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!

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.”