I was catching-up on RyanTatusko’s blog the other night when I read his recent post on games played among minor leaguers. Last year I attended an Orem Owlz’s game where I saw the Owlz playing some iteration of the pre-game ball games he discusses. I think it was likely speedball which he describes as followings:
Players make a circle again and instead of throwing both baseballs to one guy, you throw one to one person and one to another. Once you catch a baseball you have to get rid of it right away, and you cannot throw the baseballs to your neighbors until there are 4 players or less. If you drop a ball when it comes into you, don’t worry you still have time to grab it and get rid of it before they throw the next baseball at you or to your spot where you were standing. If that happens, then you get a strike.
At the beginning of the this season, I tried to introduce something similar to my little league team and had varying degrees of success the few times I tried it. Unlike the minors I have limited amounts of practice and pre-game time with my little league and travel teams and as a result tend to default to focused baseball drills but when we hold our winter workouts this year I need to work in more games like these to break the monotony of stations.
Ryan also makes reference to word association and other word-related games they play during downtime in the bullpen. Thought I’d share one of my favorite games. I call it the dot-com game. The dot-com game is best played with at least three players. The first two players each independently think of a word or two and once they’ve settled on their words say them in consecutive order. The third player has to then take the two words and add dot-com – or some other top-level domain – to the end and then explain what the fictitious company does. So imagine the two words were something like “crowbar” and “training.” The third person might say something like, “ok CrowbarTraining.com is a site that teaches self defense to individuals who live near Tonya Harding.”
The third player can take the two words in either order before slapping dot-com to the end. Other players can jump in with their own description of what a given fictitious company might do. Once a give pair of words have been exhausted you rotate around the circle of players.
Because the words are independently derived, you can end up with colorful banter. It can take a second to get the game rolling with new participants but most quickly understand the premise. I play a similar game with my three boys where each will say a word and I then have to tell a story wherein I use all three words. The boys loving hearing crazy stories and are always amazed I’m able to incorporate three often diverse words.
