it’s kind of fun that baseball seems to attract slightly wierd people to it – my main wierdness is that I live in a country that has little-to-no interest in baseball (outside of a few fans thanks to it being televised on the sadly departed Channel Five Baseball show for the last decade or so) yet spend hours pretty much daily perusing box scores, sorting out my fantasy team, posting on here, reading fangraphs/BtB and other geeky baseball numbers sites, and watching Cardinals highlights (and, when I get the chance, the live games on mlb.tv).

I particularly like your infield defence game – I used to do stuff like that (generally with other sports) when I was younger too. Takes all sorts…

I don’t have any notebooks of box scores or boxes on my garage. I don’t really have any strange things that I do, but I love the game nonetheless.

I was just at my parent’s hosue for Fathers Day lamenting that the back corner of the house is now full of nicely manicured bushes instead of my ‘home plate’. The plate to me was a frisbee in a large circle or dirt where my brother and I had worn off all the grass. We played homerun derby for endless hours there and despite being a Cards fan, I was always Steve Carlton when I pitched (lefty) and George Brett when I hit. The good ol days.

I never cut out box scores but it’s amazing to me now how fulfilled I would get as a kid just by checking them out in the paper.

used to make my own scorecard all the way up to about age 15 as I listened to Jack Buck and Mike Shannon. Of course I probably only did this about 10-20 times a year (when I was bored), not every game. And I didn’t keep them either, I usually stuffed them in the trash so no one would discover my weirdness.

I also used to look forward to the Sunday edition of the sports sections because they had the team-by-team boxscores. I used to create my own league leader charts – ranking as many of the batting average, stolen bases (remember those?), homerun and rbi leaders as I could. I’d also do rankings by position. I’d keep them only until the next weeks paper so I could compare the new rankings to the previous weeks. I’d also have to hold onto the season ending “reports” so I had them all winter to study and memorize. THANK GOD FOR MLB.COM!!

I did similar fielding drills on every exterior wall of my home. I remember the sides of my houses being covered in tennis ball marks from playing while it was raining. I never kept any written reports, buy I remember Glenn Davis of the Astros always being the most stellar defender at first. My drills focused heavily on diving plays.

Basically all of my free time spent inside was spent reading the Baseball Encyclopedia and studying the backs of baseball cards. I always loved the ones that had the trivia questions on them. I recall thats how I found out that Pete Rose was nicknamed Charlie Hustle, (thanks 1975 Topps).

Its good to know that I’m not the only freak and thankfully I’ve outgrown these obsessions, although if it was socially acceptable at my age, I’d probably still be in the front yard firing grounders to myself off the porch.

not boxscores

i had a helmet for every team in the majors. at this time i was on hiatus of being a cardinals fan because they traded my hero to this day: andy van slyke. all the neighbor kids (usually more girls than boys) would gather every evening to play wiffle ball (don’t tell my little league coach) and i would pass out helmets and tell everybody which player they were that day. Lineups usually looked like this: ozzie, van slyke, strawberry, murphy, dawson vs. puckett, boggs, mattingly, mcgwire, murray. god, i miss those days.

Good stuff.

Nowhere near your level of insanity here, but to declare my love-

Both my dad and I bear permanent injury due to playing too much catch in our old backyard, which was enormous and connected to a lot of common ground. He had to undergo shoulder surgery as a result, and still has a messed up elbow. I caught a fly ball thanks to the sun in the mouth and bit clear through, having to get stitches and eat applesauce and such for a month. Still have the nice war wound to show off.

The fondest memory of the day that I bit through my tongue was that my dad just gave me a warm rag and told me to stick it in my mouth and not swallow any of the blood. This went on for about an hour until my mom got home, who we were waiting for, and she absolutely flipped on my dad for not taking me to the hospital. I was sitting there watching TV with blood running down my face cool as a cucumber and my dad explained the whole" boys will be boys and get injured" story and how I was taking it like a man and that it wasn’t as bad as it looked.

One of the few times you remember where you really connect in a father-son moment, all thanks to this great game.

although not all related to baseball. here’s some baseball related memories:

-my brother and I trying to hit the ball over cars going by, and into the cornfield as kids
-younger brother having line drive hit off chest by bigger and older neighbor kid… we were all pretty scared
-playing on a little league team, it was weird to see 13 or 14 year olds chewing tobacco
-baseball players spit a lot, whether or not they chew tobacco
-I once wore two hats at the same time at a game in the 80s. I was always amazed at Ozzie’s back flip. got me every time
-I’m still proud of my old Willie McGee and Vince Coleman baseball cards, although they are worthless cardboard to a good portion of the population
-baseball translates very well to video games and movies
-I love when people get philosophical about the national pasttime
-I used to have a Louisville Slugger with Pedro Guerrero signature
-I’ve only been to 3 stadiums, but am looking forward to seeing more!