I personally have no strong feelings about them, but I have a neighbor whose personalized license plate is literally, "RDSXSUX" (and bumper stickers that make clear that is indeed a reference to the Boston Red Sox).
You got a typical Politics Monday evening, the Swalwell/Gonzales resignations were the headline for Tuesday evening, and Matt did the punching left on Thursday morning that you were so eager for. You've had plenty to enjoy.
It was punching left with a padded glove... but that's mostly because conservatism doesn't mean anything anymore. They're like the wooly mammoths that were contemporaries of the Mesopotamians; only barely there.
I played a lot of cricket when I was younger, and (aside from the wicket-keeper, ie the catcher), gloves are not allowed in cricket.
I never broke a finger, and I caught plenty of balls; there is a technique to catching a hard ball that is travelling fast.
A cricket ball is marginally smaller (a half-inch smaller in circumference) and marginally heavier (a quarter ounce) than a baseball, but made from basically the same stuff (cork covered in leather); there is very little difference, but the cricket ball is slightly harder, and they get hit just as fast.
Certainly there are some catches that are impossible without gloves, and, as a result, you just don't try them. But with good technique ("soft hands") you don't break fingers. Use the palm of your hand, not your fingers, let your hand move with the ball, don't try to snatch at it, don't reach for a fingertip catch.
Do they? I’ve only been able to find reddit comments and poorly-sourced articles in whatever publications but the claim I see is that baseballs get hit ~1.3 times faster than cricket balls, while the weight difference is pretty small. Which would mean they’re delivering almost 1.7 times as much energy. (ignoring aerodynamics, which might not be safe, but I don’t know in which direction that would cut)
I've played (amateur level) and follow both, and there's not much difference. The ball's hard, and coming fast.
Above poster is totally right about technique. I play in a vintage baseball league, and the first couple of years my hands were perpetually sore all summer long. Ten years on, and I barely ever get a bruise (touch wood!). Seen some gnarly injuries, though.
Conan O'Brien on playing Old Timey Baseball and trying to pick up women while doing it (honestly the only thing funnier than ole time baseball is old time dating) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GS39vMhag-A
As a veteran of 16-inch softball in Chicago, which also played gloveless, I can tell you that playing without a glove is very good for the business of the local hand specialist.
Thank you! I loved softball as a kid and wish there had been a team like those. Instead, I spent much of my life with horses, following paths less traveled, indeed, often bushwhacking. Horses are built for bushwhacking and love it.
I do wonder at why, when I was a kid in the '90s, backyard baseball was a thing and now baseball is highly organized and hardly any kids just play at a diamond or in a yard with make shift bases and ghost runners.
Basketball, soccer, and even modified versions of football (typically touch or 7on7) maintain that pickup culture. Im sure equipment is some of the story, and maybe some of the story is neighbors complaining about their windows, but either way old timey baseball does feel endearingly disorganized and underhand throwing with glove less fielding could help that some.
Yep, and baseball's popularity has gone up in the past three years, and has arguably overtaken basketball as the #2 sport in America again by many measures.
This is most easily explained by the death of unsupervised play. Used to be far more common to just force the kids outside. Rule was largely to be home for meals. Such that all of those games were kids with no adults.
Nowadays, that basically doesn’t exist. Kids at the park are chaperoned by adults on the fringe of the park.
And adding to the problem, if the kids do start playing, an adult will almost certainly step in quickly to moderate very quickly.
There's also a lot of professionalization of youth sports. Like, 12 year old kids on a travel soccer team so they can develop their talent against better players, maybe alongside playing on a school team. This is surely better for potential pro athletes, but it feels somehow similar to the whole piles of homework/test prep/cram school/build your resume thing that seems like it's eating the childhood of a lot of kids.
As a desi I can promise you there are 2 billion people who dont care for the opinions of English and Australians when it comes to cricket. The line Ive heard is, "cricket is an Asian game that just happened to be invented in England."
If kids and their parents want to put together a makeshift game at some empty field or yard, what's stopping them? (I mean, other than screens of course.)
Nothing, except it usually wasnt parents organizing us back when, and in basketball at least the culture is "show up and play" not anything that needs to be organized.
Yeah, the kids were standing around with nothing to do (having been told by their parents to go outside and stay out until dinner), and they played baseball or basketball or soccer or whatever.
I buy this a bit but also - i do see older kids playing basketball, soccer, and volleyball at local parks very ad hoc and (by my eye) happily unsupervised. But not baseball.
Vintage baseball makes me think of that one old movie about Babe Ruth where he invents batting upside-down and it revolutionizes the game.
