Memories of a Unique American Experience

The heat bearing down on Southeast Texas right now is pretty much a great indicator of why it is kids choose to stay indoors and play video games rather than go outside - it might kill them.. I remember my mom telling us when we were younger - if it got above 95 or so - that we probably shouldn't go outside because it was "just too hot". Back then, we were immune to the heat. We could have run around all day and then come in for dinner completely scorched with sunburn, and we wouldn't have even realized it.

During those times, back in the heady days of the early-to-mid 70s, we kids didn't even know what a video game was. Oh, sure, there was something called Pong, but that had yet to become an obsession like, say Pac Man. So on those days when the heat kept us indoors, I either read books or my brother and I would put together a hearty game of Card Baseball.

We both collected baseball cards, and found it kind of lame that they just sat around collecting dust, so we decided to make use of them. We would roll a small piece of aluminum foil into a tight ball. Then we would use some encyclopedias and other thick hardback books to put together an outfield fence, which took up a large part of the hallway in left field, connected with my brother's bedroom wall in center, and perfectly outlined his dresser drawers in center and right. In real life, the "park" more or less would draw comparative descriptions like, "Camden Yards meets the old Polo Grounds".

Then we would draw from cards from out of a pile and put out our team at their normal positions. The one big problem was that the pitcher's mound was only about a foot from the catcher. Naturally, if a pitcher (myself or my brother, using the tinfoil ball) hit the catcher in any part of the card, that was a strike. A miss was a ball. The problem came in when the "hitter" (myself or my brother with a baseball card in our hands, swinging) would swing wildly and hit the pitcher in the hand. Ouchie.

The outs were generated when the struck ball hit a fielder, regardless of whether it was grounded or in the air.

We would play this for HOURS. Often it ended in arguments, but most of the time it was just FUN. And yes, we ruined a lot of baseball cards that way. But it was also a bit of activity in a small setting that kept us occupied and didn't end in us crying out "we're bored" every five minutes. My mother could mop her floors without disturbance, which was very important. Occasionally she would have to step through left field to gain access to the bathroom, and a random dog or two would occupy the field in order to lick one of us (this would result in a temporary stoppage, but the game would go on).

These are the types of things I remember about my childhood. No TV. No electric wires attached to some unfeeling box. Just good old fashioned rough-housing. These days, kids are so limited in what they can and can't do by people who think they know better and it sincerely bothers me. In this day and age, our creativity and our imagination should soar higher than ever before. Sadly, I don't think that's true so much anymore.

Fortunately, they still DO make baseball cards.