The Pecan Park Eagle

Writer's rendition of the "Over The House Drill." No real graphic artists were used in the low tech production of this visual aide nor were they harmed in the presentation of this simplified depiction of the even simpler Pecan Park game.

Some days around here are simpler than others. In fact, most days are pretty simple and quiet around here and that’s the way we like it. These days are a little louder than usual because we are now in the middle of having our house Hardee-planked to make up for the fact that the builder of our home some thirty years ago chose a siding material for the homes in out neighborhood that turned out to be over time little more than cheap cardboard-in-disguise. Regardless of how today’s drawing may appear, I have no respect for people who do shoddy work at the expense of others, but we sadly don’t seem to be running out of these sorry folk, do we?

The short of it is that a lot of inside work is happening here today too and that doesn’t make for good writing space. So, I need to tell you about something that will not require additional research or composition time. I wanted to include this material, anyway, when I wrote the article on our Pecan Park sandlot baseball drills and this is a good time to do it.

The “Over-The-House” drill is my personal invention by the following rules. Anyone else could have thought of it just as easily and probably did, but these were the rules we used to govern its play on our block:

(1) Pick a house in which both parents are gone. i.e., Dad is working; Mom is shopping. The reason for this one is simple. Parents always said “no” to the “Over the House” drill because they feared what a baseball might do to the windows, roof, and walls of their houses.

(2) Play was limited to singles or doubles games, very similar to tennis. I always preferred singles play.

(3) The object of the game was to throw the ball over the house without touching the roof and get it to land in the opposite front or back yard where your opponent stood. A ball that hit the ground of your opponent’s field without being first caught counted as a run and entitled the thrower to “go again” until a ball was finally caught on the fly for an out.

(4) Balls that first touched the roof or landed out-of-bounds (off the house property) were also counted as outs, turning the ball over to the other player for a turn at throwing.

(5) The game lasted for a total of 27 outs, no matter who made them.

(6) Whoever had the most runs at game’s end was the winner.

That was it. And it was lots of fun. When you were waiting, you never knew for sure where the ball was going to land until you saw it crest over the top of the roof. Some balls came on a high bloop and others traveled more as line drive darters. (Since all our houses were one-story jobs, you didn’t have to throw the ball too high to make it over.)

If memory serves, we never broke any windows and we rarely hit the roofs of any houses we used for the game, although we did manage to thump some nearby cars that had been parked on the street and in adjacent driveways. We could sort of see why our parents didn’t much care for “Over the House.”

Depending on how much we trusted each other, we either got by on the honor system or we used two other kids to make the calls on house hits, fair falls, and out catches. You could get by with one umpire, but that required a lot of back and forth running – and sometimes, some repetitive fence-jumping. Almost nobody who could do the job really wanted to take it on, especially since hard feelings toward umpires who determine the outcome of any competitive situation so rarely go away over night. Even as kids, we understood that becoming an umpire, even for “Over the House,” was the pathway to unpopularity.

Gotta go for now. If you can’t get your dreams over the rainbow today, folks, now you have another choice. You and a friend can go play a fun game of “Over the House.”

Just don’t tell your parents.

Pinball Wizard Tommy had nothing on me when it came to baseball!

Heading toward Christmas in this high tech era of highly sophisticated and extremely realistic sports game toys, I am blown away by their contrast to  the things we used to purchase and improvise as games and means to the same competitive ends back in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Our games required our use, either or both, of those fine old qualities known as imagination and/or skill – and I mean skill that went beyond our dexterity with finger manipulations of a control device attached to a TV, computer, or game box screen.

As most of you older kindred spirits already know, we didn’t have that kind of game set-up help back in the day. We had to imagine what we were doing and we had to visualize all the pictures that now appear graphically on the digital game screen. Our screens were, for the most part, simply rolling through our brains as we escaped into our own little game trips away frm the mundane of everyday reality.

The baseball pinball game shown here is an exact replica of my chldhood buddy from way, way back. My brother found it in a flea market and gave it to me as a Christmas present a few years back. I’m not sure what happened to my original game, but it most likely suffered the same fate as all my other childho0d things. Whenever we stopped using anything back then for very long, our dad quietly just threw these things away without uttering a word to anyone. As a result, I have few things, other than books, that remain from childhood. Dad didn’t dare throw out my books. He knew I always came back to them.

I got pretty skilled at the pinball game. I can still play it pretty well too, but nothing like I did at age 10 to 12. Back then I could almost will that little metal ball into the home run pocket when when I needed it to go there.

Another low tech game held my interest for a short while, but its lack of improvisational opportunity soon put it on the boring shelf. It was called “Foto Electric Football”, a game which allowed you to insert offense and defense pages into an upward shining light box that illuminated how certain plays turned out against certain defenses.

The big game back then was that vibrating football contest by Tudor that came out in 1947. Little metal players lined up and vibrated down a metal field until contact with an enemy player tackled them at the new yard line of progress. It was fun for a while. You could bend the little vibrator reeds under your running backs to make them turn at the line of scrimmage, but that was about it. Sometimes your runner would get turned around and run toward your own goal line for a safety. That sucked. Plus, it was too much of a hassle to keep setting up twenty-two players at the line of scrimmage after each completed play. That being said, it made my Christmas one year as a gift I knew was coming. My anticipation of that game was far greater than the playing of it could ever hope to be. Sort of like marriage.

Finally, a game came along that remains with me to this day in computer form. In 1951, the APBA Game Company opened shop in Lancaster, PA with a card and dice baseball game based upon actual major league teams and players. It was totally structured upon realistuc probabilities in a complex array of actual game situations. You had to bring your own theatre of the mind to get a good picture, but that was never a problem for a lot of us back in the day. We lived in our dreams. Besides, with APBA, the heart of the game was  then, and is now, its dynamic similarity by play outcome to what actually happens in a real baseball game. Because of APBA, I never got lost in the Stratomatic Baseball Game of similar, but less complex probability roots.

APBA was just a high tech game waiting to happen. I’ve been playing its computer version of baseball since the mid-1980s. It’s simply a place I go whenever I need to take a vacation from this little, no-fun, no sense of humor world we’ve created all around us. It’s not my only mental retreat, but it is one of my most enjoyable destinations.

Merry Christmas Dreams, everybody!