Warmed-over take: bringing community together is Good, Acktually, even if it's via something kind of silly like Ye Olde Fportsball. As above, so below: although I had no real interest in continuing to pursue athletics, getting youthful exposure to a wide range of low-stakes physical pursuits was a key part of a well-rounded upbringing. Golf, tennis, table tennis, swimming (still kills me and literally kills other people that many in the SFBA don't know how to swim), Little League, Chinese boxing/The Art Of Fighting, futbol, volleyball, badminton...anything to make exercise fun is great, structured socialization across diverse socioeconomic lines is great, and it was really a privilege to be able to do these things back when it wasn't so damn competitive and expensive, even at early ages. Leave professionalization to the adults - let kids just play for the sake of playing, for God's sake, not as another extracurricular box to check on the application to a selective K-12 school.
Also, obligatory [insult] the Dodgers. NY Giants is where it's at. There's no heated rivalry like a 200-year-old rivalry.
I hadn’t watched baseball in a while but I’ve been watching some of the Reds on mlb.tv and the amount of rule changes actually was kind of shocking.
The pitch clock, the challenges, the universal dh, it was actually kind of striking to me. They’ve changed more in the past 10 years than I can remember when I was watching it regularly from 1987-2012.
I love the bounce rule so much. I would also love it if in addition to old time sports we had futuristic experimental rules. If I ever become a billionaire I'm going to start a minor league where you get four strikes instead of three but a swinging strike counts as one and a looking strike counts for two. That way there's more incentive to swing and put balls in play and less walks and strikeouts. I'd also like to see 4 out innings (probably with 7 inning games) just because the one in a million time someone turns a quadruple play it would be so cool.
I'd like to see baseball tried with cricket-style innings.
That is:
* every inning starts with the leadoff hitter.
* It matters which player is out, because they are out of the inning
* If you score, you can bat again when your spot comes up in the order; if you're out, you can't and it goes to the next available player
* Inning ends once there are six outs, because then the defense could walk the bases full and there'd be no-one left to bat.
There would be a lot more than twice as many runs per inning as three out baseball (because there would be a much lower percentage left on base), so you probably only need three innings for a game to be about the same length as nine three-out innings. Have the seventh-inning stretch at the end of the second inning.
This is me being old: I like to eat in restaurants (even fast food) but the bloody food app orders jam everything up and hey, the restaurant is basically empty of anyone else. I strongly suspect that dining rooms are gonna shrink or close altogether. Maybe I actually have to waste my time preparing meals.
It's great to let people see what baseball looked like in its early years, but it's not more "authentic" than later forms; it's just what it was.
And as for the players saying it's better because it doesn't have the fancy statistics, the fireworks, and all that stuff, well, I suspect that rec leagues don't have those things either. It's just a bunch of guys doing reenactment because it's fun and maybe visiting fans will enjoy it.
The content this week begins Monday morning with basketball, and ends Friday evening with baseball. Excellent work done, Slow Boring.
Our plans are measured in centuries.
For real tho, this is the writeup I had no idea I needed
It was elite
Like your commenting
Don't forget to plant a few trees along the way.
Best sports blog on the internet
However, fuck the Dodgers.
And the Yankees.
I personally have no strong feelings about them, but I have a neighbor whose personalized license plate is literally, "RDSXSUX" (and bumper stickers that make clear that is indeed a reference to the Boston Red Sox).
I respect the commitment to the bit.
Didn't know New Yorkers were moving to Colorado. Thought it was just Californians and Texans.
While I am in Colorado, the license plate is an Illinois plate.
Guy in Colorado, from Illinois, beefing with the Red Sox.
This guy sucks lol
Terrible work done. A tragic week at Slow Boring.
At this point they should rename the blog Slow Balling. Jocks ruin everything. The only football I want to read about is political football.
YAAASSSS!
You got a typical Politics Monday evening, the Swalwell/Gonzales resignations were the headline for Tuesday evening, and Matt did the punching left on Thursday morning that you were so eager for. You've had plenty to enjoy.
I'm a politics junkie. I'm chasing the politics dragon. THERE'S NEVER ENOUGH POLITICS! 😆
Policy not politics
It was punching left with a padded glove... but that's mostly because conservatism doesn't mean anything anymore. They're like the wooly mammoths that were contemporaries of the Mesopotamians; only barely there.
Halina is earning my attention. Always interesting stuff well written. Kudos! 👍
This take should have also applied to the basketball conversation though. Roll back the rulebook like 40 years please.
Fantastic journalism, Halina.
That's what I call a hardball interview!
