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Stoop Ball
Baseball at its finest
Baseball
The interpolations of formulas solving for multiple variables does not have as many iterations as the game of baseball.
There is baseball and softball as the basics two. I played both starting with little league when I couldn’t be 8 years old fast enough. My brother was 8 and I watched his games wishing I could be playing too. I stopped playing baseball at 21 and played softball into my mid-forties. Coaching the kids shortened my career which is what I tell people rather than it being the aches and pains of an aging body.
The Iterations
Kick Ball: Played in the streets of suburban New Jersey. Summer nights was the best time. Any number could play and teams didn’t have to be equal numbers. Usually a sewer or fire hydrant would serve as first and third base and a manhole cover would be second. Chalk could also mark the bases. The pitcher would roll a soft rubber ball and the batter would start from behind home plate, run up and kick the ball. The ball had to land in the street to be fair. Caught on the fly was an out and you could retire a base runner by throwing the ball and hitting them.
Wall Ball: Draw a chalk square, or the strike zone, on the side of a brick or concrete building that has a decent size parking lot or, even better, an adjacent grass lawn. The equipment needed: Tennis balls and a sawed off broom stick. You could play with one tennis ball but if the ball could be hit into any unrecoverable area it was best to have more than one. The teams could be one-on-one or multiple players. In the one-on-one version of the game strikeouts and walks were determined by swings and misses and whether pitches taken landed inside the square or not. Hits were determined by the distance the ball traveled in the air beyond the pitcher. Any ball bouncing before the pitcher was an out. Players didn’t run the bases. Each team kept mental track of base runners and scores. For a two on two version the distances for hits were adjusted because each team now had a fielder who could catch fly balls beyond the pitcher. Still no base runners and as the teams grew hit variations were made.
