How to Play Baseball (If You Don’t Play Baseball)

If baseball had cargo shorts, how different would it be? (via M.S. Burton)

If baseball had cargo shorts, how different would it be? (via M.S. Burton)

Once every year or so, when the calendar smiles on me, I put together a softball game for the writers and readers of the Mariners blog Lookout Landing. They tend to go well. The event draws a wide mixture of talents and enthusiasm, a small degree of beer on field, some iconic memories or running jokes. Strangers meet and forget each other’s names. Everyone goes home relatively sore and relatively content from an afternoon of play.

I played bar league softball for most of my adult life; back before I went to grad school and had children, I played every weekend in summer and fall co-ed leagues. My baseball career ended at age 12 as soon as the first pitcher threw a curve, and I’m hardly an athletic specimen. But though my power was limited to line drives over the infielders and my arm was barely tenable at short (imagine Jhonny Peralta minus the power), I enjoyed my time playing softball and missed it once it left me. But as I planned the latest game, I found myself wondering: not that there’s anything wrong with softball, but why weren’t we playing the sport we loved? Why not baseball?

I discussed the matter with my colleagues on staff and was told by various people that it wasn’t really practical. Someone would get killed, was the common refrain, either by a pitch or a foul tip or a screaming liner down third base. It was too dangerous, too difficult. It seemed strange to me: Baseball used to be played in grass fields without gloves, and then in the streets with broom handles, let alone the polycarbonate armor and cups that we have access to today. Certainly the potential for injury was there – but as someone who’s taken a few comebackers on the mound in slow-pitch softball, it didn’t seem ludicrous. Why not try?

I made the announcement on LL, emphasizing that the goal was enjoyment over competition, to avoid scaring off inexperienced players. The response was overwhelmingly positive and also overwhelming; no less than 40 people arrived to the event, and we had to split into two fields in the middle of the afternoon. “I’ll be terrible, but let’s do it,” was the general response, and exactly the one I was hoping for. We would, I imagined, have half a dozen dominant players – former college and rec-league baseball players, with their baseball pants and actual gear – and the rest amiable bushers. It would be like traveling back to prehistoric baseball. We would all walk up to the plate with our wood bats, flail harmlessly at 60-mph heat, and then after an hour we would laugh and turn back to slow-pitch and Pabst.

The plan went awry.

First, I fell apart. Less than a week after the idea, I suffered from adulthood, standing in my recycling bin, stomping down cardboard to make room. I have done this a thousand times in my life. We all have. This time, the bin spun out from under me mid-jump, and the concrete greeted the flat of my forearm in the aftermath. It was fortunate, really: I would have broken the wrist or the elbow, and my health insurance is lackluster at best. Instead the force of the blow traveled up my arm and into my shoulder, aggravating a bicep tear from college that prevented me from throwing overhand for two years. Because I am old, the new old arm injury didn’t heal, and was supplemented by back pain from picking up my writhing baby off the floor. By the time warmups started, I was short-hopping throws from second to third, and I knew it was going to be a rough day.

Other than my own invisible suffering, however, everything went perfectly. The sky was unbroken blue, the temperature a crisp 65; we’d cobbled enough gear for two catchers and six hitters. Everyone had a glove. Only the dusty green artificial turf, and the lack of parasol-wielding gentlefolk discussing matters of the day from foul territory, broke the spell of a perfect 19th century baseball game.

The new inefficiency: counting off by fours. (via M.S. Burton)

The new inefficiency: counting off by fours. (via M.S. Burton)

We picked teams by lining everyone up and counting ones and twos. I volunteered to umpire, because I was injured and because I am an idiot. I detest umpiring; I am conflict-averse and not particularly perceptive. I crouched behind the catcher during warmups and had no sense of how high the pitches were. I was working entirely on a two-dimensional plane. Good thing this is just for fun, I told myself, and called out “Play Ball” with middling gusto.

