stickball

Baseball camp was an incredible experience. I first attended a camp hosted by my friends in Merke (they acquired enough equipment to field two teams courtesy of donations from a little league in Connecticut). I don’t know if it because they respected me because of the time I got benched for trying the hidden ball trick back in ’94 in the Omaha little leagues, or because they are leaving in October - but they decided to give all the equipment to me. I was a little nervous about how it would go in my village because when talking to my kids they knew nothing about the game, other than they have seen it in a few sports movies and that gangsters use bats to beat people in other movies. But...they LOVED it. We started every morning at 10 and by the second day there were hordes of them shouting up to my apartment to come out early. I would wake up and groggily shout to them from my balcony that it was only 7 am and they had to wait for 3 more hours. I was shocked and awed at how quick they learned. I was lucky to have a bunch of friends come stay at my place and help teach so I wasn’t alone. Sidenote: we also christened my apartment and I am happy to announce that I was threatened with a call to what can be translated as an immigration police on my very first party…needless to say, success. Also I checked with the rest of the neighbors later and they are all on my side, but from now on “stump” will be an outside game. Anyway we started with about 20 kids on the first day doing basic throwing and hitting drills, by the end of the second day we were playing a game, and on the last day there were over 50 players and one kid turned a double play that would have made Chuck Knoblach, smile and warranted a cheesy Fox sports graphic narrated by Rod Allen.