Pick-up Games Research Articles

Damaged Heritage: The Elaine Race Massacre and a Story of Reconciliation by J. Chester Johnson

Reviewed by: Damaged Heritage: The Elaine Race Massacre and a Story of Reconciliation by J. Chester Johnson Robert Whitaker (bio) damaged heritage: the elaine race massacre and a story of reconciliation J. Chester Johnson Pegasus Books http://pegasusbooks.com/books/damaged-heritage-9781643134666-hardcover 400 pages; Cloth, $27.95 As the 1619 Project reminds us, our nation's damaged heritage stretches back more than four centuries, to the moment that the first Africans were brought to the New World to labor under the yoke of slavery, and here we are today, still in need of protests that proclaim, "Black Lives Matter," and still hearing of resistance to teaching this history in our schools. Readers of J. Chester Johnson's aptly titled book, Damaged Heritage: The Elaine Race Riot and a Story of Reconciliation, will recognize that although his story is autobiographical, he serves as an Everyman, telling of a need for us all to confront this past, which so infects our present. His deep friendship with Sheila Walker serves a model for moving forward with a shared understanding of history. This is a book about escaping from the talons of our damaged heritage, so infused with racism, violence, and a societal narrative that turns a blind eye to such facts. Johnson has a particular heritage that haunts him. After his father died when he was not yet two, he spent his preschool years in Little Rock with his grandparents. His grandfather Lonnie doted on him, and some of his earliest memories are of sitting in Lonnie's lap. Yet, years later, he would come to understand that Lonnie had been a member of the Ku Klux Klan, donning the white sheet on many nights, and that he had been a member of the mob that killed Black sharecroppers in Phillips County, Arkansas, in 1919. In an imaginary letter to Lonnie, Johnson writes: [End Page 85] While I have unreservedly written here and accepted that you are part of me, you cannot be in fact and in sum, for consciously and unabashedly, I abhor that part of you who pursued a massacre of blacks, you who could mortify, terrorize, burn, or lynch, and then claim the rightness of it all with an allegiance to the proposition of superiority for a white coterie. Although it is always difficult to know why one person retains the values of the culture they grew up in while another breaks from those values, there was an early experience in Johnson's life that prepared him for the latter course. In 1949, when his mother moved their family to Monticello, his backyard was adjacent to a field that, on the opposite side, was home to Black families. There, in this no-man's land, they played pick-up games of baseball with young Chester, the only white child, and yet everyone also knew the rules: his Black friends would never be invited into his home, and the opposite was true too. Those friendships proved fleeting once Chester developed new friends at the all-white elementary school, and that remained true for the rest of his youth. However, upheaval to Arkansas's Jim Crow world came in 1957, when nine Black students integrated the Little Rock High School, with white mobs hurling insults and threats as they entered the school under the protection of federal troops. Johnson's early friendship with Black children prompted him to begin to separate himself—at least in his mind—from those who would countenance such hate. Chester went off to Harvard, but after the Summer of 1964, when Freedom Riders went to Mississippi to register Black voters, he dropped out and returned to Arkansas. He traveled widely, occasionally sleeping in his car, intent on better understanding the South and its residents. At the end of that journey, he often spoke with an older Black man who lived in the woods outside Monticello, the two of them drinking whiskey together. After earning a degree from the University of Arkansas, he spent the turbulent year of 1969 teaching at a Black school in Monticello and running for mayor. He knocked on every door in town during that effort, which, when accompanied by a Black...

A Call for Pick-Up Games in Educational Institutions

Informal participation in sport is a universal practice across time, space, and culture. One such manifestation is “pick-up games.” A pick-up game is an informal version of a team sport played by an arbitrary or selected group of people who play because they want to, not because they have to. The purpose of this article is to highlight why pick-up games ought to be included in such institutions and to offer suggestions for how to do so.

