My friends and I were like a lot of other kids growing up. During the summer, we played baseball.
Every week, we'd all get together at the little field at the park down the street from my house and play ball. Our crew usually wasn't big enough to field an official nine-on-nine game, but that didn't matter to us. We'd pick sides, install a permanent pitcher or DH, play double-or-nothing if we had to, and end up having a blast playing six-on-six baseball.
There were no catchers or catcher's gear. No batting helmets. We shared our gloves, used only two aluminum bats (one had a crack in it), and had maybe seven baseballs that we reused every game. If a ball rolled into a bush, you had to find it, or else risk ending the game early.
It was always a modest setting, but we loved it like the seventh game of the World Series.
Baseball always meant more to us during those summers than other sports like football or basketball, because of the effort it took to get a game together. It took more players, more equipment, more planning, and therefore we cared more about winning the game. To us, those our days on the baseball field were more than games, they were events, spectacles, and gatherings of friends.
And that's the way it's supposed to be. When you're a kid, you play baseball.
But as you grow older, it becomes harder to get the old gang back together for a game. School, work, growing apart, all of these things get in the way. Friends move out of town, responsibilities come up, and suddenly, before you realize it, high school is over and you hadn't had a baseball game in years. And by then, it's too late.
Something that meant so much during those summers of our youth is relegated to nostalgia, just a memory.
Because when you grow up, it seems like you're not allowed to play baseball anymore. In its place is softball, and it's not the same.
The same elements are there: you hit, run, field, and pitch (to a certain degree). It's played on a field very similar to a baseball diamond, and much of the same equipment is used. But again, it's not the same.
As kids, we played baseball spontaneously and to have fun. Games were competitive but only because that's how they should be played, and it never got out of hand. Softball for adults, however, is rigid, scheduled, and lacks the heart that came from a session of six-on-six, double-or-nothing.
Softball isn't played with your closest group of friends just trying to get a game together, it's played with coworkers, extended family, or members of an organization. And unlike your friends, who wanted to win while keeping it in perspective, softball is populated by people who don't care at all or care way too much. In a softball game you could be teamed with the lady in accounting who doesn't know how to swing a bat or throw a ball, and you wonder if she's even heard of the game. Or you'll be teamed with the over-competitive jackass ("Softball Guy" as Jim Rome calls him) who will yell at that same lady for not knowing how to play, while arguing calls and throwing his bat after each pop-out.
Gone is the spontaneous sense of "quick, call all your friends for baseball and get to the field" from pickup baseball. It's replaced with something like "ladies and gentlemen, this saturday we'll meet in the office parking lot and go to the field ... or else" in softball.
We weren't softball players when we were kids; that game wasn't the same. The ball was too big and bulky, and you couldn't throw it or hit it as far. There were never those crazy hoppers to short that would leave you with a shiner if not properly fielded.
In our games of baseball, we used the same equipment as our childhood heroes, and emulated them on those hot days of summer. We felt like ball players, because we were playing the same sport, and playing it right.
But you don't play that as an adult; you're expected to play softball. Unless you're getting paid to play it professionally, baseball is considered a kid's game.
And at first, all of this is hard to take for someone who was raised playing baseball. But then slowly, you start to make rationalizations about softball. No, it's not the exact same as baseball, but it's rules do make it easier for people to play, especially as they climb up in the years. It evens the playing field. It limits injuries that could've occurred with a hard baseball rocketing off an aluminum bat. Sure, certain people may ruin the game, but if that's the case, just play with a different group of people.
And as these reasons pile up, you eventually settle into the fact that softball will the the closest thing to a baseball game you will ever play again.
It doesn't seem normal; to go from being a kid playing the real game of baseball to being an adult playing the easier version of it. While other sports like pickup basketball or football can be put together easily by kids and adults alike, pickup baseball just doesn't seem to work anymore after you reach a certain age. But that's where baseball/softball is different: no other sport makes you face your own maturation as obviously. The transition makes you realize that you can't play the same game the same way you did as a kid.
It's a sobering moment when you make that realization. But it comes to everyone. Most people move on easily, leaving the kid stuff in the past and accepting the fact that things will always be different. At that point, you go play softball and enjoy it, while looking back on playing baseball as a short-lived, memorable experience, one that made your childhood fun.
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