Teach Your Kids to Play Indian Ball

Too many kids today don’t play enough pick-up games of baseball. There are many reasons for this. The obvious one is that kids, in general, just don’t go outside and PLAY enough… at least not as much as they have in generations past. There are too many other tempting distractions for them, like an almost limitless supply of television channels, the Internet, video games, handheld devices, and so on. In the last two decades, childhood has moved indoors. The average American boy or girl spends as few as 30 minutes in unstructured outdoor play each day, and more than seven hours each day in front of an electronic screen. And, as Mike Lanza points out in this great piece, Playing Ball With No Adults Around, parents too often delude themselves that their child can become a superstar athlete by playing in the most competitive (read: “Select”) leagues around, where they often have to try out for a team, as if they’re trying to make the varsity squad of their high school team. Hogwash, I say!

One of our jobs as parents is to try and encourage our kids to spend more time outdoors, by themselves, and as often as possible. It’s not only healthy for them to do so, but is good for their mind and spirit as well. I don’t really have to go into more detail about this, do I? I didn’t think so.

But expecting your kids to run out and play baseball, without some sort of overly competitive, organized league to belong to, is very problematic. For one thing, it takes too many kids! Even if you can make it happen with only 7 or 8 players a side, that’s still about 15 kids. And even in the most densely populated neighborhoods, that will most likely be too difficult to pull off, especially on a regular basis. In fact, your son or daughter may be lucky to find even two or three others in their general vicinity to play, either because that’s all there is, some of the kids simply don’t like playing outside (sad, but too often true), or the other kids’ time is just being over-managed by their helicopter parents.

But, let’s say that your kid is able to find a handful of others in the neighborhood with enough free time and appreciation of the sport to want to play it. Most people probably have a Wiffle Ball set, and that’s great. There’s nothing wrong with Wiffle Ball. It makes it easy to play ball in a smaller area and is lots of fun. But if you have a larger area to play in, say an open field, a big park or a vacant baseball diamond, then a game where they can actually use a baseball and a real bat would be better for them to learn the basic skills of baseball, like hitting and fielding.

This is why I recommend teaching them to play Indian Ball (feel free to call it something else if you don’t care for the name, e.g., Lou Ball!). Indian Ball is basically baseball without the base running, so that you don’t need a player positioned at every base. The great thing about Indian Ball is that as few as three players can get a game going.

But how do you play Indian Ball? Well, just like a lot of bat-and-ball games, there are many different variations. Some of them are quite complicated, while others can follow the simplest rules, such as those of Wiffle Ball. I happen to prefer the rules that some old timers who’ve been playing Indian Ball since the 1940s use, the only difference is I prefer to use a baseball rather than a softball. If you have a smaller lot to play in, or there are too many houses around, you can choose to use a tennis ball instead, making Indian Ball very similar to fuzzball!

In Indian Ball, the pitcher tosses the ball toward a batter from his own team. It’s a single if the fielders of the other team fail either to scoop up the grounder before it stops rolling or to catch it in the air. An out is recorded if they can do either of those or if the batter hits two fouls to the same side of the plate. If a batted ball is fair but doesn’t fly or roll past the pitcher, then it’s an automatic out (so, no bunting!). Three strikes is an out. There is no catcher, no umpire, there are no doubles or triples and, in fact, there are no bases; runs are scored by an accumulation of singles and home runs (hits that go over the fence) using “ghost runners” like in corkball or fuzzball. Likewise, there can be no walks, either, so a ball (a pitch not swung at by the batter) is recorded as a strike.

The game can be played anywhere where you have room to hit the ball and not interfere with parked cars, buildings with windows, or anyplace where the batted ball can cause damage or get easily lost. That’s why it’s best to play it in a sandlot, an open field, or an available baseball diamond with a backstop. But, no matter how you slice it, it’s fun, and a great way for kids to get outside, get some much-needed exercise, and spend a lazy summer afternoon.

What the #%@& Is Indian Ball?

And why have these guys been playing it for six decades?

BY BYRON KERMAN from St. Louis Magazine | JUNE 26, 2008

PHOTOGRAPH BY MARK GILLILAND

Doing anything for 60 years is an achievement. If you can breathe, remain upright and avoid jail for that long, you deserve an award. So the fact that a group of 75-year-old men have been playing the same abbreviated version of baseball in the park, weekly from May through October since age 15, is kinda nuts.

The game is called Indian Ball, and it’s a “St. Louis–originated game,” explains ballplayer David Golde, 74. “When you talk to people outside of Missouri, no one seems to have heard of it. I think it was developed because we could never get 18 guys together to play a regular game. It’s a game you can play with as few as three and as many as 20.”

In Indian Ball, the pitcher gently lobs a softball toward a batter from his own team. It’s a single if the fielders of the other team fail either to scoop up the grounder before it stops rolling or to catch it (and it’s an out if they can do either of those or if the batter hits two fouls to the same side of the plate). There is no catcher, there are no doubles or triples and, in fact, there are no bases; runs are scored by an accumulation of singles and home runs (hits that go over the fence).

It’s a simple game that should remind many of street ball games like cork ball, where running the bases can be more trouble than it’s worth. For Golde and his gang of septuagenarians, it makes perfect sense. “I used to be a pitcher in a fast pitch softball league,” he says. “When I saw a guy slide into third base and break his leg, I decided to do something less dangerous.”

The Indian-ballers, who play in Tilles Park in Ladue, are fully aware of their limitations. In fact, they call themselves “the AKs,” which, explains Golde, is short for “alte kockers.” That’s Yiddish for “old men.”

“This whole thing started in 1948 with a group of eight guys from U. City High” on a field-hockey field, of all places, adds Golde. Now, there are sons and grandsons playing—anywhere from six to 18 total show up each Sunday. Through marriages, children, wars, deaths and, worst of all, arthritic knees, the Alte Kockers have kept on pitching, hitting and fielding for 60 years. And their equipment is aging gracefully, too.

“I’m using a mitt from 1955,” reports Golde. “In fact, I sent it back to Rawlings and had them relace it. They said they couldn’t believe what good shape it was in.”

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.”