What Makes a Champion? Early Multidisciplinary Practice, Not Early Specialization, Predicts World-Class Performance

What explains the acquisition of exceptional human performance? Does a focus on intensive specialized practice facilitate excellence, or is a multidisciplinary practice background better? We investigated this question in sports. Our meta-analysis involved 51 international study reports with 477 effect sizes from 6,096 athletes, including 772 of the world’s top performers. Predictor variables included starting age, age of reaching defined performance milestones, and amounts of coach-led practice and youth-led play (e.g., pickup games) in the athlete’s respective main sport and in other sports. Analyses revealed that (a) adult world-class athletes engaged in more childhood/adolescent multisport practice, started their main sport later, accumulated less main-sport practice, and initially progressed more slowly than did national-class athletes; (b) higher performing youth athletes started playing their main sport earlier, engaged in more main-sport practice but less other-sports practice, and had faster initial progress than did lower performing youth athletes; and (c) youth-led play in any sport had negligible effects on both youth and adult performance. We illustrate parallels from science: Nobel laureates had multidisciplinary study/working experience and slower early progress than did national-level award winners. The findings suggest that variable, multidisciplinary practice experiences are associated with gradual initial discipline-specific progress but greater sustainability of long-term development of excellence.

Medical Cultures, Therapeutic Properties, and Laws in Global History

Medical Cultures, Therapeutic Properties, and Laws in Global History

Rivals by Tommy Greenwald

Reviewed by: Rivals by Tommy Greenwald Elizabeth Bush Greenwald, Tommy Rivals. Amulet/Abrams, 2021 [320p] Trade ed. ISBN 9781419748271 $17.99 E-book ed. ISBN 9781647000387 $15.54 Reviewed from digital galleys R Gr. 5-8 Greenwald returns to the fictional Walthorne public school system, lately roiled by high school sports controversy in Game Changer (BCCB 9/18). This time middle school tension erupts as the Panthers of Walthorne South (the racially diverse, economically struggling school) face off in a basketball rivalry against the Cougars of Walthorne North (the advantaged, mostly white school). Garden-variety taunting begins when an online Panthers pep rally is visited (well, video bombed) by Cougars players and fans and even a stray provocateur from the private Walthorne Academy. The face-off escalates when a student sports blogger and reporter for South speculates without evidence about an injury suffered by a North player. Soon two rival team stars, both of whom privately long for the good old days a few years back when they played pick-up games at the park, recognize the possibility of forming a friendship but become embroiled instead in a melee when verbal nastiness turns violent at girls' basketball game. Greenwald ramps up the drama by opening with a narrative voice tracking a free fall that ends in a crash and a blackout, and then letting readers speculate on which possible character and scenario is destined to end up with that dive. That pretty much assures no reader will leave before the final buzzer. Copyright © 2021 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

What's Important: Empathy in Patient Care: Lessons from My Own Knee Story.

What's Important: Empathy in Patient Care: Lessons from My Own Knee Story.

Attucks!: Oscar Robertson and the Basketball Team That Awakened a City by Phillip Hoose

Reviewed by: Attucks!: Oscar Robertson and the Basketball Team That Awakened a City by Phillip Hoose Elizabeth Bush Hoose, Phillip Attucks!: Oscar Robertson and the Basketball Team That Awakened a City. Farrar, 2018 [224p] illus. with photographs ISBN 978-0-374-30612-0 $19.99 Reviewed from galleys R* Gr. 6-10 It's the 1955 and '56 seasons that basketball diehards remember, when the Tigers of Crispus Attucks High School in Indianapolis, led by scoring phenom Oscar Robertson, gave their city's roundball-crazed fans exactly what they always wanted—a state championship—and exactly what many of them feared—an all-Black team of champions. To understand the dilemma, Hoose delves into the history of the all-Black Attucks High School which, ironically, was established under Ku Klux Klan influence in the 1920s to assure segregated public education in Indianapolis. Staffed by highly educated Black teachers—many scholars who couldn't find work elsewhere—the school had high academic expectations and standards. Drawing players from neighborhoods where there was little entertainment for Black youth apart from pick-up games, the Tigers could recruit kids who played hard and played obsessively. Factor in Coach Ray Crowe, who favored an innovative, aggressive play-book, and the Robertson family of talented brothers, and it was close to inevitable that the school, initially created by white bigotry, would produce a powerhouse of Black talent. The evolving fast-break style of play, the local rivalries, and the sheer prowess of individual players guarantee a compelling read, but the story of how a mini dynasty of high school players turned the tables on segregationists extends interest beyond sports fans. Plentiful photographs and newspaper articles, as well as an index, source notes, and addenda on the Attucks team, are included. When kids think they've reached the end of their civil rights era education, hand them this. EB Copyright © 2018 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Futebol: The Beautiful Game?

