Time of your life, appreciate every minute of it! Different stages of life; we’re expecting our first grandchild (a boy) any day now, and those are the kind of things I look forward to.
OT: Hodgepodge of nonthingness, ridiculous, pathetic
- Thread starter Fk_Pitt
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I don’t want it to sound like it was all positive. On the contrary I feel like these activities ruined me and many others to tolerate the rigors and boredom of regular organized baseball and football. As I mentioned I found little League baseball very tedious, actually the practices were more fun than the games, as at least there was a lot of action, everyone assured their shot of fielding and hitting. I didn’t continue playing organized baseball past elementary school. I played organized football up through high school and the games were cool, but the practices were agonizing, not even so much the physical part but the tedium. I could take the practicing of plays and even sprints which were kind of like contests… but the lap running and mundane calisthenics (squat thrusts! 😩) nearly broke me to the quitting point. I think I may have found it more tolerable if we hadn’t had so many years of carefree UNorganized play, when there was no practice and continuous action.
The part where he wants to have a sit-down is pretty cool. You should dig up the old "Home Run Derby" shows on YouTube. He'll be mimicking the ump in no time.
That ump sounded like Sylvester the Cat. One Outthhhhhh, two outtthhhhhhs, three outttthhhhssss,, You're out!
I'm not sure we boomers and Gen Xers as a whole are proving ourselves to be smarter. And young people can see it.
Oh yeah, we had all kinds of variations. I lived in a great neighborhood (well after I moved there when I was 12) and we had so many kids.
I had a pretty good size wrap around driveway with a hoop. We had huge 3 on 3 tourneys back there, in fact I can remember one during the NCAA tournament (now remember this was the days of console TV) where I carried the TV out of our basement gameroom into the yard and brought out coaches so the teams who weren't playing can watch games. My parents came home and wanted to kill me. They just didn't understand.
Have you seen their tik toks? They’re pretty good at outing themselves.
but give them some time in the workplace and adult experiences, they’ll wise up.
We had to do more with less. I don't mean that in an impoverished way, I mean no electronics for the most part (until you got pong and Mattel hand held football) so you got creative inventing games and things to do. An empty snuff can at a bus stop (what's a bus stop) could yield 15 minutes of pseudo soccer/hockey hybrid waiting for the bus. A badminton racked and a plastic golf ball can take wiffle ball in a whole different direction. Taping wiffle balls was an art itself.
With small groups of kids, we employed "Ghost Runners" on bases. If you were safe at 1st, the ghost runner was safe at its next base. Double plays: you could either tag the base before the batter made it to 1st and the ghost runner was out or you could throw the ball and it had to hit the base, essentially putting the ball in the imaginary baseman's glove.
Back to the Indian ball thing. In my mind I always imagined as a kid that Indians really did play the game and it preceded baseball.
but in hindsight. how sad that we played game that required you to roll a baseball from deep in the hole and hit a bat laying in the batters box. Talk about fun…
but in hindsight. how sad that we played game that required you to roll a baseball from deep in the hole and hit a bat laying in the batters box. Talk about fun…
We were more Neanderthal, you could actually throw and hit the kids and they’d be out. Couldn’t hit them in the head though. But that was only established after grudging negotiations between older and younger kids.
we did that, too, but only with wiffleballs. all our baseballs were 50 years old and hard as cannonballs.
Not what I meant. I thing it would be great if Generation X would step up and try to fix the mistakes we and our preceding generations made for our successors. But I’m not sure we have it in us.
Tell him it's just like major league baseball. If the ball hits the roof in fair territory in a stadium with a roof, the ball is in play. If the ball hits the roof and is caught the batter is out.
Yeah, you are tougher than we were then, if you used actual baseballs in your neighborhood pickup games. We only used wiffle balls and occasionally tennis balls if everyone’s wiffle ball had been cracked beyond tape-ability. We would use real baseballs on the rare occasions we would go to the actual neighborhood baseball field to play.
Real Wiffle™️ brand balls were imperative to use, too. None of the cheap imitators that had no holes (and often were packaged with the really fat plastic bats, which were also frowned upon). Or the other knock offs that had circular holes all over the surface. This was similar to the firm requirement during on street pickup football games that any foam football had to be a Nerf™️ Brand football. If no other choice, an Itza™️ Football (which was kind of a soft flabby rubber contraption) would be acceptable for that day, but not permanently. We would take turns taking one for the team by begging our moms to buy new wiffle and nerf balls when all the neighborhood supply was exhausted.
I believe Nerf footballs are still available to buy? Back in the Oughts when my daughter was still little and we frequented Toys R Us and other toy stores, I’d see them. However, the cheaper stores like KMart had some abomination knock offs called Poof™️ footballs. Poof!!!! No self respecting Football loving kid should be playing with something called a Poof ball.
In these situations it wasn’t (entirely) cowardice that we wouldn’t use actual hard baseballs or footballs, it was also to avoid getting in trouble for smashing windows or denting cars.
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I like you Zelda, but I used to play pickup baseball games in late summer after baseball season.... say in the years I was 11 to 13. This was in the early 90's and all of us kids rode our bikes to the field. We would pick teams and try to play a five game series. We didn't always have 9 on 9, but we did sometimes. If we were short players, a hit to right field was an out, pitcher was the 1st baseman, etc. We would be there from around 9 AM to supper time. It was awesome.
Plenty of them have wised up -
They realize spending 40+ hours in an office is stupid
There may be some validity to Eckersley's point but it's lost when he praises the Royals while dumping on the Pirates. Both are loaded with young players (Pirates avg age is younger) with laughable payrolls. And I think the time to dump on the Pirates was a few years ago when they let the contending teams die. This is still the first few years of a rebuild. What does he expect?
Yep. Amazing how games like that which you think someone in the neighborhood came up with, were actually universally played. And this is without an internet and social media spreading it.
I thought the same exact thing while reading the above post about how it was determined with the older and younger players the rules regarding throwing the ball at base runners.
Funny story. My bus stop in high school was at the local bar. We'd find beer cans, smash them and played a game we called sockey.
that's pathetic. Gen X'ers like me do it right and spend our days listening to allanis morisette on our CD player and hackey sack.
LOL, I just walked into a boomer colleague's office and he was watching "Hard Knocks."
I think I speak for most of GenX when I say, just leave us alone. We've suffered enough.
You’re missing out. You should really pack some Tide Pods in that Dukes Of Hazard lunch box that you take to work. They really help you get through that 40 hour work week.
Which one is college educated and I will tell you which one is smarter.
Regards,
SMF
Compare them to the Orioles. Orioles won the AL East in 14, were a WC IN 12 and 16. They sold off and are now competing for a WC with a treasure trove of prospects and a rebuilt DR facility. The Pirates issue is their analytics department has failed them.
I’m (technically) a gen Z’er. Ghost runners, throw to the pitcher to be out, and hitting almost any pitch were all things when I was growing up. This was in the late 2000’s. My cousins and I were fancy and took a chair to the field as a backstop that we played “baseball” on. We used a tennis ball and I believe a metal bat. I had one cousin that was like 13-14 and was pitching to me when I was like 7….it’s safe to say I didn’t reach base during many of those matchups!
