Easy now. I actually thought he was joking. Btw, I’m younger than you and we played it morning til night and only took breaks when we had to go home for dinner. And what sucked the most were the kids who had to sit for 30 minutes to let their food digest.
ok freeport, feel free to bore us with your mythical rockwellian childhood of you and 21 other kids meeting up for a pickup baseball game every day. we believe you, it really happened.
no worries, miserable old man making his usual miserable old man post.. it's what we expect from freeport
Lots of things have changed since the idyllic Leave it to Beaver days.
Yeah, baseball was one sport it was hard to play pickup, you need 18 kids. Who does that. I remember we had some facsimiles, right? Wiffle ball. "Fast Pitch". "run down". and sort of playing maybe a pickup game between 4-5 kids a team who opposite field was an automatic out (which would be perfect for modern day analytics baseball who eschews base hits to the opposite field).
no, i let my kids leave the yard and ride bikes without a plastic helmet. if i made my kids put on helmets or ask permission to leave the yard, I'd punch myself in the face.
we played this game where a guy with a ball stood on top of a hill at an angle and there was a catcher at the bottom behind the plate and the runner would run full speed and go down the hill into the plate when the guy throwing it as soon as he came over crest of the hill.
When we didn’t have enough, we played a game where we had a pitcher and planted two kids on the left side of the infield, and 2 on the left side of the outfield. A batter stayed in the box and batted until he got 3 outs. A ground ball through the infield was a single. A ball fielded by the infielder was an out. A ball hit down the line was a double. Off the fence was a triple and over the fence a home run. A fly ball caught was an out. There was no running—only batting, ghost runners, pitching and fielding. So essentially we only needed 6 kids. And we kept score. We always swing for the fence. So we were working on launch angles a couple decades before the term was coined.
Not really. Kids were very creative. You could have a pretty nice game with 5 on a side.
got it freeport, i take back my "it never happened" stance. i stand corrected.
so it was you and your friends that invented the Shift. Thanks alot for ruining MLB for all of us..
I played pickup baseball games all the time in the late 50s and 60s. Regardless of how many kids we had. And I am a boomer so I am proof that you are dead wrong.
I hate to have to agree with this but I'm aware a few different families that have forced their kid to play a sport they didn't want to. One went so far as to ground their kid for missing the sign-up for basketball and made the kid do chores for two hours after school every day during what would have been basketball practice. Another makes their kid play because the mom's friends all have kids who play. There is one couple that I can think of right now that is on the verge of divorce because the kids want to play one sport and the father is committed to forcing the kids to play something else that runs at the same time because that was the sport he played in. It's pretty gross to watch and I really feel for these kids.
Next thing he'll claim we never had pick up touch football games on the Cathedral lawn. He wouldn't know though because he went to WVU! LOL
O'Neill Cruz = Gregory Polanco without a fun nickname like El Coffee.
LOL, that's a whole other story.
I guess he is better than only batting 8 and taking an out for his spot in the line up. But not much. Maybe that is what the stat is measuring.
We played wiffle ball every day from 9am til dark, with breaks for lunch and dinner in our culdesac(we called it the circle). Ages ranged from 8-18. Pitcher's hand was like first base. Older kids batted opposite of their strength. On the roof was a homer. Right field was a short porch. There was virtually no left field line. Left center was as far as the field went. We could play minimum of three on three with a steady pitcher. It was glorious!! We played wrigly ball with a solid ball sometimes. Neighbors didn't love us.
Also, games formally known as smear the queer and Indian bal. Great times.
Those games were all more challenging and fun than playing actual boring organized baseball. Other than the pitcher, catcher and first baseman, nobody got much action. In earlier years the outfielders got none at all. And with 9 batters and 7 innings, it maybe it was 6, but it was abbreviated…you might get to bat as few as 3 times a game, especially if the opposing team has its manager’s overage son pitching and blasting all of us 4th graders away with his 8th grade fastballs. Flip side if you played a really bad team with a weak pitcher, you couldn’t even run it up due to the mercy rule.
The only mercy rule we had was darkness. The game went on regardless until it was too dark to see!
In my town we did the same but we used the term “invisible man”. That always sounded kind of wussy. I only learned about the term “ghost runner” once I moved to big, bad Pittsburgh for college and spent time BSing among guys from several different places, sort of like this thread. “Ghost Runner” was a much cooler term.
Forgot about opposite field out and some of the best arguments were over the status of a ghost runner.
Don’t feel bad, sometimes called invisible man in my little town too! We were lucky enough to have a ball field to play on. The road to the field was dirt, and the township would spray it with used motor oil a couple of times a summer to keep the dust down😳. Sorry, not sorry, those were the good old days.
ghost runner moved up as many bases as the batter hit, right? A single, the base runner moves up one bag, double he moves up 2?
Right! And yeah, pitchers mound as first base usually made up for the fact that you only had one infielder. One outfielder too.
Oh, that was the next Yu Chang/Tsutsugo/John Nogowski; the latest example of the Pirates dusting off some other team's DFA and plugging him into the lineup.
That's how we did it. Fortunately we had a sewer in the middle of the circle the pitcher had to be standing on to record the out.