A principal objective of economic thinking is to inform key decisions made by firms and their managers. One of the most important topics for managers concerns the basic choices about labor: How many people should I hire, and what should I pay them? Using the context of football (soccer) in Brazil, this case can be used to explore players' current and future worth to a team. Analysis could include marginal product of labor, marginal revenue product, team profitability, and how managers might fund player acquisitions while still generating consistent profits. Excerpt UVA-GEM-0138 Rev. Apr. 17, 2019 Futebol: The Beautiful Game? It happened in the streets and on rooftops. It happened during recess or a lunch break. Football (soccer) was not relegated to parks in Brazil. It was a high religion worshipped by young and old. It was a contest simple enough that only a ball was required to put together a game. At the highest level, it was a multi-billion-dollar industry—the most popular sport in the world. In Brazil, there were seemingly never-ending levels to the sport, whether it was a pick-up game between children, a match on the biggest stage—the World Cup—or somewhere in between. If at all possible, football's popularity in Brazil was only increasing. But there was more to the sport than the fans—it was a business. Managing a football club required the ability to generate revenues and invest in athletes. With the salaries of top football players increasing at an exponential rate, how would managers fund player acquisitions and still generate consistent profits? The Federation Internationale de Football Association . . .

World attending in interaction: Multitasking, spatializing, narrativizing with mobile devices and Tinder

Studies of new mobilities have emphasized changes in spatialization processes affecting conditions for conversational interaction. Conversations from four Ethiopian-Israeli male teens walking in a northern, peripheral Israeli city to and from pickup games (soccer/football, basketball) at public parks are analyzed. The data selected below all involve talk whilst using a social networking application called Tinder. Analyses follow a narrative practices approach (De Fina and Georgakopoulou, 2008, 2011), particularly that of small stories (Georgakopoulou, 2007). These teens are found to be world attending (a subtype of breaking-news stories) in voicing their noticings of the perceptible surroundings amidst pursuit of individual local interactional projects, i.e. a one-upmanship often exploitive of narrative practices of projections, i.e., unrealized possibilities, the irrealis. The introduction of mobile devices into conversational interactional space provides an added/resource of potential items (referents) to be attended to and thus creates a continued state of incipient multitasking across offline and online spaces.

Becoming iron men: the story of the 1963 Loyola Ramblers

Loyola University Chicago was ahead of its time when racial matters were forefront in a long overdue revolution in civil rights. The Ramblers of the 1962-1963 NCAA college basketball season were pioneers in race relations in sport, though most of the time they were simply playing the sport they loved. When the NCAA tournament began in March, the Ramblers engaged in a series for the ages, daring to be the first NCAA Division I school to play five black athletes on the court at once and capturing the most prestigious title in college basketball at a time when states below the Mason-Dixon line still had laws on the books preventing black and white athletes from mixing even in pick-up games. Records were set, rivals faced and one of the most famous and significant contests in college basketball playoff history played out in what incidentally became a model showcase for race relations. Nearly every time the Ramblers took the court, the game was unique in its magnitude. Relying significantly on exclusive interviews with surviving players, now in their seventies, Lew Freedman chronicles the entire journey, the adventure of the season that bound tight for a lifetime the group of men who lived through it.

