Sandlot Romanticism
Are sports for kids too organized?
Sandlot Romanticism
In keeping with my snobbish ways, I spent some time today reading the latest issue of The New Yorker. I was interested in this article about modern NBA players:
There’s a bit in here that I found absolutely fascinating:
The entire article is worth a read, though it is a tad long.
But the thing that really captured my attention was this reference to LeBron learning how to play on the playgrounds. I was interested in this precisely because of how closely it resembles the old stories of kids learning how to play baseball on the sandlots, long before Little League and Babe Ruth League came along.
It’s hard for me to remember those days, though, since I never really experienced them. Baseball for me as a child was all about organized leagues and uniforms and games that counted and practices and so on.
We used to hate going to practice. You’d get coaches that would have the kids run for about half the practice. You’d wind up spending a lot of time catching fly balls over and over again. Everybody wanted to get to batting practice — but, honestly, what we wanted to do most was just play the game our way.
I’m not certain that I learned any better baseball skills through those practices and organized games than I would have if there had been no formal organization at all. I certainly did learn that some adults would do anything to win, though. I had a coach once who saw that the other team broke some pitcher usage rule, went to the umpire after he threw a pitch, and got us to win a game by forefit. I guess the rules are the rules, though it felt kind of odd to win that way.
Anyway, what do you think? Is the sport too organized at the younger levels? Does anybody just go out and play for fun anymore?
I recall playing sandlot baseball with my siblings, cousins and neighbors. No adults to influence our organization. The great thing was we would always improvise the rules based upon how many participants. If not enough outfielders we would close right field and any hits there would result in an automatic out. If one team was too strong we’d reorganize so both teams were competitive. The point being we would just play and have fun.
I also played little league and up until my freshmen year in high school, so I had a taste of both worlds. Although it was possible to have fun playing organized baseball, it was not truly “play.”
Nice post!
We had so many kids wanting to play in our sandlot games in the late '60s and early 70's that often the game had to be "locked". We didn't use a catcher, we had a rule that you could just throw it to home and the runner had to hold at 3rd if the ball was ahead of him. One interesting thing about our field is it was on a corner lot. The "fence" was the sidewalk that was across the street. There was a cul-de-sac in the centerfield. In Left field the sidewalk was straight as it moved toward CF, but in right field it curved back towards the field about 20 feet, creating a very short RF porch. About half the kids in the neighborhood learned to switch hit to help with their summer HR totals (LF was just too far for most of the kids). Most of us continued to switch hit up through little league, pony league, hardball leagues in our early 20's, and then finally in softball as adults. The corner lot is still empty and I drive by it every once in a while just to remember the golden days of our youth.