It wasn’t long before my preconceptions of baseball were shattered. The first batter grounded routinely to short, and to my horror the catcher ran up the line to back up first in a display of rank professionalism. Once the third baseman did run in to make an infield throw, and his base remained adorably uncovered as runner and fielders alike discovered the error. But for the most part, the game was lacking the lovable chaos I was seeking. The pitcher was wild, and batters took their share of bases, but strikeouts began as rare. Hitters were making contact – no massive drives, and the cleanest outfield hit was a bloop that actually forced out a runner at second – but the ball was in play. I struggled to remember the count, remember to crouch down to get the best view, where to run to get sight lines on the bases.

The game changed as it went on. I asked everyone to use the complete major league rules, but with the first baserunner, leadoffs and stolen bases were immediately abandoned, much as I expected. The Little League rule of being able to run once the ball crossed the plate was adopted, and steals happened, though sometimes softball mentality, or just general politeness, caused runners to stand and watch as balls skipped to the backstop. A fourth outfielder was also soon adopted, not to prevent scoring but to allow more people to play at a time.

But the game changed in another way too, and a less agreeable one. Baseball Prospectus author and young, athletic human being Brendan Gawlowski worked a 3-0 count and then watched a fourth pitch that I called a strike and that he called eye-level, though neither of these were probably precisely true. He grounded out on the following pitch and frowned quite justifiably on his way back to the dugout. It grew worse. On another ground ball the next inning, I tried to get a sight line on the play at first, but the runner was on the inside the line and though the throw beat him, I failed to see it pull the first baseman off the bag. This time half the players howled at my error, though after 10 or 15 seconds of silent disbelief, the out was recorded.

As the runner complained to me on his way back to the dugout, I rather flippantly told him to file his complaint with the first base umpire. And while it’s not easy working alone when professional umpires get to work in teams of four, make no mistake – I was wretched, and increasingly tired of it. When a runner dodged a tag down at second before a throw home nailed a runner for what appeared to me a double play, the runner on second simply didn’t leave. So I did. I took off my mask and headed into the dugout for a bottle of water. It wasn’t worth it.

A Hardball Times Update
Goodbye for now.

And it really wasn’t. Teams supplied their own umpires for balls and strikes, and grousing still took place here and there, but disputes over calls in the field immediately stopped. Part of this is because the biased umpires were still far, far better at it than I was. But the other part, I think, was the existence of an umpire at all. The treatment of umpires in 19th century baseball is an endless string of vulgarities, threats, broken bottles and occasionally actual battery. That shouldn’t have happened here, I thought, because this wasn’t an official game – no money, no statistics were on the line. But the mere presence of authority cultivates an instinct in people, I think, a fight-or-flight mechanism. Even with replay, there are missed calls in every baseball game, and yet with each missed call I could feel an invisible tension growing on both sides, a rising sense of injustice. I was glad to be done. I held my wife’s cousin’s baby for a couple of innings to give the dad a chance play, and the child fussed and squirmed valiantly against his unfamiliar, unacceptable caretaker.

As it became necessary to split into four teams, I decided that the only way to conquer my distasteful brush with authority was to play. I took the mound and warmed up, submarine-style, the only way I was physically capable of throwing. The pitches were barely reaching the plate, and my release point was entirely dependent on when in the pitching motion my arm would start to hurt. I told myself I had two walks before I would swap out. But when the batters stepped in, somehow, it all worked. I got my lazy, underhand pitches close to the plate, enough to entice contact and allow BABIP to rescue me. I pitched a scoreless inning on three balls in play, and sat down a content man.

But after I relegated myself to left field, the game once again shifted toward a natural resting state. Pitchers began throwing harder, runners remembered to steal on passed balls. I walked in my first time up not because of a careful batting eye, not because of Jim Rice-levels of intimidation, but because the pitcher, Nathan Bishop, kept missing off the low outside corner. I wanted to swing, I did; but with my anatomically proportional but baseball-deficient arms, there was no way I could hit those pitches. I couldn’t even make myself try.

Then Jacob Reppert took the hill for the other team; he had been drafted in the later rounds of the previous major league draft by the Philadelphia Phillies. He threw at half-strength, and the batters couldn’t catch up to him when they swung before he let go. The only person to reach against him was a random 12e-year-old boy who had been playing near the field when we arrived; on the first pitch, he laid down a perfect bunt down the third base line and reached easily.