Fault Lines: Views across Haiti’s Divide by Beverly Bell (review)

Reviewed by: Fault Lines: Views across Haiti’s Divide by Beverly Bell Mark Schuller Fault Lines: Views across Haiti’s Divide. By Beverly Bell, with foreword by Edwidge Danticat. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013. ISBN 978-0-8014-7769-0. 256pp. $18.95 paperback. Haiti’s 2010 earthquake has inspired at least two dozen books in English so far. Charles Forsdick has published an excellent review of this now crowded field.1 Four years after the earthquake, particularly after another season of mega-disasters that included Haiyan/Yolanda in the Philippines, Haiti fatigue has set in. It is no longer enough to publish on Haiti, or even the earthquake. Scholarship has to contribute more broadly relevant ideas, and ideally should contribute to the construction of new narratives, as Gina Athena Ulysse implores us to do.2 When the rubble clears, Beverly Bell’s Fault Lines will remain an essential text, a useful archive of the many “ordinary” and quite extraordinary Haitian people and their youn-ede-lòt (helping one another), their activism, and their visions for a better Haiti. As Edwidge Danticat concludes in her foreword: There is rarely a representative of grassroots urban or rural sectors in the international commissions and panels that will decide the future of the country. In this book, thankfully they too are heard, not as victims or beggars, but as self-reliant and proud men and women who are the backbone of Haiti, and without whose full inclusion and participation the country will never fully succeed. (xiii) Bell’s conversations with hundreds of such grassroots activists in the earthquake’s immediate aftermath constitute the strength and major contribution of Fault Lines. Bell, a solidarity activist whose work in Haiti began in the 1980s, had a unique ability—and responsibility—to write this book. The stories were first published on scores of blogs, including the Other Worlds website, and were reposted on sites like Huffington Post. Some [End Page 208] of the most widely circulated missives include a discussion of gender-based violence, “Our Bodies Are Shaking Now” (Chapter 11), and a roadmap of grassroots alternatives, “The Ones Who Must Decide” (Chapter 10). The text comes alive with the immediacy of the moment, with the sound of birds chirping, people cracking jokes, or a pick-up game of soccer as background to the urgency in people’s stories and the poignancy of their analyses. The pieces are short, which also makes them easily accessible to students and lay readers. A risk of compiling such in-the-moment prose texts is that they might not work well together, since the pieces were taken from their diverse initial contexts for assembly as a book. But Fault Lines is carefully edited and crafted, offering several meticulously researched chapters on Haitian history. It includes, like Bell’s earlier book Walking on Fire, the resistance of the maroon communities (Chapter 4) and a chapter on the women’s movement (Chapter 5). Bell uses this discussion of history to offer readers the interpretive frames necessary for her discussion of the earthquake and its aftermath. Chapter 9 is a solid analysis of the ways in which foreign aid deepened Haiti’s dependency and increased Haiti’s vulnerability to disaster. After this historical and theoretical background, Fault Lines adopts a largely chronological narrative arc, chronicling the various struggles for justice on the part of grassroots movements. The book’s narrative ends a year after the quake, so readers only glimpse the process of holding elections in the time of cholera. In Fault Lines, Haitian grassroots activists offer their analysis of both the structural and circumstantial dimensions of Haiti’s situation. They are speaking to Bell, but their messages are directed towards a world audience. Their proposals for justice, inclusion, fairness, equality, and participation are lucid and simple to grasp. Bell uses her own voice to make suggestions about engaging in solidarity, such as “Support what Haitians are doing instead of starting your own initiative” and “At every step, promote mechanisms and opportunities for Haitians themselves—especially those whose voices go unheard and needs go unmet—to take the lead” (109–11). These deceptively simple principles of solidarity are unfortunately rare in...