I was there until no gloves. I'm not breaking my fingers for "authenticity."
I hope they at least have an on-field barber-surgeon to deal with such injuries in a timely manner. Hear the laudanum makes it all worthwhile.
So THAT’S how the opioid crisis got started…
True, they could just saw off my fingers entirely.
I played a lot of cricket when I was younger, and (aside from the wicket-keeper, ie the catcher), gloves are not allowed in cricket.
I never broke a finger, and I caught plenty of balls; there is a technique to catching a hard ball that is travelling fast.
A cricket ball is marginally smaller (a half-inch smaller in circumference) and marginally heavier (a quarter ounce) than a baseball, but made from basically the same stuff (cork covered in leather); there is very little difference, but the cricket ball is slightly harder, and they get hit just as fast.
Certainly there are some catches that are impossible without gloves, and, as a result, you just don't try them. But with good technique ("soft hands") you don't break fingers. Use the palm of your hand, not your fingers, let your hand move with the ball, don't try to snatch at it, don't reach for a fingertip catch.
“they get hit just as fast”
Do they? I’ve only been able to find reddit comments and poorly-sourced articles in whatever publications but the claim I see is that baseballs get hit ~1.3 times faster than cricket balls, while the weight difference is pretty small. Which would mean they’re delivering almost 1.7 times as much energy. (ignoring aerodynamics, which might not be safe, but I don’t know in which direction that would cut)
Unless I'm very confused, average hit speed is smaller, but maximum is about the same.
That's to do with cricket tactics, where it's much more often useful to hit a ball less hard than you can.
I've played (amateur level) and follow both, and there's not much difference. The ball's hard, and coming fast.
Above poster is totally right about technique. I play in a vintage baseball league, and the first couple of years my hands were perpetually sore all summer long. Ten years on, and I barely ever get a bruise (touch wood!). Seen some gnarly injuries, though.
Go to Chicago and play some 16-inch softball!
Let's hope they didn't retain the spitball.
One of the guys is nicknamed "Splash" . . . .
Conan O'Brien on playing Old Timey Baseball and trying to pick up women while doing it (honestly the only thing funnier than ole time baseball is old time dating) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GS39vMhag-A
I was hoping someone would reference the Conan sketch. Possibly my all time favorite from his NBC years.
That or him going to the Irish American Heritage Center in Chicago are my faves https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6kWQPM-RZDI TAYTOS!
I like some of his travel pieces more than others, but the Armenia one was fantastic.
First thing I did when I opened the article was Ctrl-F for Conan. Very good article despite this glaring omission.
Love this piece, Halina. Don't let the sports haters get to you!
This reads like vintage Sports Illustrated. So good. I didn't even realize it was SB until I got to the end. Great read.
As a veteran of 16-inch softball in Chicago, which also played gloveless, I can tell you that playing without a glove is very good for the business of the local hand specialist.
Thank you! I loved softball as a kid and wish there had been a team like those. Instead, I spent much of my life with horses, following paths less traveled, indeed, often bushwhacking. Horses are built for bushwhacking and love it.
Take a horse into a corn field and maybe you can bushwhack a diamond?
I saw that movie:)
I do wonder at why, when I was a kid in the '90s, backyard baseball was a thing and now baseball is highly organized and hardly any kids just play at a diamond or in a yard with make shift bases and ghost runners.
Basketball, soccer, and even modified versions of football (typically touch or 7on7) maintain that pickup culture. Im sure equipment is some of the story, and maybe some of the story is neighbors complaining about their windows, but either way old timey baseball does feel endearingly disorganized and underhand throwing with glove less fielding could help that some.
I suspect it’s mainly a function of declining popularity of the sport.
Youth participating in baseball in pretty steady though
Yep, and baseball's popularity has gone up in the past three years, and has arguably overtaken basketball as the #2 sport in America again by many measures.
I actually think its the other way around - the sport is less popular because it is harder to play. But it could be ive got the causation backwards
This is most easily explained by the death of unsupervised play. Used to be far more common to just force the kids outside. Rule was largely to be home for meals. Such that all of those games were kids with no adults.
Nowadays, that basically doesn’t exist. Kids at the park are chaperoned by adults on the fringe of the park.
And adding to the problem, if the kids do start playing, an adult will almost certainly step in quickly to moderate very quickly.
There's also a lot of professionalization of youth sports. Like, 12 year old kids on a travel soccer team so they can develop their talent against better players, maybe alongside playing on a school team. This is surely better for potential pro athletes, but it feels somehow similar to the whole piles of homework/test prep/cram school/build your resume thing that seems like it's eating the childhood of a lot of kids.
