Baseball
What does a boy do when he wants to play a game that is meant to be played by 18 players? And there is no one at all to play with? And Nintendo has not yet been invented? Why, he throws a tennis ball against a pile of fallen pine logs is what he does!
At least if you happen to be me.
One of the great benefits of growing up in the country (relatively speaking - our one acre of land was considered "city life" where I grew up) was an abundance of natural resources at the disposal of my imagination. So, when I was six or seven and then beyond and I wanted to play baseball so bad I got physically ill, that five foot tall pile of logs with all the knobs sticking out of it looked like Tiger Stadium to me.
First, I would make out the lineup. All the players. Both teams. And, of course, I was always the Tigers. I set up a diamond. This stick is the first base line. That one is the third base line. I would relay the play-by-play in my head: Jack Morris on the mound. He's been roughed up a bit today. Three walks and four runs in just five innings of work, and in trouble again here in the sixth. (pause). Morris goes into the stretch, he deals...........the batter swings and........pops it up to second base! And no, I was not just making it all up. I actually had my little makeshift diamond all mapped out. I painted a strike zone on the woodpile. I could strike a guy out by throwing three pitches right down the middle (not a good idea in real life). The great thing about the logs, though, was that the knobbiness forced the tennis ball to ricochet in very random directions - up, down, left, right, straight up the middle. I had an intricate scoring system that determined whether a batter was out based on where the ball went. If it got over my head, for example, and landed in the garden, it was a homer. I would even accompany it with mock crowd noises. Yes, I did. I would play three or four nine inning games a day sometimes.
I loved pounding the leather in my glove. I loved rocking onto my back foot, pivoting and raising my left leg high in the air, and then stepping towards the target with a mighty kick and follow through, just like Jack Morris did.
Baseball
My brother never took it easy on me. I'm not sure I remember ever beating him. We played, not as often as I wanted to, but we played nonetheless. I had no problem hitting off him (you know it's true, brother) but, I could never throw it hard enough to get it by him. It didn't help that he was (and is) seven years older than I.
We played makeshift baseball made for two. Our strip of land wasn't quite big enough for a fair game. So we turned the neighbor's wild-grown field (no big trees - but lots of small sassafras trees as well as something extremely prickly, the name of which escapes me at the moment) into a baseball diamond. We cut paths through the weeds for basepaths (literally). Imagine what happened when the ball got hit into the thorns......lol - mom wasn't too happy to see her sons coming in the house looking like they'd just been run over by a lawnmower. If the batted ball was touched before the batter reached base, he was out. Since there was only two of us, we assigned "ghostrunners" to circle the bases invisibly.
I loved it all, even the sting from hitting my brother's pitches not-so-solidly with an aluminum bat. I loved yelling "GOT IT!" at the same time my brother was yelling "SAFE!" and then arguing about it for five minutes.
Baseball
What does a boy do when he wants to play a game that is meant to be played by 18 players? And there is no one at all to play with? And Nintendo has not yet been invented? Why, he throws a tennis ball against a pile of fallen pine logs is what he does!
At least if you happen to be me.
One of the great benefits of growing up in the country (relatively speaking - our one acre of land was considered "city life" where I grew up) was an abundance of natural resources at the disposal of my imagination. So, when I was six or seven and then beyond and I wanted to play baseball so bad I got physically ill, that five foot tall pile of logs with all the knobs sticking out of it looked like Tiger Stadium to me.
First, I would make out the lineup. All the players. Both teams. And, of course, I was always the Tigers. I set up a diamond. This stick is the first base line. That one is the third base line. I would relay the play-by-play in my head: Jack Morris on the mound. He's been roughed up a bit today. Three walks and four runs in just five innings of work, and in trouble again here in the sixth. (pause). Morris goes into the stretch, he deals...........the batter swings and........pops it up to second base! And no, I was not just making it all up. I actually had my little makeshift diamond all mapped out. I painted a strike zone on the woodpile. I could strike a guy out by throwing three pitches right down the middle (not a good idea in real life). The great thing about the logs, though, was that the knobbiness forced the tennis ball to ricochet in very random directions - up, down, left, right, straight up the middle. I had an intricate scoring system that determined whether a batter was out based on where the ball went. If it got over my head, for example, and landed in the garden, it was a homer. I would even accompany it with mock crowd noises. Yes, I did. I would play three or four nine inning games a day sometimes.
I loved pounding the leather in my glove. I loved rocking onto my back foot, pivoting and raising my left leg high in the air, and then stepping towards the target with a mighty kick and follow through, just like Jack Morris did.
Baseball
My brother never took it easy on me. I'm not sure I remember ever beating him. We played, not as often as I wanted to, but we played nonetheless. I had no problem hitting off him (you know it's true, brother) but, I could never throw it hard enough to get it by him. It didn't help that he was (and is) seven years older than I.
We played makeshift baseball made for two. Our strip of land wasn't quite big enough for a fair game. So we turned the neighbor's wild-grown field (no big trees - but lots of small sassafras trees as well as something extremely prickly, the name of which escapes me at the moment) into a baseball diamond. We cut paths through the weeds for basepaths (literally). Imagine what happened when the ball got hit into the thorns......lol - mom wasn't too happy to see her sons coming in the house looking like they'd just been run over by a lawnmower. If the batted ball was touched before the batter reached base, he was out. Since there was only two of us, we assigned "ghostrunners" to circle the bases invisibly.
I loved it all, even the sting from hitting my brother's pitches not-so-solidly with an aluminum bat. I loved yelling "GOT IT!" at the same time my brother was yelling "SAFE!" and then arguing about it for five minutes.
Baseball
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