Fuzzball and other Bat-and-Ball Games

On the south side of St. Louis, where I spent most of my childhood years, Beer and Baseball were and still are king. As kids, we had to turn to baseball. But it was a rare day when you could throw together two full teams of nine from the kids who floated around our neighborhood. On hot days, we were lucky if there were two of us to play catch.

The field was another issue entirely -- there were plenty of asphalt schoolyards with bases painted on, but for the true hops of a grass field, all we could find was an abandoned church lot that was mowed once a month. We made do, even made some amateurish attempts at groundskeeping, but if one of the older kids got hold of a pitch going the opposite way, the ball was gone, possibly through an apartment window.

We played anyway, of course, when we could muster the players and the equipment; but it was hard to pretend we were the Cardinals when the pitcher had to lob the pitch in and back up as quick as they could to play the infield and hopefully chase the runner down.

It was Dave Cook, a squirrelly guy from two buildings down second only to me in his obsession with baseball, who came up with the rough idea for a game we would call "Fuzzball". "My uncle from New York played it when he was a kid," he said, grinning and bouncing a tennis ball in one palm. "All you need is a tennis ball and a bat - or even a broomstick. You pitch up against the wall, so you don't need a catcher."

I'd seen strike zones painted and scrawled up in back of our school, so we picked the lowest one and started playing every day, developing the rules of the game as we went. In Fuzzball, which reached its Zenith in fourth grade, when Dave hit 72 homeruns and I struck out 350 batters, the focus was on the purity of batter vs. pitcher. We drew lines in the schoolyard for singles, doubles, triples. There was already a fence at perfect homerun distance. The pitcher could field anything on the fly or try to stop a ground ball, but there wasn't any baserunning. After a double- or triple- header of Fuzzball, our hands were red, our arms aching. If other kids showed up, we played two-on-two or three-on-three, and every kid in the neighborhood did come out and play at least a little. But Dave and I were the Fuzzball gurus.

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