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Welcome to Stuff I Learned Yesterday! My name is Emilee O’Leary, this week I reached the big 3-0 milestone, and I believe if you aren’t learning, you aren’t living. In today’s episode of Stuff I Learned Yesterday I am sharing a story about how my dad adapted the game of baseball so that we could play one-on-one in the backyard and taught me something, in the process, about how adaptation can make things more accessible.
Friday Forum
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Fun Fact
Today’s fun fact is about the cross-section of a baseball. Just like most things in life, a baseball is much more than meets the eye. It has many layers. During the early 1900s it went through a great deal of modifications in order to arrive at what is now standard.
The outer layer of a baseball was horsehide until 1974 when the switch was made to cowhide. Beneath the cowhide are four types of winding fabric. There is a fine poly-cotton finishing yarn, then a three-ply gray yarn, a three-ply white yarn and then a four-ply gray yarn. The red cotton stitching on the baseball’s cover keeps the cowhide firmly attached to the top layer of finishing yarn.
The most intriguing part of the baseball to me is what is called the pill. The center of the baseball. The pill of the baseball essentially hasn’t changed since 1925 when the cushioned cork center was wrapped first in a layer of black rubber and then in a layer of red rubber. These three layers comprise the center-most point of the baseball.
The cork-only pill was first introduced in 1920. Prior to that, only baseballs with a rubber core were used. The only exception to this was during World War II when the U.S. banned using rubber for anything not related to war efforts. During that time, baseballs used a rubberlike substance called balata.
Adapt & Play
I love sports. I love playing sports. I love watching sports. I love talking about sports. And I owe so much of that to my dad. Because of his athletic nature and general intrigue of sports, I grew up wanting to play, watch and talk about baseball, soccer, and football, in particular. But more than just giving me a love for playing, watching and talking about sports, my dad instilled in me some invaluable life lessons.
One lesson is the broad concept of learning how to love playing over learning to love winning. My dad grew up in the Bay Area of California. He grew up cheering for the San Francisco Giants and 49ers in the 70s. This was the era in which the Giants were alright, but never won anything of note. They traded away a lot of players who would end up excelling on other teams. And the 49ers were even more disappointing, putting up consecutively bad seasons until acquiring Joe Montana in the early 80s. It was the year after my dad moved to Minnesota that things started to turn around for the 49ers, winning a Super Bowl within a couple years of his move. And then he came to Minnesota and had to start rooting for the Vikings, so as you can see, he was a glutton for punishment. But the point here being, my dad emphasized the importance of having fun and playing for the sake of the game instead of playing to win, or watching a game in which you were invested in and hoping for a good game instead of hoping for your team to win.
Another lesson is about the importance of inclusion. Sometimes in order to have fun and play for the sake of playing, some adaptation may be necessary. As a person who is naturally inclined to obedience, following rules and general legalism, I can honestly say that my dad was the most kind and humble example of how to throw tradition out the window in favor of having fun. Because having fun draws in more people than simply playing a game.
My dad was the king of adaptation. He liked making things easier to use and more accessible. Everywhere you look around our house, in the garage, and at the cabin is filled with systems he put in place to make storing tools neater or to make it easier to get at the things used on a daily basis.
A lot of sports require more people to participate than are often available to play. Baseball, for example, uses 9 players on each team, which means 18 people in total. Finding 18 people to play a game of baseball, the way you might organize a game night for friends, is not the easiest thing in the world.
I don’t know whether my dad invented the game of bucket ball, or if he got it from somewhere else, but Bucket Ball was his adaptation of baseball in order to make the basic premise of the game accessible to however many people were available to play. This Bucket Ball is NOT the children’s form of beer pong. I just Googled bucket ball and apparently there is a version out there that looks like a life-sized version of beer pong played with tennis balls and large 5-gallon buckets. And this is not that. This is an off-shoot of baseball.
So this is basically how the game works. You need at least two people, one for each team. There is a bucket of balls at the pitcher’s mound and something to mark each of the four bases, spread out as large or narrow as needs to be for the size of the people playing the game. The pitcher throws a ball to the batter, the batter gets some tries to hit the ball, and when the batter does hit the ball, they run to first base. The pitcher’s objective is to retrieve the ball and hit the bucket before the runner reaches first base. If they don’t hit the bucket before the runner makes it to first, hitting the bucket prevents the runner from advancing to the next base. Since there may or may not be enough players to have baseman or outfielders, especially in the one-on-one scenario, the bucket becomes the substitute for whomever the team in the outfield lacks.
Say the runner makes it to first before the pitcher hits the bucket. If the only people playing are the runner and the pitcher, the runner then declares that there is a “ghost on first!” And the ghost runner takes over the work of advancing the bases. The ghost runner obeys all the rules and runs the bases very conservatively. They can’t steal bases or slide into home plate, but they do advance as many bases as the runner. So there’s a ghost runner on first, the batter returns to home plate and prepares to hit again. They smack the ball and make it to second before the pitcher hits the bucket. This means that the ghost runner is on third, because the ghost advanced as many bases as the runner.
This was immeasurably fun for a variety of reasons, but the biggest reason was that the game worked. It wasn’t a weird, kind-of-fun game. My dad made it fun. The game adapts to the skill levels of whomever is playing and, as such, provides an opportunity for kids who are too small for a full-sized baseball field to learn the basic concepts of baseball more to scale.
My dad would set up a baseball field in the backyard, using trees or bright orange cones as bases. Sometimes it would just be he and I playing, sometimes my sister Mikki would join. Sometimes it would start out just the two of us, but over the course of an hour the entire neighborhood would join in and we’ve have a full-on game of baseball going.
Here’s what I learned.
Among the many characteristics that I loved about my dad, his desire to simplify everything around him was one of his most interesting qualities. He didn’t make things complicated and was able to teach me a lot without really ever being overt about it. My dad led by example, demonstrated inclusion instead of preaching it and honing skill instead of teaching brute force, and as a result, I grew up having a desire for camaraderie and team building in all aspects of life.
This lesson he taught me about playing to have fun and adapting a game in order to include whoever was available wasn’t just through bucket ball, but in every sport he was part of. I mean, kids in the neighborhood would come to the door and ask if he could come out and play. The girls on the teams he coached wanted to play because he made it fun to win and lose… since playing wasn’t about winning or losing.
More than just learning how to have fun, in spite of winning or losing, the process of adaptation taught me a great lesson about inclusion. Adapting the game gave my dad and I more opportunities to play together, to have fun when there was nothing on the line, and to instill in me the desire to seek out that same sentiment for sports and activities in the future.
He made sports fun, and his easy, fun charisma drew others in and gave him such a natural platform when he coached my basketball, softball and soccer teams. I look back on high school sports with such immense pride because I only remember the fun times, the girls on my teams, and crazy practices he’d hold. I don’t remember the wins or the losses. I don’t remember dreading practices. I remember teams that started off a little awkward, with a few girls I knew and a lot of girls I didn’t, but as the season went on, my dad would just draw these girls out of their shells and by the end of the season we were all friends and working like a well-oiled machine. My dad coached in an inclusive way, making every person feel valuable and making it about having fun and developing the skills of those who wanted to be part of something bigger.
My name is Emilee O’Leary and this has been Stuff I Learned Yesterday.
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