Sports Specialization vs Diversification

Sports Specialization vs Diversification

The Lance Armstrong Saga

For cycling enthusiasts and LIVESTRONG supporters, October 2012 will forever be imprinted in our memories as the month of damning revelations and the demise of a hero. Literally millions of people worldwide believed in Lance Armstrong. For more than a decade, he inspired us with his phenomenal comeback and unrivaled good works in the fight against cancer. Sadly, he duped us. On January 17, after three more months of denial and increased seclusion, Armstrong came clean with Oprah Winfrey as a vast audience watched. The Armstrong question now has been answered. For the sake of his children, he finally admitted to using performance-enhancing drugs and is now seeking amends. Like no other story about drugs in sport, this one should rally us to action. It is no longer about Armstrong; it is about the charade of drugfree sport with all its nuances and complexities. We can only imagine the immense pressures in professional and world class sport. We understand why top athletes have networks of coaches and advisors to support training and maximize competitive effort. Their livelihood and prominence depend on it. Fans, the media, and corporate sponsors want to see splendid athletes competing at the highest level, so every potential aid is explored. Science and technology have spawned performanceenhancing advances, each with its own controversy. For example, cyclists benefit from improved bicycle materials and design, swimmers from bodysuits, and endurance athletes from altitude tents. All manner of dietary strategies and mental training techniques are used to gain an advantage. We see how doping could be viewed as just another tool. The World Anti-Doping Agency updates its extensive list of prohibited substances and methods annually. Notable on the list are anabolic steroids, erythropoietin, growth hormone, stimulants, narcotics, and blood doping. Banned drugs either impart an unfair advantage or are used to mask those that do. Many also pose significant health risks. National and international sports federations follow this antidoping code or a slight variation of it. Recent reports confirm doping is widespread in professional cycling, and most ‘‘dirty’’ cyclists are never caught. Doping is entrenched in other sports too; baseball, football, track and field, and weight lifting are obvious ones. Insiders are savvy and know how to beat the system. They live with the deception, while the public believe doping is limited and controlled by drug testing. Athletics like politics has its cover-ups, detections, and apologies. Following the United States Anti-Doping Agency report in October, many hoped Armstrong would see the light, admit his misdeeds, and show remorse. With his admission in January, he has an oddly unique opportunity to make a real difference, again. He could be a powerful force in dismantling the charade surrounding drugs in sport. Time will tell what role he takes. From youth leagues and pick-up games to national tournaments and the Olympics, we love sports. They are an outlet for our innate drive to play and compete, and cherished entertainment for young and old. Many pleasant memories are related to sport. We have all played a sport, ran a race, or competed on a team. Indeed, many learned about hard work, cooperation, and fair play through a sport. At the top levels though, the power of money reigns and ideals take a backseat. Questionable short cuts and secret strategies become necessary for getting ahead. Or so it seems. If doping in sport is to be eliminated, professionals need to stand up and admit the scope of the problem. Let us not shield the public from the hard truth. We all have been complacent. Fans overlook misdeeds and shady dealings as long as no one gets caught or is hurt. Then when a scandal breaks, we are outraged V for a few weeks. Like the Romans who filled the Coliseum 2,000 years ago, spectators still revel in the display of fierce competition but are not concerned with the details of preparation. Sport is a joy and a dilemma. It can be simple and pure but also complicated and corrupt. Armstrong’s saga is a stark reminder that doping in sport is insidious. Despite decades of well-intentioned and serious efforts, the current antidoping system is falling short. The recent stripping of Address for correspondence: Phillip B. Sparling, EdD, FACSM, Georgia Institute of Technology, School of Applied Physiology, Atlanta, GA 30332; E-mail: phil.sparling@gatech.edu.

