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Originally posted by GarthB
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Bottom line, we had fun, we learned about baseball and we played and played and played baseball. A couple of us played in high school and even college, so it didn't seem to hurt us to not have the "advantages" of Little League.
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In my neighborhood, we had an elaborately built "league" of wiffle-ball teams, and Ben Williams' backyard provided us the perfect wiffleball field. The clothesline pole was first base, the base of the slide on the swingset was 2nd base, and the middle pole on the privacy fence was third base. A ball hit over Ben's fence that went in the alley was an out; to get a homerun, you had to hit it over Ben's fence, the alley, AND the next-door neighbor's fence. And, if you hit a homerun, you had to retrieve the ball yourself, and incur the risk of being eaten alive by the neighbor's German Shepherd.
Like you, we played those wiffleball games morning, noon and night until it was too dark to see, with one exception. We took timeout to ride our bikes to Little League practice (where, coincidentally enough, Ben's dad was our coach) and we had family and neighborhood outings twice a week on Little League game days, down at Rick Oden park right next to Duck Creek. I don't remember the outcome of any single LL game I played, but I remember the post-game trips down Garland Road to the local Baskin-Robbins. Nothing like a double-dip cone of Rocky Road on a balmy summer evening to reward (or console) yourself for whatever just happened on the Little League field.
So, it is possible to have your sandlot games and more formally organized Little League (or whatever brand of youth ball is popular in any given area), both.