Sports Games: Stickball
While legions of people occupy their virtual sports time with video games, it’s interesting to look at just how far the simulation of sports has come. For nearly as long as professional sports have been popular, people have found ways to shrink them down in to related, yet entirely different, games and simulations.
So starts a series in which I will look back at what we can call “sports games.” While clearly a redundant title, a sports game, simply put, is a game based off of an organized sport.
Chronologically speaking, the first thing I could think of was stickball. Now, you may be thinking “hold on, that isn’t a simulation, that’s a sport,” but I include it here because while it may be closer to an actual sport than say a sports toy, the game is an adaptation. The important thing is that it embraces the imagination, which is the entire basis of a sports game.
I missed the stickball era, and as a suburban kid, I had little league and grassy fields to play around in. As such I’m even more fascinated with all the ins and outs and the shear inguinity and resilance of the game. I mean check out that photo, there’s that intangible charm that comes from legions of babies playing on cobbled roads. That wagon is no slouch either.
All kidding aside, stickball truly is fascinating to me.
A recent ESPN (http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?page=kampwirth/080630) article did a very nice job tracking a bit of the history of the game (as well as profiling the current and very serious adult leagues). The game is tough to track the origins of, but the game enjoyed it’s highest prominence in from the 1920s to the 1950s in cities, before the rise of the suburb.
Baseball was enjoying a golden period in these decades, and quite understandably, kids wanted to be like their her
oes. The facts that city streets and tenements houses were a far cry from Ebbets Field, equipment was expensive, and organized leagues had stuffy rules, were all problems that stickb
all dealt with. Bats and bases were improvised, and a pinky was a great stand-in for a baseball when your bat was a broom handle, and if not a pinky, a wad of paper wrapped with tape substituted.
It’s that adaptive nature that makes the game so charming. Bases were frequently manhole covers, but bases, boundaries, and the like could just as easily be other objects (cars, lamposts, someone’s home window, etc.) that were set at a reasonable distance and proximity. The game itself even differed from region to region.
For instance, in some versions you run bases like in baseball, in others hits are determined by the distance the ball is hit. Sometimes hitting a ball ontop of a roof meant a homerun, other times it meant you were out and ruined the whole game.
The thing that I really like about stickball, and the thing that really places it high on the li
st of other sports simulations, is its ability to provide escapism, fun, and the players imagination all in one. When I played little league, frequently I would pretend to be Cal Ripken, my favorite player. My complete inability to put some solid contact on the ball and having to go to practices and listen to coaches pretty much shattered those fantasies.
Stickball on the other hand, helps those fantasies. You don’t have to worry about coaches, you can jaw around with the other kids, you can hit better, you might not even need to field at all, and you can play with fewer people by adjusting the rules.
Though sports games of today are smaller, more individual based, and further from their source material, stickball has all the elements of a prototypical sports game, and though it is far less popular now than it once was, it’s legacy remains.
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