The Cause of Baseball: Baseball and Nation-Building in Revolutionary Cuba

Sports have long been a source of national pride for Cubans. Today, in a country lacking shopping malls and other commercial forms of entertainment, youths can be found playing pick-up games of soccer, volleyball, and baseball at any given hour of the day or night. Older aficionados gather at places such as the famous Esquina Caliente, or Hot Corner, in Havana's Central Park to discuss and debate the particulars of sporting events. While Cubans have embraced niche sports chess and fencing, baseball has always occupied a rarified stratum in Cuba's sporting culture despite its historical association with American imperialism. This has continued to be the case despite drastic changes to the way the game was organized and presented to the Cuban public after 1959. In the wake of the Revolution, the sport came to have great importance to the state as a symbol of revolutionary ideals and defiance. nature of the game leant itself to politicization by state actors. British anthropologist Thomas F. Carter writes that, like all sports, baseball is all about the increasingly refined and controlled movement of bodies--a concern of all state-building projects as well. (1) In order to better capture the hearts and minds of the Cuban public, the revolutionary government set about shaping baseball into a spectacle that was equal parts training program and patriotic theater. Postrevolutionary Cuban baseball, rather than a game that was integrated with its American counterpart as a sort of farm system for potential major leaguers, became an insular system, retaining its finest players to represent Cuban self-sacrifice and patriotic fervor. Even the biggest stars renounced the material rewards of professionalism in favor of the purity of amateur play. Furthermore, producing athletes who could compete on the international stage served as proof that the island nation stood on equal ground with the United States, the country against which Cubans measured their progress and standing in the world. idealistic image of Cuban players as altruistic defenders of national honor has been challenged, however, by the Cuban stars who have heeded the siren call of American Major League Baseball and the wealth it bestows on the select few with the physical gifts to compete in its ranks. flow of Cuban baseball talent to the US market is, in part, an expression of the persistent bond between the two countries, cemented by a shared history and passion for the game of baseball. This connection posed a conundrum to Cuban revolutionaries who sought to reshape the game to conform to the revolutionary national project despite its history as an American invention. BASEBALL BETWEEN EMPIRES, 1860-1959 As Louis Perez argues in On Becoming Cuban, the United States had an integral role in the formation of a Cuban national identity as the island distanced itself from Spanish norms in the nineteenth century. Perez writes, The two cultures converged on each other, interacting and merging, and fused in dynamic adaptation and accommodation. Cubans and North Americans occupied a place in each other's imagination and in their respective fantasies about each other. (2) US material culture had flooded Cuba well before the American military intervention of 1898. American capital and consumer products steadily poured into Cuba, bringing with them myriad cultural trappings. (3) Among the many American institutions introduced to Cuba was baseball, a sport that was burgeoning into an iconic American cultural touchstone. Cubans' enthusiastic embrace of baseball was a product of this affinity for all things American. According to Thomas Carter, the game was introduced to Cuba by university students returning home from the US in the 1860s--around the same time that the sport was becoming the national pastime in the United States itself. (4) Long covetous of Spain's remaining Caribbean colonies, the US saw Cubans' adoption of baseball as a sign of America's waxing influence in the region and the hemisphere as a whole. …

Philip Moss Platzman

Philip Moss Platzman

Ever-Cleaner Auto Exhaust

Touch football games and automobile catalytic converters share little in common, as far as most people are concerned. Not so for Galen B. Fisher. As a college student in Southern California in the 1960s, Fisher remembers all too well the choking dark clouds that drifted 30 miles eastward from the traffic-congested highways of Los Angeles and frequently descended onto the grounds of Pomona College, in Claremont, where he often played afternoon pickup games. “Around 4 o’clock when we were out playing football, we’d often see this big cloud roll in,” Fisher recalls. “Before you knew it, all these healthy college kids would lie down on the ground gasping for air and struggling to catch their breath.” As Fisher would come to learn, he and his football buddies of the ’60s were experiencing the noxious effects of untreated engine emissions. He would go on to spend decades researching catalytic cleanup of ...

Thinking Problems

Thinking Problems

Computational Diversions: WordWiring, a Network-Themed Party Game

Fans of ‘‘mathematical games’’ (I’m one) often end up with a small library of books on the subject, collectively containing descriptions of a vast trove of games. There are board games, or informal pencil-and-paper games, with applications to (e.g.) graph theory, number theory, combinatorics, logic, and many other branches of mathematics. In fact, the range and variety of mathematical games is so wide—and so rich in content—that one could plausibly base a pretty good introductory mathematics curriculum on these pastimes. Perhaps a few of the more advanced subjects would be underrepresented in this exercise (real analysis? differential geometry?); but a typical library of mathematical games provides, overall, a broad portrait of mathematics in general. Now, coverage of mathematics is one thing; but does our library provide reasonable coverage of what we mean by games? Interestingly, there are certain important types of games that tend to be near-invisible in recreational mathematics. For one thing, almost all the examples in our library are either solitaire games (which by some definitions of the term would hardly qualify as ‘‘games’’ at all), or two-person games. Think of the standards: tic-tac-toe, Nim, Sim, Sprouts, chess, Go, and so forth. Occasionally there are threeor four-person variations of these games, but for the most part we’re talking about n players, where n is a small positive integer. (Perhaps, if we program a computer to play a mathematical game against itself, we could say that n = 0 in that case?) Not all games are like this. After all, baseball is a game, isn’t it? You need to round up 18 people at the very least to play a weekend-afternoon informal game of baseball. Even a pick-up basketball game will usually have at least six players; touch football would require a dozen or so. And how about children’s favorites, such as musical chairs? Starting a game of musical chairs with only two or three kids on hand seems hardly worth the effort. Other children’s classics—Tag, Duck-Duck-Goose, Capture the Flag—are best played with numbers ranging from a half-dozen (at the low end) to twenty or more. For older children and adults, there are games such as charades, or twenty questions, and these are typically played in moderate-sized groups (three would be a bit small for these games). In other

