Baseball Last Night

With wet weather destroying the baseball schedule in the eastern states last night, the Casual Observer and his Casually Observing Wife took in another amateur game last night, this time at Stark. This game was much better than the Monday night game we attended.

The primary difference was the pitching. The first three innings flew by because the pitching was crisp and they were throwing strikes. The last 4 innings were a bit slow as both teams tried out a variety of different pitchers and most looked they had never pitched before. That's probably because they hadn't.

As I mentioned in Tuesday's blog, we go to these games because we know two of the players pretty well. Based on what they say, baseball isn't what it once was. They get no official practice during the week and neither gets much practice on their own either. I think that explains the pitching.

My twin brother and I never played organized baseball of any kind, but we played hours and hours a day every single day of the summer. If we couldn't get a few friends together to play pick-up games (even three on three or two on two worked well enough sometimes) we'd fungo hit to each other, pitched to each other, played rundown (some call it hotbox) or 500 when we had at least three, or as a last resort, just played catch.

Every single day.

If no one was around, we'd take the ball, stand 60 feet from the high school and pitch against the tall wall. The foundation of the school was at knee level, and we'd aim right at that spot and throw at it over and over and over and over again. Side-arm, over the top, three-quarter arm, curves, fastballs, you  name it. And we got very good at hitting our spot every single time.  We easily threw 60-80 pitches at a time. Hard. And then do the very same thing the next day, and then the next again.

I guess young arms had a lot more in them than I've been told lately.

Life in the summer WAS baseball. When it got too dark to play, we'd go home and listen to the end of the Twins game on radio. On rare occasions when the games were on T.V. we'd stop playing early just to go home and watch them. It helped that when we first developed a love for baseball that the Twins were the best team in the division every single year. Only the Oakland A's offered any real competition for us. This was in the late 60's and early 70's.

Back to last night's game. Stark won again, this time against Lamberton. The final was 4-2 but Lamberton had the bases loaded with two outs in the top of the seventh. The final batter grounded to second to end the game.

Good game.