Ah, scuff baseball. You’re asking about that, huh? It wasn’t exactly a highlight of my sporting career, if you can even call it that. More like a series of questionable decisions leading to minor injuries and a lot of shouting.
I got dragged into it one summer. You know, one of those summers where it’s too hot to think straight, and my buddy Dave, he’s always full of these… ideas. He just showed up one day, “Let’s play some baseball!” Sounds normal, right? Wrong. Very, very wrong. What followed was what we affectionately, or maybe sarcastically, termed “scuff baseball.”
The “Setup” – And I Use That Term Loosely
First, the “field.” There wasn’t one, not a real one anyway. We ended up at this patch of lumpy grass behind the old Kwik-E-Mart, the one that closed down after the rat incident. You know the one. It was all uneven ground, a random sprinkler head that someone always tripped over, and what we generously called “home plate” was just a faded pizza box lid. Classy.
Then the equipment. Oh man, the equipment. Calling it “second-hand” would be an insult to decent second-hand gear. Let me list out the horrors for you, it was a real collection:
- A bat that was mostly splinters and hope. I think it was aluminum, but so dented it looked like a crumpled can.
- Baseballs? Nope. We used a mix of ancient, rock-hard softballs and a couple of those plastic wiffle balls that flew crooked no matter how you hit ’em.
- Gloves were a luxury. Most of us just raw-dogged it, trying to catch line drives with our bare hands. My palms were bruised for a week straight.
- Bases were just whatever junk we could find: a discarded traffic cone for first, someone’s forgotten backpack for second, and third base was dangerously close to a grumpy dog’s fence line. Made for some fast runners, I tell ya.
And the rules! Don’t even get me started. It was less “rules” and more “strongly suggested guidelines that changed every five minutes.” We had arguments about everything. Is it an out if the ball bounces off old Mr. Grumbles’ shed? What if it lands in the mystery puddle? We just made it up as we went along, usually in favor of whoever yelled the loudest. Pure chaos.
That One “Legendary” Inning
I remember this one game, if you can call it that. Sun glaring down, everyone already tired and grumpy. Someone actually managed to hit one of the wiffle balls pretty good. It’s sailing, right? Looks like a home run, or whatever our equivalent was. Then this gust of wind, a freak gust, just snatches it. Carries it straight up, then sideways, and it lands right in the back of a passing garbage truck. We just stood there. Stunned. Was it a home run? An out? Did the garbage truck count as a fielder? We argued for about twenty minutes, achieved nothing, and then someone’s mom called them for dinner, so we all just gave up and went home.
Honestly, it was a mess. Every single time. We weren’t playing to win, because winning was impossible to define. We were just… out there. Sweating, occasionally connecting with a ball, mostly just dodging bad throws and uneven ground. It was frustrating, it was stupid, and half the time I wondered why I even bothered showing up.
So yeah, that was my practical experience with scuff baseball. It was a testament to how you can make anything more complicated and less fun if you really try. Or maybe it was a lesson in… something. I haven’t figured out what yet. But it happened. I was there. My bruised hands were the proof.