I do have pick-up cricket near me but they start at an ungodly early time of day. Who finishes playing games before noon?
That's insane, no cricket should *start* before 11am. Tell them this from an Englishman!
As a desi I can promise you there are 2 billion people who dont care for the opinions of English and Australians when it comes to cricket. The line Ive heard is, "cricket is an Asian game that just happened to be invented in England."
The main players in this game are likely entirely of Indian descent... either way, it's too damn early for me to take the invite I got.
Enshittification.
If kids and their parents want to put together a makeshift game at some empty field or yard, what's stopping them? (I mean, other than screens of course.)
Nothing, except it usually wasnt parents organizing us back when, and in basketball at least the culture is "show up and play" not anything that needs to be organized.
Yeah, the kids were standing around with nothing to do (having been told by their parents to go outside and stay out until dinner), and they played baseball or basketball or soccer or whatever.
I buy this a bit but also - i do see older kids playing basketball, soccer, and volleyball at local parks very ad hoc and (by my eye) happily unsupervised. But not baseball.
I loved this story, Halina!
Vintage baseball makes me think of that one old movie about Babe Ruth where he invents batting upside-down and it revolutionizes the game.
Warmed-over take: bringing community together is Good, Acktually, even if it's via something kind of silly like Ye Olde Fportsball. As above, so below: although I had no real interest in continuing to pursue athletics, getting youthful exposure to a wide range of low-stakes physical pursuits was a key part of a well-rounded upbringing. Golf, tennis, table tennis, swimming (still kills me and literally kills other people that many in the SFBA don't know how to swim), Little League, Chinese boxing/The Art Of Fighting, futbol, volleyball, badminton...anything to make exercise fun is great, structured socialization across diverse socioeconomic lines is great, and it was really a privilege to be able to do these things back when it wasn't so damn competitive and expensive, even at early ages. Leave professionalization to the adults - let kids just play for the sake of playing, for God's sake, not as another extracurricular box to check on the application to a selective K-12 school.
Also, obligatory [insult] the Dodgers. NY Giants is where it's at. There's no heated rivalry like a 200-year-old rivalry.
The Art of Fighting is fine, but the cool kids played King of Fighters '98.
We're looking for emotional content.
MBAACC or bust.
I mean, I can play Skullgirls on my cab, but given an option I'm going with Vampire Savior. If it's Neo Geo though, KoF '98 is where it's at.
I hadn’t watched baseball in a while but I’ve been watching some of the Reds on mlb.tv and the amount of rule changes actually was kind of shocking.
The pitch clock, the challenges, the universal dh, it was actually kind of striking to me. They’ve changed more in the past 10 years than I can remember when I was watching it regularly from 1987-2012.
Enjoy your temporary NL Central lead.
We take our rare joy as it comes.
Now I know why when I asked my little league coach why I had to play right field, he said "You play likes it's 1864."
I love the bounce rule so much. I would also love it if in addition to old time sports we had futuristic experimental rules. If I ever become a billionaire I'm going to start a minor league where you get four strikes instead of three but a swinging strike counts as one and a looking strike counts for two. That way there's more incentive to swing and put balls in play and less walks and strikeouts. I'd also like to see 4 out innings (probably with 7 inning games) just because the one in a million time someone turns a quadruple play it would be so cool.
I'd like to see baseball tried with cricket-style innings.
That is:
* every inning starts with the leadoff hitter.
* It matters which player is out, because they are out of the inning
* If you score, you can bat again when your spot comes up in the order; if you're out, you can't and it goes to the next available player
* Inning ends once there are six outs, because then the defense could walk the bases full and there'd be no-one left to bat.
There would be a lot more than twice as many runs per inning as three out baseball (because there would be a much lower percentage left on base), so you probably only need three innings for a game to be about the same length as nine three-out innings. Have the seventh-inning stretch at the end of the second inning.
This is me being old: I like to eat in restaurants (even fast food) but the bloody food app orders jam everything up and hey, the restaurant is basically empty of anyone else. I strongly suspect that dining rooms are gonna shrink or close altogether. Maybe I actually have to waste my time preparing meals.
It's great to let people see what baseball looked like in its early years, but it's not more "authentic" than later forms; it's just what it was.
And as for the players saying it's better because it doesn't have the fancy statistics, the fireworks, and all that stuff, well, I suspect that rec leagues don't have those things either. It's just a bunch of guys doing reenactment because it's fun and maybe visiting fans will enjoy it.
It's about style, something we don't have enough of these days.