It wasn’t long before bats stopped reaching balls altogether. The game had boiled down to two outcomes: walk and strikeout. On my final at bat against LL author David Skiba, as I peered through my glasses at the white dot before me, the pitch recognition of my brain reflected for 0.3 seconds, reading the velocity, the spin on the ball, mostly the fact that it appeared to be heading straight for me. My eyes took in all this information, and weighed it carefully, and provided my brain with a simple instruction: “no.” I fell backward clumsily, the slider (it was a slider) broke back over the inside corner of the plate, and I was out. I would have struck out 100 times before hitting that pitch; I don’t know how many it would have taken before I would even try to swing. I sat in the dirt, the bat still on my shoulder, laughing.

The game continued, the four teams merging back into three as people filtered out, rotating from bat to field to bench. I tried pitching one more time, to provide the game with some much-needed BABIP, but my arm was now throbbing and I missed wildly with my pitches. As a metaphor for old age, it was heavy-handed. Instead I groused at the other players to slow down their pitches, let their infield do the work, stop being so fascist. I don’t remember who won, or what my own stats were. It was a fine day, and I spent it with my friends, and it was enough. That part, at least, was a success.

Game two: A shortstop ages. (via M.S. Burton)

Game two: A shortstop ages. (via M.S. Burton)

We’ve long discussed the issue of the decay of baseball in our inner cities, and rightly so. It’s a major problem. But there’s a decay of baseball in the suburbs as well, especially among adults: baseball and many other sports have become increasingly voyeuristic and less participatory an affair. We consume more sports than ever, and play less.

Before the game I wondered what would happen if random people played baseball. Six hours later I wondered why they didn’t. Baseball wasn’t some sort of dangerous activity best left for the elite professionals. It was a social affair that catered to various levels and allowed for an appropriate ratio of exercise to rest. So why the popularity of slow-pitch softball? There seem to be three factors that push us away from playing the actual game we love:

The cost of equipment: Among the 40 of us, we had dozens of balls to lose in the bushes, two sets of catching gear and a mask for the umpire, gloves and bats and batting gloves. But compared to the $20 it takes to buy a basketball, or even the lesser demands of a softball game that hardly even requires cleats, let alone padding, it’s an undeniable impediment. This assumes that there’s even a field nearby to use, no guarantee of its own.

The need for an umpire: You can use the honor system on the basepaths and only encounter the occasional source of tension on a close play. But unlike slow-pitch, where the pitch helpfully and gently lands on an easily trackable spot just beyond the plate, you need someone to state whether a pitch is a ball or a strike. And as soon as you introduce external justice into a sport, as mentioned above, it becomes altered. Also, you need to pay that person, because umpiring is the worst.

The art of pitching: The most valuable asset of the lob of the slow pitch is that it acts as a resistor plate on the game. Given no limits, the pitchers in our game quickly emulated the pitching environment of baseball at large, throwing harder and harder until there were two true outcomes left. It wasn’t illegal; it just made the game less fun. (Much as it does in the majors, for many people.) And just as with major league baseball, there isn’t really a good solution except to tell people to try less to win, and then remind them every inning until they forget.

The iconic image of adult, slow-pitch softball is the can of beer sitting on the grass beside the left fielder. And yet when we began play with baseball, the product on the field was surprisingly similar to my softball experience, outside of the pitcher-catcher battery. The players ran into outs, gave terrible base-coaching advice, forgot who was up. But they also ran hard, griped about bad pitches and bad swings, punched their glove when they made errors. They even occasionally slid. The competitive drive tends, I think, to win out over the most casual of intentions. Baseball, and sport, distills this competitive spirit, draws it out of us.

Forty strangers can drive to a random field agreeing to have a good time playing a meaningless game, and afterwards they will have had a good time playing that meaningless game. But in the moments when the game’s self-designed sense of justice is shattered – either by the written rules being broken or the natural rules superseded – for just that moment, everything else disappears, all the detachment from results we can muster.

There will be another game at some point, and I honestly don’t know whether it’ll be a baseball game or a softball game. It’ll come down to a vote. Slow-pitch softball is more democratic; the physics behind it pull down the elites to a mortal level, while the speed and difficulty of baseball provides the thrill of employing one’s full, untethered ability. It also lets people pitch well, which is fun.

