Seattle Sports Insider

To the sandlot...and beyond!

Lessons learned while the grownups are busy

Posted by

7/14/17

I'm not sure what brings me more joy than to know that young boys are out there having fun playing baseball. I prefer sandlot ball, without adult supervision, where boys learn to cooperate, take turns, and work out the rules of fairness. They learn to think: the rules of baseball are designed to make sense, in a spirit of cooperation. If you don't know the rules, you can usually figure them out, and get a consensus based on an internal logic. And if you have to adjust them, it's for the better.

Hitting a ball over the fence is a home run. But the rules could have just as easily have evolved to turn the home run into an out - forcing the game to stay within its boundaries. But it's a home run, because the kids, both true kids and the kids in all of us, the same kids who dreamed of flying a rocket ship to the moon, wanted it that way. In other sports, you must stay within the boundaries or you are punished.

In the paragraph above, you may notice I adjusted the subject from "boys" to "kids". I do not mean to dismiss girls, but I think boys are getting pushed aside too much these days. The young boys of today are being forced to pay the penalty for past generations. It's not fair to them. The sandlots of old had a saying: "You throw like a girl." This meant "you aren't capable of playing at our level. Better up your game." Believe me, if a girl could play at the level the game was being played at, she could fight her way in.

In baseball, there are the boundaries. Gravity does exist. The earth is our home. We travel beyond it unprepared and we die. Boundaries are meant to be obeyed, But, in cases of self fulfillment, or self improvement, we are meant to be people who aspire to break them. And thus, the pitcher can throw the ball as hard as he can, but it must be within the strike zone. The batter can hit the ball as hard and as far as he can, but it must stay fair.

Proper education consists of plenty of recess, with unstructured time for children to play the participation games we pass down to them. And if some kids prefer to play apart, and develop the games of the future, based on individual achievement, God bless them as well.

And God bless baseball.

Comments

Sandlot play vs Little League

When my own son played between the ages of 10-12, I was simply appalled by the adults in charge of the kids. Appalled with a Capital A. And Pierce County is hardly a bright lights brand of Little League. The administrators, coaches and parents (that I worked with anyway) were problems for the chlidren on so many different levels.

IMHO, kids these days need to just go play outside more than they do. Hitting the nail on the head Rick.

....

And, yes, the attempt to minimize even *differences* between boys and girls (not roles or opportunities, simply "differences") does our youth very little good. There are a fair amount of adults in the Seattle area who genuinely resent simple biology, the scientific fact that genders (in all mammals) are COMPLEMENTARY. For a female, the males in her life are not the "opposite sex" they are the "complementary sex." :- )

In the Seattle area there are people who need to learn to look at the positive side of a ledger along with the problematic side.

Thanks for your thought-provoking ideas Rick!

Complementary, indeed.

The whole 'opposite sex' shtick never did sit well with me. To my mind, and if the continuation of the species is of any significant value, men and women must be more invested in cultivating strong relationships with the OTHER sex than with each other. There's a meme-worthy distillation of this idea floating around somewhere in the ether, but I've yet to encounter it.

We're teammates, not opponents. Even teammates compete with each other, but in the end they're working together for mutual victory.

Growing up

I played Little League and Babe Ruth ball, probably from the time I was 7 or 8, until I was 15. Every summer. Even traveled with All Star teams, blah blah blah. But when I look back at those years, the games and experiences that I best remember were always the sandlot games with buddies and a tennis ball or playing waffle ball in the backyard with my brother.

In those games I was truly free.

i hope all kids have that lucky experience!!

May be just me, but I doubt it

I have eight grandchildren, six boys and two girls, and I spend time watching movies with them. I am stunned by the lack of powerful male role models. My sons, who raise the boys, don't see it. But I just watched Moana, and it seems to be getting more obvious: every Disney movie since Lion King is focused on developing strong, independent princesses who save the world, with the help of a bumbling male sidekick. And if a strong male role model does take the lead, it is always necessary to put a woman into the script who demonstrates she is just as capable as the man. Now, I can't see how this is affecting my grandsons per se, they continue to play their role model games - they are Spiderman, the Flash, Batman, Mutant Turtles, so it's all good, I suppose. Boys will be boys, and they will find their role models. But the culture really seems to want to put them in their place, and exhalt the female hero. Propaganda is propaganda, whether the point is to exalt male dominance or female equality-dominance. And the Burkean conservative in me says beware of unintendted consequences when you go about remaking the world.

Anyway, I find the female princesses far more compelling and multidimensional than the male heroes. And they often make for great movies: Tangled (Rapunzel) is the best in my mind, and the male secondary character is a hoot and does save the day. Moana is a combination of Rapunzel and Frodo and the movie combines Tangled with Lord of the Rings, except that you have to imagine the Frodo character as pretty much the only person who knows how to make things work and what the stakes are. When Rapfrodo stumbles, her Wizard is her dead grandmother. The male hero is a bumbling fool, but I haven't seen the end of the movie, but I am certain he will redeem himself. It's not a bad movie, really, except for the songs, But....

