Wooden bats and leather gloves.

 Suburbia isn’t the right word. After all , the farming community was only about 15,000 hard working souls. But I did live in a large subdivision on the east side of town.  The blocks of pre-fab houses were filled with young families and down-sized retirees. For reference the one block stretch of the street I lived on had more than thirty kids, all born within a five year stretch. Multiply that by hundreds of houses. 

We had a large backyard and over time it became the site of a backyard baseball diamond. It wasn’t full size, but big enough. Sure, it wasn’t the symmetrical diamond you think. First base was a little closer to home than third, but it didn’t matter. 

Home plate was close enough to the house that a foul ball could bust a window, so instead of a baseball we used a tennis ball. In those days tennis balls weren’t bright green. The ones we used were a dusty gray and you could throw and hit it hard enough you needed a proper baseball glove to catch it. Games started in the morning and stretched into the evening. Kids would come and go and who knew the score? It was balls and strikes and innings. A team might be 4 or 6 or even 9 players. Go to lunch join back in where needed. It was all fun and fights and competition.

We played enough the grass was laid bare at the bases and the bare spots of the pitcher’s “mound” snd batter’s boxes lasted for years after we outgrew the confines of the backyard. If I looked closely, I could still see the indentation of the home plate area well into my high school years. 

This kid named Tracy from down the street always wanted to pitch. He was a grade behind me in school. Not only did he smell of baby powder, he couldn’t pitch at all. If he did get it across the plate he threw so slow the ball was invariably smacked far over the outfielder’s heads. 

I was reminded of him watching the first two innings of the Cubs game yesterday.