| OCR Text |
Show Car Baseball Butch and Fenn Stories 45 "Good deal," Butch says, dropping the entire weed onto Karen. He walks over to us. "Let's play ball." 4 Wall Ball is a tough game. The batter faces the wall of the house, the pitcher behind him, the fielder behind him in the yard. The pitcher tosses the ball against the house; it bounds back through the hitter's strike zone and he clobbers it wham! and then wham! again, off the wall as it rebounds into the field. While the hitter runs to the porch and back, the fielder comes up with the ball and throws it to the pitcher at home plate for the force out. That throw, of course, must also bound once off the wall before the pitcher can make the force. The total advantage of Wall Ball is that it can be played full speed, no choke-up, no soft throws, in a tenth of the space required for, say, Strike-Out which is the same game played without a wall right in the middle of everything. After huddling to compare our record books to see where we were, I end up at the plate with Fenn on the mound. Butch is out in the yard somewhere hiding in a hole. It is his strategy as a fielder in Wall Ball to conceal himself so the batter won't know where to push the ball. "Come on, Butch!" I cry. "No way!" his voice comes back from the thicket. "It's a rule!" |