1830c.2 Thoreau's Diary Entry, and Other Tiny Clues as to Who Played Early Ball, and on What Occasions (Especially Holidays)

April 10. Thursday. Fast Day.... I associate this day, when I can remember it, with games of base-ball played over beyond the hills in the russet fields toward Sleepy Hollow, where the snow was just melted and dried up.1Henry David Thoreau's 1856 journal entry is typical of the quality of evidence that is available to those of us who want to understand the evolution of American ballplaying. It is clear enough that the Bard of Walden remembers seeing ballgames played in the past, and that he linked such games with Fast Day, religious observance in New England from the late 17th century to the late 19th century. The specific years he is recollecting (our guess is c. 1830, when Thoreau was in his teens), the age range of the players, and the rules of the games he saw, are wide open to speculation. It is dim but tantalizing glimpse of the full story of ballplaying in eastern Massachusetts six generations ago.But such skimpy anecdotes are all we have, and if we wish to form, or to verify, general notions about baseball's early evolution, they will have to do, for now. Among the interesting scholarly generalizations that one may encounter are these two:1. Prior to the Knickerbockers, American ballplaying was largely confined to children.2. Because of the lack of leisure time, lot of the ballplaying occurred either in schoolyards, on holidays, or at social occasions, like barn-raisings.This essay entails an attempt to test these two conjectures against the evidence for the period 1770-1830 as compiled in version 11 of the Protoball Chronology.2Ballplayers' AgesThe Protoball Chronology now contains over 200 fairly specific references to ballplaying from 1770-1830, including the Thoreau journal entry. Most of these appear to refer to games included in the family,3 but about one-quarter of them describe cricket and wicket play. Well over half of these accounts do not specify the name of the actual game played,4 but employ terms like playing at ball and a game of ball, and we need to remember that such terms may possibly have denoted ballgames that are outside the baseball family.For about 150 of the references to baseball- type games, it is possible to form an educated opinion as to whether the games' players were juveniles (preteens), youths (early/ midteens), or adults.We find that while over one-third of these accounts involved adult play, and about one-third involved youths, far fewer than one-third involved younger children. For the first half of this period (1770-1800) adult ballplaying actually accounts for about onehalf the total of U.S. ballplaying references, owing to the frequency of accounts of military play during the Revolutionary War.While there will be interesting regionto- region variation that readers may wish to investigate further, the body of evidence that researchers have contributed to Protoball, inexact as it might be, seems hard to square with the traditional idea that adult play was rare before 1845 and the rise of the New York game.The Settings for Early U.S. BallplayingThoreau's account is clearly an instance of holiday play. Many other Protoball entries refer to play in schools and colleges. Some appear to refer to what we might today call ordinary local pickup games, where the venue might be street, open area, or town common.For about one-half of the collected references, neither the occasion nor the venue for play is indicated. However, that leaves about 100 of the 1770-1830 references to baseball-type games for which one can determine the game's setting, as tabulated below:Reminding the reader that this exercise is nothing like an exact science, and merely uses the available heap of anecdotal accounts collected through 2010, we can see some possible patterns that may be worth further consideration:* Adult play in U.S. towns, and in military settings, was not rare.* Holiday play is found,6 but is not particularly frequent. …

When Play Was Play: Why Pick-up Games Matter. By Ronald Bishop (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009. ix plus 203 pp. $19.95)

Journal Article When Play Was Play: Why Pick-up Games Matter. By Ronald Bishop (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009. ix plus 203 pp. $19.95) Get access Howard P. Chudacoff Howard P. Chudacoff Brown University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of Social History, Volume 44, Issue 3, Spring 2011, Pages 973–975, https://doi.org/10.1353/jsh.2011.0018 Published: 01 March 2011