It does seem that for a movie to offer a fully male world and role models, it has to be a historical depiction of an actual war: and the young boys aren't really ready to watch the limbs and heads get blown off on a moment's notice. Well, maybe they are: I met an eight year old while coaching baseball this week who has apparently seen every horror movie out there. But Disney's Davy Crockett (sanitized war hero of the Alamo) is dead. That may be for the better, actually. Glamorizing war has its own problems. And I got to say, the boys we sent to Iraq and Afghanistan were as awesome as any soldiers who wore our country's uniform. I am truly in awe with how they performed their duties over there.

I do agree with Jonezie and Doc: Complementary. Absolutely. Hopefully, the pendalum will swing back.

On an unrelated note, I want to give a shout out to a hero of mine: Doc (Jemanji, Jeff). He is my role model and mentor. Most of my stuff these days is on Facebook, and I don't have a tremendously large audience, but I often get people out of the blue following the threads who thank me and tell me I have the most interesting discussions on my posts. That they do so is largely due to the influence of Jeff, who taught me how to have strong opinions, and how to keep it civil and respectful, and use humor, especially self deprecating humor when necessary. "I could be wrong" is a phrase I use often. It's OK to be wrong. It's important to know when we are because it's how we learn.

Terrific article, Rick.

The most FUN I had playing baseball was in a sandlot environment, usually a school ball field during off hours. But there were frustrations.

First, sometimes you couldn't find enough players at the moment even to play over-the-line. In most cases there were compromises because of the lack of six players, much less eighteen, and often you were pitching to your own team to make it work.

Second, sometimes the condition of the field made it difficult to play meaningful baseball.

Third, sometimes basic equipment was lacking. Did you ever, like me, arrange to meet at the ballfield only to discover there were six players but only two gloves, and sometimes nobody brought a bat? And pity the guy "catching" without a mask. There were a TON of passed balls.

Fourth, it could be frustrating when some guys who showed up literally could not play. If you were on the team stuck with them, you were hosed.

Fifth, sometimes the appointed hour for the meetup was uncertain, and you were hanging around the ballfield for a couple of hours waiting for guys who might never show up.

Sixth, sometimes you had some guys who simply could not compromise on a ruling, be it safe/out, ball/strike, fair/foul, etc. The game devolved into arguing rather than playing.

That said, WE HAD A BALL DOING IT.

As a young teenager my favorite was impromptu games were held in our family' back half-acre, which was nothing but weeds and large clods of dirt, and it had a significant uphill slope. Predictable bounces simply did not exist. Bases were hats, or jackets, or towels, or garbage can lids, or shoes, or WHATEVER. And often you had to parcel out really little kids (and GIRLS!) onto the teams. Sometimes making the teams took longer than the game itself.

BUT WE HAD A BALL DOING IT!

In my later teens and early twenties it got to where my favorite baseball times were playing over-the-line with friends who could mostly play.

Choosing teams

Thanks, DaddyO. Yes, keeping a ball around was a challenge, wasn't it? My Dad bought me a mitt in the Sears bargain basement. I was so excited. we got home and played catch for about five minutes. From then on, I was on my own - dad was in no way shape or form an athlete or interested in athletics. But it was cool.

I was a pretty bad ballplayer, and usually struggled to not be among the last chosen. One day I hit a fairly lazy grounder to right field. Of course, the one player worse than me was manning right field and it rolled under and last him for a home run.

That home run moved me up a few notches in the pecking order for a couple weeks: "Pick Rick! He hit a home run."

Getting Picked

Yeah, in games at school during school hours or at lunchtime, I was closer to the bottom than the top, and certainly no All-Star.

But I can relate on the home run story. My second year of Little League as a "veteran" I copped the shortstop job on the Cardinals and got off to a hot start to the season. Mid-season we were in second place behind the White Sox, who had the leagues most dominant pitcher, a gas-throwing lanky kid named Mickey. We played the White Sox in a crucial game, and Mickey was on the mound. I came up in the middle innings with runners on first and second and the score tied 1-1. My season had already begun to tail off badly, so my confidence wasn't that high, but somehow I walked into a drive over the left-center field fence that won the game, 4-1. That was my last hurrah for the season, really, but they still made me the substitute shortstop in the All-Star game, in which I struck out as a pinch-hitter. I vaguely recall I might have made an error as well.

The next season I was a scrub in the Senior Majors and that was my last organized hardball. Our church had a team in a church softball league, and I played some there but was never particularly good. Time had passed me by, and I was only in my early 20's!