that hit the roof (which was also a good place to find some tennis balls if you needed more).

As we got older and met kids from throughout the town, we played elsewhere, each field having it's own quirks.

Depending on where we were playing--and how many people we had--we used "ghost" runners as needed.

 

Yeah, we used ghost runners or "dead fields" if we didn't have full 9-player lineups. A fly ball to right field was an out; a one-hop line drive was a single.

We didn't have catchers gear or anybody who wanted to catch, so the pitcher would throw at a 4x6 plywood backstop we set up behind home plate with a strike zone painted on it. If you hit the zone, it was a strike.

We'd usually play games with 4-6 baseballs, so we usually only had to gather up loose balls once every at-bat, unless somebody started fouling a bunch off.

On a play coming to home plate, if your throw hit the backstop at all before the runner got there, the runner was out.

 

Mine was a game that was basically 500 except you threw the ball on a roof and it rolled down. Hopefully it can't be googled.

 

LTL already made the point, but the dandelion picking happens in other youth sports as well. I saw it when my daughter played soccer at that age.

 

Running the bases was called Rundown, and everyone tackling the kid with the ball was called Muckle. I still remember the day in sixth grade when someone threw the ball to a random kid who happened to be walking by and literally everybody in the schoolyard chased him all the way into the building, where he ran into the principal's office. He had no idea what was going and was just terrified for his life as all these screaming brats came after him.

 

We played pickle in baseball. Commando Basketball (no foul calls whatsoever)

We callled the pileup game Jampile or Dogpile.

By the time my bro came through the grade-school-junior-high years a decade or so later it had become Smear the Queer. I don't know what brought on the official designation as a homophobia exercise.

 

The Balance of Baseball

 

Our massive football game in elementary school was Kill the Man With the Ball.
When I got older, though, we only had 8-10 kids in the neighborhood so we played a lot of 2-on-2 and 3-on-3 two-hand touch games. Not a lot of kids or patches of open grass in our neighborhood, so we played on the street. There was a really long dead end that was perfect for it.

Baseball was the same. We played wiffle ball at a local school, or in front of an old garage. Both had chain link fences at the outer edge, so anything over that was a home run. Anything that hit the fence on one hop or less was a double, anything on the ground past the pitcher was a single. We used ghost runners, naturally.

Basketball was a lot of 2-on-2 and 3-on-3.
Later on, when I lived in an apartment complex as an adult, we'd get never-ending games of 21 going with as many as a dozen people. Those were always fun. You could drop in or out as needed, take a minute to catch your breath and let others go at it, whatever pace you wanted to play. We also had a wide mix of kids and adults playing, so it was a good way to just play basketball without the pressure of an actual game.

 

since we have started down this road. In my backwards part of Pennsylvania, it was Smear the Queer, which sadly I was introduced to while in Cub Scouts. Every one of our den meetings ended with a brawling game of it. The games soon morphed into a school yard battles with annual "championship" match toward the end of the year between the middle school grades. I don't remember how we decided who won, but I think it had to do something with whatever team had the least bruises. For basketball, we also had the never ending game at one kid's house that had a net and goal in their back alley. Typically, it was who ever showed up during the course of the night would play for awhile, sub out, leave, wait for more players. In high school, we got a little more mobile and would travel to nearby towns to play pick up games against whoever was there. There always was some excitement in finding a new court to play on. Oddly, since most of my crowd played Little League together and then Teener League, we rarely played pickup games outside of that.