I know how I’ll vote, however. While my dream of hapless baseball proved utterly false on the whole, it was entirely correct in at least one sense. Thirty-seven years and two children have proven too much; I can no longer play baseball well. The lazy arc of the softball is my only hope. Age works like this: it provide truths in starts, not in a graceful transition but in a series of harsh realities intruding on age-old, untested beliefs. You don’t remember your athletic achievements and then adjust them by a percentage based on the aging curve. You think you’re good, until the moment you learn you’re not. I am not.

At least I picked the right pursuit in life: the aging curve for writing is much kinder.


Patrick Dubuque is a wastrel and a general layabout. Many of the sites he has written for are now dead. Follow him on Twitter @euqubud.
14 Comments
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Bob Hofferber
7 years ago

Maybe you should try baseball the old-fashioned way: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1rLnfraZskY

Trace Juno
7 years ago

I played baseball in Germay for about ten years and I feel like I know exactly what this article is about! Thanks!
You miss an important (to me, anyway) argument in favor of baseball: the sound and feel of the bat when you hit the ball.

(Oh, and thanks for reminding me that I am thirty-four, have two kids, and, well, the break on my curveball isn’t getting any sharper.)

kevin
7 years ago

Love it, thanks.

runfolk
7 years ago

wonderful article, thank you.

mike dixon
7 years ago

Awesome read, thanks man. I pitched for a town league at 32 after not touching a baseball for 11 years and i 1) threw up in the 2nd inning and 2) couldn’t lift my arm for 2 weeks. I shudder to think of how my 39 year old body would say “no” this time around.

Mike
7 years ago

Right from the start of the article I had a pretty strong feeling what the outcome would be, because I’ve imagined the same concept in my head many times. Softball balances out the pitching, which dominates if you have a player or two in a casual league who actually knows how to pitch.

A good compromise, in my opinion, is “orthodox” or “modified” softball, which is essentially fastpitch softball where pitchers are only allowed to through without using a windmill motion. As fast as you can pitch underhand, in other words.

The faster pitching makes stealing something that can be allowed in the game, but the limitations of underhand pitching make it tough for even very good pitchers to dominate the game. In our league, there are a handful of guys who are challenging to hit, but even then they are still a far cry from what you get when you start letting guys throw overhand.

Unfortunately, the trade off is that pitching is much more difficult than it is in slow pitch, which is another balancing point for slow pitch. Not just anyone can pitch, which means fielding a team is more difficult than in slow pitch.

I don’t think there’s any perfect answer at a casual level.

T. Evans
7 years ago

I played little league when I was younger

Thomas Norton
7 years ago

“I detest umpiring; I am conflict-averse and not particularly perceptive.”

That made me laugh out loud. I referee field-hockey games and I experience this feeling a lot as stuff is happening all around me and I’ve no idea what the hell has just gone on.

Zachary K
7 years ago

I play pickup baseball every week. The best way to do pitches and strikes is to do away with the strike zone altogether. We don’t do walks, and you only get a strike if you swing and miss or foul the ball off. This keeps the ball in play and prevents any arguments about the strike zone.

Yehoshua Friedman
7 years ago

How about trying to reproduce the dead ball? I have since seen some footage of retro baseball under 1860s rules. I don’t know how far back you want to go, but playing a less high-speed game that is still baseball is a good idea.

John Hager
7 years ago

This is an awesome article. I want to play basketball but it looks like I can’t play well.

badoo login
7 years ago

Thanks for sharing. I hope it will be helpful for too many people that are searching for this topic.

Dianabolbulk
7 years ago

I play football usually but baseball is another game which I like most. I watch all matches when it comes to New York city but your article has some good points who never taste it. Thanks for posting it here !!

Liam Antony
7 years ago

Thanks for this great and informational post . I enjoyed while reading . Baseball is my favorite sport . Baseball needs more equipments for playing so most of the people don’t lıke it . There are very few sports where the proper equipment does not give you an edge in performance. This is true when it comes to the sport of baseball too. Many people think that you can just pick up any old bat to use and play the game well. In truth, there are certain equipments that can take your game to a whole new level such as bat , gloves and cleats . All of them are necessary for playing well .