When was the last time??

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After a good bp session with my dd hitting coach he asked the girls when was the last time you just got a bucket of balls and through them up in the air and hit into a side of a barn or a net or even into a field and run out and pick them up and do it again and again,and then he asked when was the last time you called your buddies up and started a little pickup game of softball ????The girls looked at him like he just took there Jonas bros. I tune off there i-pod and..Needless to say none of them had ever done these great things that most of us here have done and still to this day have great memories of doing them..I know these are just a few little things that most of us here have done but i sit back and think,we as travel ball parents do we expect so much out of our children that we take them to hitting instructors,pitching instructors,base running camps,mental preparation seminars and so on because we want them to the best that they can be or the best that we can make them.Now i know that the world we live in now is more competitive than it has ever been and our dd's in our way of thinking has to have an edge or a some kind of an advantage to stay on top but when we look at our children after all these workouts and camps, personalized training sessions and ask them(did you have FUN today) and of course most of them say yea it was great dad,It makes me wonder how much fun would they be having if they could experience the things we as parents enjoyed when we was there age?

i know this was rather lengthy and probably not well wrote but the times we live in and all the the expectations we have for our children and all the extra things we do to give them that little edge,,Sometimes I FIND MYSELF forgetting to tell them HAVE FUN..

 

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How about playing 5 dollars? Where you threw up a hit balls to your friends and a fly ball was 1 dollar , a ground ball was .75 on one hop, .50 on 2, and .25 on 3. You get to 5 dollars you were hitting.

 

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Children of the '70s - Do you remember the shoes that we wore to play in? How did our feet survive?

 

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Yes, we had an old church lot that was as good as any field. It used to have worn out base paths and a home base bare spot. We didn't text everyone back then, you told one or two friends and they told a few friends and pretty soon you had enough friends for 2 teams.....and you divided yourselves up to make it even and everyone was just glad to play. You didn't go in until it was too dark to see, or your parents started flicking the lights or whistling for ya. Yep, those were the days. We had old gloves then, and mostly wooden bats, or some very old aluminum bats.

In the fall, the field served as the neighborhood football field. Of course, this was the mid 70s. I've gone back there now and again, and it is just a plain patch of field....no base paths, and no trace of the old bases. It doesn't look like anyone plays softball, baseball or football on the field anymore. That is a trip down memory lane.

Oh yeah, Explosion, in the summer, we mostly played barefoot in the field. Bee stings were common, but boy were we fast in barefeet! We didn't start playing in our shoes until High School. Also, the boys and girls played together because we needed the kids and we were from the same neighborhood.

 

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Lil Ron --back in the day we had 2 rival wiffle ball teams , our bunch and the kellen hollow bunch. We meet every fall for the world series , best out of 7 after school for a week. Usually games were 3 on 3 or if we were lucky 4 against 4 . Brings back memories of the lawn chair ump ( if the pitch hit the cloth of the chair it was a strike) and "invisible runner on 3rd". How bout "right field is dead" ? Or searching for an hour to find lost wiffle balls hit into ravenes,fields,creeks etc.

I've been thinking about pickup games --2-3 years ago the girls from SSU and several HS age girls met on sundays on the west side at ssu's field and played pickup games in the fall . Would love for that to pick back up --I just about guarntee if we could get the word out we could have 14-16 ages 12-16 show up just for a pickup game. maybe next year in the fall. see ya tonight hopefully MD

 

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You guys need to stop this nostalgia ****, your making me feel old. LOL I only hope that playing ball brings my dd all the joy and fond memories it did me.

The first memory that comes to mind is the day before Easter 1974. Pickup game in the street (red brick) sliding into 2nd and my heel caught on the brick then let go just in time to smash the back of my head into the street. Split it wide open. Had my head all bandaged for the Easter photos that year. Day after Easter we had a pickup game at the school and mom insisted I wear my football helmet to protect my head. That was pretty lame, but the older kids made me wear it when I was pitching and it was a good thing. I took a line drive right to the side of my head that was split two days earlier. Good thing I had that helmet on. LoL

 

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3 Pops six grounders... Stick ball, but with real bats and baseballs pitching to a painted box on the school wall, Wiffle ball with a lawn chair as the strike zone and if you threw it there over the base before the runner, they were out... When we got tired of playing on the field, or it was too wet, full 9/9 hard ball on the blacktop playground as 15-18 yr olds..!!!

 

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There was a bunch of us growing up that were within 3 years of each other. We had both boys and girls. We played ball in the street, on a curve. Why on earth our mothers let us play out there, I will never know.

We had one ball - not a bucket of them.

We all wanted to be called Mickey or Roger.

The game had ghost runners and pitcher's hand, you're out.

Most times we played Roundsters. We learned to play every position that way. I find it odd that no one ever got hurt catching w/o gear.