title: Growing Up with Baseball: How We Loved and Played the Game
author: Gary Land
description: In this charming collection of essays, ordinary people recall their earliest encounters with baseball, describing sandlot pickup games, lazy hours listening to the radio and countless summer afternoons at ballparks. The result is both a vivid anecdotal history of America's pastime and a colorful portrait of how people lived and played in the middle and late 20th century. Many of these touching stories will seem pleasantly familiar to readers who engaged in such youthful rituals as poring over box scores, imitating players' batting stances, begging for autographs and, of course, visiting a big league park for the first time. Others are unusual and, at times, fascinating: a Seventh Day Adventist talks about how his first exposure to the wider world came through baseball; a missionary's son describes afternoons at Ebbets Field with his mother; and a number of writers describe the inventive tabletop games and backyard contests that they came up with to pass the time. Refreshingly, the writers manage to avoid the syrupy nostalgia that tends to infect too much writing on baseball. Land, a history professor, recruited his contributors through the Society for American Baseball Research and specifically asked that they focus on their own experiences without lamenting how times have changed. Because most of the authors are amateur writers (a large number happen to be teachers or academics) the quality of the essays varies, but the prose is almost uniformly clear and entertaining.<br />Copyright  Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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  Resurgence
  
  
    
  
    
  
  By Peter B. Hoole
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Copyright Peter B. Hoole 2019
  
  All Rights Reserved
  
    
  
    
  
    
  
    
  
    
  
    
  
    
  
    
  
    
  
    
  
    
  
    
  
    
  
    
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  > For the POD
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Chapter ONE
  
  
  Gary was elated.
  
  It had been an amazing season so far, and the stadium was a buzz with
  anticipation. The crowd and atmosphere were electric. His beloved Rovers were
  in full flight, having won their past four games, and only trailing the league
  leaders by a couple of points.
  
  And to top it all off, the team had a two-goal lead over their north-London
  rivals, with less than five minutes to go.
  
  Being a season ticket holder, Gary had been to every home game that year. In
  fact, he had been to every home game since he was about sixteen years old.
  
  He had missed weddings, birthdays and even a funeral.
  
  Such was the importance of seeing the men in white and blue.
  
  At the start of the match, a moment of silence had been held for the victims
  of the Seattle and Italian atta