St. Louis Sandlot Baseball

Edit: St. Louis Sandlot Baseball now plays regularly on Sundays at noon at the “Y” baseball field at Carondelet Park in South St. Louis. Their travel team is called the St. Louis Slingers. Follow @stlouissandlot on Instagram for details, time changes, etc.

A group of us are trying to form a sandlot baseball league in St. Louis. We currently play on occasional weekends (schedules and weather permitting) at Fox Park at Shenandoah & Ohio just west of Soulard. There’s a really nice baseball diamond there that rarely ever gets used called PAL Memorial Park (the Cardinals built it over 20 years ago as part of their Cardinals Care Ball Field Program using money from a grant from the late Daryl Kyle). Still very casual but we run the bases, keep score, etc. Will try to play into December if the weather allows for it. If anyone has catcher’s gear that they’d be willing to borrow that would be greatly appreciated!

We will be meeting up there to play again this weekend (Sunday) Nov. 12 at 10am. Longer term goal is to get involved with the Sandlot Revolution next summer. 

Rules are pretty loose at the moment but there are no called strikes, just swings and misses and foul balls count as strikes. Balls have to be obviously out of the strike zone to be called a ball, but I know other leagues around the country don’t even count balls or strikes. It varies from place to place. I haven’t been able to play since the first week due to injury, but when everyone gets there the guy leading it (Josh) gets everyone together for introductions, explains the rules, and picks another person to pick teams to play a game against each other. This is if there are enough guys there for two teams, which is basically at least 10 guys. The day I was there we ended up having 14 or so after a few local neighborhood guys playing basketball came over and joined us. By the way, that’s the nature of sandlot ball. It’s very laid back. It’s about building community, not about competition. Getting together on a baseball diamond and having fun. You have players who play semi-pro ball (we have one) and several others who maybe haven’t played in years, and even a few who may have never played ball before at all. It doesn’t matter (nor should it). Totally inclusive. No umpires, no managers, just getting together to have fun playing ball, just like when we were kids!

There are a couple of really great podcasts out there to check out that I highly recommend listening to to get an idea of what this “sandlot revolution” is all about. Here are the links: Sandlot Revolution and Sandlot Social Club.

Anyway, if you’d like to come out and play some ball, please join us! Bring your gloves, bats (wood only), and drink(s) of your choice. We have an Instagram account you can also follow for updates: @stlouissandlot And our team is called the Southside Slingers.

Thanks, and play ball!

Unorganized Baseball

Make youth baseball fun again. Leave the adults out of it!

Street Baseball

Hit Me With A Stick Or Hit The Ball With A Stick It Was Tough Out On The Street

Inner City Street Baseball Rules were Rough and Tumble and Provided Lessons Which were not Classroom...

The following was posted on BaseballFarming.com…

Street Baseball was a brand of playing baseball in the streets of the hood which took no prisoners. The skills of playing were tempered with raw toughness and bravado not found on most or many of the other more structured and friendly baseball playing fields.

Some of baseballs Hall Of Fame greats earned their spurs, in a manner of speaking, in the streets. Yogi Berra knew the street as a ball playing mecca.

His first hard disappointment came when by fate of baseball playground rules made him “wait his turn” while his buddy from the streets of St Louis Joe Garagiola was picked from the streets of St. Louis and signed with the St. Louis Cardinals.

Yogi by fate (or if you will in the rules of life) was destined to be one of the most loved of the Bronx bombers of our fabled and leading world champion teams the fabulous seeming perennial winning New York Yankees.

My capability to speak from on site experience is limited. The stories and movies depicting play on the streets of New York and San Fransisco provides adequately the portrayal of this play.

In the deep south our street baseball rules were more subdued and with less traffic to contend. There was toughness associated with a street playing style of, “take no quarter”, you were expected to be tough.

In most games of street baseball rules the game was often modified and a version of Corkball took on a life of its own.

Street baseball rules was so prevalent on the streets of New York one of the all time greats Willie “Say Hey” Mays was often caught joining the youngsters there. Willie Mays our Baseball Hall Of Fame great player playing with the then New York Giants.

The Giants and Willie moved on west and settled in San Francisco the city by the Bay and the place where Tony Bennett “Left His Heart” high on a hill.

Corkball was popular in the streets and replaced street baseball in the urban living places other limited space areas, where windows were an ever present deterrent from using a baseball. Cork use was simply what it was.

Did I get a surprise when I recently received an email about Corkball via my Baseballfarming website. Corkball has been alive and well through the years in some parts of the country and folks you too now have a chance to join the Corkball playing action.

The cork was nothing standard when the game was played here in the South. Whatever size cork that anyone had is what we used.

Buster I did not during my corkball playing time at the boys dormitory at Alabama Polytechnic Institute (API) realize it had life and was an organized play with a standard official Corkball and Bat with St Louis being the center of attention and the Corkball hotbed capitol of the Country.

Just chalk it up as this lad growing up without a lot of travel and experience of the world around me. All that is not of importance the only thing we knew back then was that we played our game and St.Louis apparently played their game.

