Hot Box— Indian — Workup — and 500

There are many indications that spring has arrived, but none have more impact upon me than the return of the “Great American Pastime,” baseball. Just a couple of days ago, as it happens each year, my Kansas City Royals opened their 2017 season. Makes me wish, I still had the youthful flexibility, to enjoy some of the related pursuits from my childhood that were in the title of this story.

I recently watched a rerun of a 1999 comedy movie, “Blast From The Past.” This is a worthwhile and enjoyable movie that has a lot of imagery for my fellow seniors, who grew up during the time of “The Cold War.”

The plot of the movie is based upon a time during the Cuban Missile Crisis. I don’t want to ruin the story for anyone who has not seen the movie, so I will give only a quick background. There is a family that had lived in a ‘fallout’ shelter, from 1962 to 1995. Their son was born during this time.

He was forced to return from the shelter to gather supplies, which were beginning to run low. He is exposed to many things that he has only heard about from his parents. One of these is baseball.

He attends a baseball game with his new found friends, and suddenly he rises and shouts, “I get it ... you have to see it to understand it!” That simple response, explains the beautiful knowledge and insights that are part of the intricate game of baseball. He discovers as a young adult, what practically every American boy and girl, learn at an early age.

There is nothing as American as baseball. Just try and explain to someone who has never seen or heard of baseball, adages such as … bunt, sacrifice, intentional walk, hit and run, straight steal, pick-off, double play, or hundreds of other baseball jargons!

In the fall of 2015, when I visited London, my Kansas City Royals were playing in the World Series. I soon discovered, that while the British might have some rudimentary knowledge of American football, when it came to understanding baseball, it was as foreign to them as the planet Mars.

If a person doesn’t understand the basic premise of the game, there is no way they can comprehend any of the terms, I used in the title of this column. I often wonder if today’s American youth know about or have played, any of these baseball playground pursuits that were common in my generation?

In today’s world they still have Little League and school baseball, but do they play regularly, in neighborhood games, like those from my adolescent days? Organized sports are great, but some of my favorite baseball memories, took place on makeshift neighborhood fields, sidewalks, and backyards.

These baseball activities were mostly designed to be played when there were not enough kids around to make up two full teams of nine players each. The first of these was hotbox.

You can play hotbox with as few as three players. All you need is a baseball, two players with gloves, two imaginary bases, and a runner. The idea is simply to have the runner try to get from one base to the other before they are tagged out by one of the base defenders. This was good practice for us, and it taught us base running basics.

Indian Ball was another game we played when there were only a few players available. There were many different types of Indian Ball, but the one we played most often, took place on only half of a baseball field. Fair territory was a diamond shaped area that ran straight from home plate through second base and continued on to the outfield, then from home plate all the way down the left field foul line.

A batter was tossed a pitch. They remained at bat as long as they did not incur three strikes. A strike was awarded when you swung and missed a pitch, hit a ball that landed foul of the half field, or when you hit a ball that was fielded cleanly as a fly or ground ball. Typically you would have a batter, a pitcher, and three to four infielders and outfielders. Once you struck out, you moved to the furthest outfield position, and each player advanced a position until it was their turn to bat. Workup baseball was quite similar, but it usually was played when there were more players on hand, and a full field was used.

To learn fielding skills, we often played 500. A batter would toss a ball to himself, and then hit fly balls and grounders, to the other ball players. When they fielded a ground ball cleanly, they earned 50 points. A caught fly ball garnered 100 points. Once you attained 500, you took your place hitting the balls to the other fielders.

We never left home most days back then without our ball gloves, as you never knew when one of these above titled baseball pursuits might take place, and it was rare to see a kid on a bicycle, that didn’t also include a ball glove hanging from the handlebars.

Even if there were none of these playground activities happening, we didn’t forget baseball. We loved to go to one of the neighborhood small grocery stores, to buy baseball cards, which were included in bubble gum packages. We tried to obtain or trade for the cards, of our favorite baseball stars.

We spent hours arguing about who were the best players. Each day we checked the papers, to see who had the best batting averages, and which teams were leading in the standings.

Yes, spring and baseball are here once more. I will regularly watch both the Royals and Cardinals on TV, but my mind will also gaze back to those days of my youth, when baseball was everything to my friends and me. P.S. “You’re up!”