By John Grindrod
Contributing Columnist
.neFileBlock {
margin-bottom: 20px;
}
.neFileBlock p {
margin: 0px 0px 0px 0px;
}
.neFileBlock .neFile {
border-bottom: 1px dotted #aaa;
padding-bottom: 5px;
padding-top: 10px;
}
.neFileBlock .neCaption {
font-size: 85%;
}
For those of you who’ve been following my scribbles for a while, you must know two of my great loves are movies and baseball. And, when those two happen to coincide, as in films such as “Bull Durham” or “Eight Men Out” well, it just doesn’t get much better.
Recently, on TV, I ran into yet another one of those movies that I simply cannot turn off, one I know I’ve seen at least a half dozen times, the 1993 film “Sandlot.” Much like “Breaking Away” isn’t just a movie about cycling and “A River Runs through It” isn’t just a movie about fishing, “Sandlot” is far more than just a movie about boys playing baseball on a field far from adult supervision. However, it is also just that, a movie about school-aged boys on a baseball diamond.
And, for every boy, even us older ones, who ever dug into an imaginary batter’s box, say, up on the hill in Faurot Park on a warm summer day, weeks after the shackles of compulsory education had been thrown off, to face an 11-year-old wearing a ball cap with bill angles at the corners, a striped polo shirt and a pair of sneakers and was about to throw a curveball with a nickel break, “Sandlot,” the movie, positively drips nostalgia.
However, there is little doubt that all of us 50- and 60-plus-year-old men who so vividly remember our sandlot moments know that sandlot died quite some time ago. Unfortunately, I think we all missed the funeral.
In 2008, Eric Olson wrote a newspaper story titled “Baseball Sunday: Sandlot games disappearing” and opined that the grand American tradition of sandlot baseball was, in effect, dead. And, nothing has really changed in the years since Olson’s writing.
Baseball coaches and sociologists attribute the demise to shifts in family structure, the advent of video games, parents’ fear of their children engaging in unstructured play far from home and the proliferation of league play and travel teams organized and coached by adults, especially for those who have talent and could model their skills to less-gifted sandlot players, much as the future Major Leaguer Benny did in “Sandlot.”
Dan Gould, director of Michigan State’s Institute for the Study of Youth Sports, laments the demise of pickup baseball games. Children who used to play sandlot learned so much, and not just about baseball. As for the game itself, they learned from repetition — batting, throwing and catching. But, beyond that, they learned creativity by making up their own rules, especially when there were fewer than nine on a side. Additionally, they learned to negotiate and settle disputes without adults interceding on serious-at-the-time matters relating to ball or strike, fair or foul, safe or out.
But, that was long ago. Every time I drive by Faurot now, I see diamonds that, while enticingly await a group of young players with sneakers and ball gloves, will see no play until organized league games commence in early evening, once adults pull up in minivans and sport utility vehicles to teach children how to play, something that sounds as wrong as it really is. Reverting to rhyme, I’ll simply say, how to play is part of a child’s DNA.
Recently, I noticed while driving by the area historically known as The Hole, the diamonds just west of Bradfield Center, some really nice looking temporary fencing had been put up, which my childhood pals and I would have absolutely been drawn to as moths are to porch lights. My, the opportunity to get a hold of one and send it flying over a distant barrier as our diamond heroes could do, would that ever have been sweet, since our sandlot games were almost always played on open diamonds.
The closest we could come to the allure of a fence or wall to shoot for was when we laid out our own bases in the grass just off West Elm in front of the Sharon Drive-In, which had an imposing steel-corrugated wall painted green. While the metal barrier was far too high for any of us to hit a ball over, my, the sound I remember when the rawhide we’d purchased at Repps Sporting Goods struck steel half way up. That metallic rattle resonates with me to this very day more than 50 years later.
Nonetheless, whether fenced or open, today’s diamonds throughout Lima again this summer remain empty, that is until the organized games commence, games where there will be no ghost runners and right field will always be open. And, if you don’t understand what that means, you don’t remember sandlot.
John Grindrod is a regular columnist for The Lima News and Our Generation’s Magazine, a freelance writer and editor and the author of two books. Reach him at [email protected].
