Check out this version of bottlecaps played with caps from five-gallon water jugs. Way cool! Now I just need to find me some of those caps… Anyone?
I’d love to find out more information about this stickball game, so if you any information, please send it along. Thanks!
I was passing through Oak Park yesterday when I saw the above box, meticulously drawn on the playground side of Mann School.
This is a box for Strike Out, a baseball-like game in which a pitcher hurtled a rubber baseball at a batter in front of the box, in an attempt to strike him out. When I was a city kid, growing up in the 1970s, these boxes were as ubiquitous as afro hair picks; chalked or spray-painted on the sides of schools, the backs of commercial buildings–almost any place that faced a large lot or playground. But in recent decades, I’ve rarely seen them. A couple of years ago I asked a young boy if kids still played Strike Out. He looked at me as if I were talking about a game of marbles or Hoop & Stick.
So seeing two on a single wall in one day caught me by surprise. I didn’t even have my camera with me. I had to make do with my cellphone cam.
In Strike Out, a pitch inside the box was a strike, but a hit was judged a single, double, triple or homer, depending on the distance the ball traveled after leaving the bat; there were no bases for the batter to run. If the ball was caught on the fly by the opposing team, it was an out. If the pitcher caught the ball on a single bounce, it was an out.
The building was an important part of the game because you needed one with a flat brick, concrete or limestone surface with enough mass to absorb the energy of the fast pitch, yet return the rubber ball without enough velocity to reach the pitcher on a strike. And no glass near the box. Strike Out was great way to play baseball without having 18 people. A team could be as few as one to four players.
“It’s sad how kids nowadays don’t play and learn how to hit and pitch like we did,” Kenny McGregor, one of my buddies from high school (we’re both Chicago Vocational, Class of 1983), replied when I messaged him yesterday about the box I saw. In addition to the rules, he remembered games in which the ball was hit hard enough to make its way into traffic, “sometimes hitting passing cars and buses” on Ashland. “I can recall a buddy named Pete who threw so hard the ball sizzled and as it came towards you, and it changed shape and [would] look like he threw an egg. One bat, two balls, one or two gloves, and we were playing all day until we destroyed the balls.”
Henry Murphy–also in his 40s just as Kenny and I–remembered playing Strike Out on the side of a Monarch Cleaners on east 87th Street back in the 1970s. He hasn’t seen a Strike Out box in years, either. “We’ve become a lawsuit-delicate society,” he says. “Want to [have your kids] play a game with a chance of being hit with a fast rubber ball? Get your lawyer on retainer.”
And–dare I say it?–drawing a Strike Out box defaces property, which is a bit of a demerit.
I was wearing a suit and had my baseball-loving daughters (two teens and a ‘tween) with me when I photographed the Strike Out box. Maybe I’ll double back one day with a rubber baseball to see if my 44-year-old arm has the stuff, still. Just gotta remember to bring the shoulder ointment.
On the south side of St. Louis, where I spent most of my childhood years, beer and baseball were and still are king. As kids, we had to turn to baseball. But it was a rare day when you could throw together two full teams of nine from the kids who floated around our neighborhood. On hot days, we were lucky if there were two of us to play catch.
The field was another issue entirely — there were plenty of asphalt schoolyards with bases painted on, but for the true hops of a grass field, all we could find was an abandoned church lot that was mowed once a month. We made do, even made some amateurish attempts at groundskeeping, but if one of the older kids got hold of a pitch going the opposite way, the ball was gone, possibly through an apartment window.
We played anyway, of course, when we could muster the players and the equipment; but it was hard to pretend we were the Cardinals when the pitcher had to lob the pitch in and back up as quick as they could to play the infield and hopefully chase the runner down.
>It was Dave Cook, a squirrelly guy from two buildings down second only to me in his obsession with baseball, who came up with the rough idea for a game we would call “Fuzzball.” “My uncle from New York played it when he was a kid,” he said, grinning and bouncing a tennis ball in one palm. “All you need is a tennis ball and a bat — or even a broomstick. You pitch up against the wall, so you don’t need a catcher.”
I’d seen strike zones painted and scrawled up in back of our school, so we picked the lowest one and started playing every day, developing the rules of the game as we went. In Fuzzball, which reached its Zenith in fourth grade, when Dave hit 72 home runs and I struck out 350 batters, the focus was on the purity of batter vs. pitcher. We drew lines in the schoolyard for singles, doubles, triples. There was already a fence at perfect home-run distance. The pitcher could field anything on the fly or try to stop a ground ball, but there wasn’t any base running. After a double- or triple-header of Fuzzball, our hands were red, our arms aching. If other kids showed up, we played two-on-two or three-on-three, and every kid in the neighborhood did come out and play at least a little. But Dave and I were the Fuzzball gurus.
On the East Coast, they call it “Stickball,” and they bounce the ball, a pink Spaldeen, down the middle of the street. They actually run the bases. Grown-up (sort of) men play the game today in leagues. Chicagoans know it as “Strikeout.” In suburbs all over America, Wiffleball satisfies the same need — the space needed is similar and the threat of broken windows is less. Decades ago, inner-city youth tried to hit whirring bottle caps with their broomstick in the most extremely urban derivation of the game. For the solo player, stoopball and off-the-wall allow something close to baseball action.
The beauty of Fuzzball, and all the bat-and-ball games like it played all over the Western World, is its ease of play. The equipment, a tennis ball/Spaldeen/Super Pinkie and a bat/stick, are readily available to kids of all socioeconomic classes. The games are made to fit into the nooks and crannies of urban life. The rules are fluid, easily adapted to any city or milieu. Pick-up games are the preferred method of play. The essential skills of America’s Pastime are encapsulated in these games; if you can throw a curveball without seams on your ball, you’ve got something, and the 70+ swings taken by each player in a typical “Fuzzball” game have to help.
The popularity of basketball in most city neighborhoods has put a dent in the bat-and-ball games of my generation, but you might still come across a cluster of kids up against the back of a grocery store or scurrying between parked cars on a narrow street. If nothing else look for the strike zones painted or taped or scratched on brick walls in cities across the country.
Cork & Fuzz 