Boys who lived in families that enjoyed fishing normally had access to many corks and of sundry sizes. Many times we had use of a round red and white colored cork. These round corks were prizes for the most common cylinder shaped corks, small on one end and larger on the other end, were real doozies to hit.

For the corkball bat, eureka, it was usually moms broken broom handle. Many a mom never knew how her good broom lost a handle.

She would see the games in progress but being the good mom she was, she never complained about her broken broom handle. She knew. We simply thought we were sneaky slick. The most cork ball that I personally ever played was inside the inner courtyard of what was once Auburn’s Magnolia Hall. Magnolia Hall was the main boys dormitory during the 50’s on the Loveliest Village On The Plains, Auburn University, Auburn, Alabama.

Bill Sparks, Ronnie Syphers, Ross Wommack and Rip Riggins, were corkball playing whammer jammers. Now the folks at Midfield High School probably never knew their coach was the corkball hitting champion of Magnolia Hall.

The only person that I knew who could hit better than Bill Sparks was Ross Wommack (he was a hitter too).

The only time I remember observing a successful cross handed hitter was in cork ball. His name has completely slipped my mind. It has been several years.

My Dad also would bat cross handed. The corkball hitter would make me think of how Dad would hold the bat. Dad told me he used the cross hand to hold the bat because when he was young and helped Grandad clearing land to cultivate, he swung an axe that way.

My Dad was not a ball player so he did not cotton to street baseball, however he truly enjoyed the games of baseball and football, but his lot of being a country farmers son he had precious little time for ball playing.

He did raise up six boys and two girls. The girls played some but all of us boys were given the time to enjoy playing ball.

He started a family just as the depression was upon our land. His time was taken with making a living for us youngsters to enjoy baseball and other sports which he had missed.

Being from the country and rural America my dad never had the exposure of playing baseball by street baseball rules.

Baseball players from all walks of life learned to love the game and how to play from all the playing diamonds or from any corner even in the streets by Street Baseball Rules. Street Baseball was baseball playing by the baseball playground rules.

Free time, Let’s go play a game!

A Love for Mutant Baseball

ODD-BALL ST. LOUIS DISPLAYS “A LOVE FOR MUTANT BASEBALL”

By John M. McGuire of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Sunday, 8/20/2000, EVERYDAY MAGAZINE

Indian ball is just one of the peculiar games that have made St. Louis the center of the odd-ball universe. Or as Esquire magazine noted, “St. Louis has been giddily creative in constructing games around the concept of hitting a thrown object with a bat.”

The best known and oldest is the hardball variation called corkball, a game so St. Louis that it gave the city a curious reputation during World War II when local corkballers played the game on the decks of aircraft carriers or on military parade grounds. Back then, homegrown corkball was played in “cages,” most of them attached to the side of a tavern.

Other local variations are fuzz-ball, featuring a singed tennis ball that moves like a sphere possessed, and perhaps the oddest game of all, a batter-pitcher diversion called crowns or caps. In this game, usually played against the exterior wall of a saloon, the batter uses a broomstick and tries to hit a beer-bottle cap that is hurled with a vengeance, bobbing about like a crazed dragonfly.

These distinctly St. Louis games have one thing in common – kegs of beer, taverns and buckets of chili.

How did it all begin? The most precise story is that corkball was born at Mueller’s, a boardinghouse and saloon at Grand Boulevard and Greer Avenue. The year was 1890, and the story is that some members of the St. Louis Browns — an American Association team that a few years later would be rechristened the Cardinals in the National League — were sitting on the porch at Mueller’s polishing off a keg of brew. Chris Von der Ahe, a colorful saloonkeeper who called himself “Der Poss Bresident,” owned the team, which featured a player who would go on to become a baseball legend. He was Charley Comiskey, founder of the Chicago White Sox.

Comiskey might have been there the night that one of the players decided he needed exercise. He took the bung out of the keg, carved it into the shape of a ball, while another Brownie found a broom handle for a bat. Five players, not so tipsy, set the ground rules: One would be a pitcher, the other a catcher, with the remaining three playing the outfield. Like Indian ball, there was no running.

Eventually, the game evolved into organized leagues and manufactured equipment. For a time, the corkballs — baseballs slightly larger than golf balls — and slender bats used in the game were made by Rawlings Sporting Goods. Rawlings, based in St. Louis, dropped the line years ago, and now Markwort Sporting Goods on Forest Park Boulevard carries on the tradition.

Leagues such as Sportsman’s Corkball, South St. Louis and Santa Maria or Lemay Corkball became so identified with St. Louis that Bill Vaughn, the late Kansas City syndicated columnist, wrote: “St. Louis without corkball is San Francisco without cable cars, Baltimore without crabcakes or Boston without spaghetti,” noting that Bostonians eat more spaghetti than beans.

Corkball’s popularity has faded, but it’s still played at Jefferson Barracks Park, and there are seven teams and some 42 players, according to Len Renfrow Jr., 34, of Oakville, a second-generation corkballer with the Sportsman’s organization.

In June, corkball and St. Louis were featured in an Esquire article headlined “The Sport That Time Forgot.” Writer Charles P. Pierce noted that “St. Louis has a love for mutant baseball that is richer and more diverse than even that of New York, which has produced stickball, which hardly anyone plays anymore.”