would love to play vintage baseball. I’m not sure how much I want to travel to Sun City West to watch, at least not this weekend.

Vintage baseball is all kinds of awesome. I got some pictures, hopefully many of which turned out well, so I’ll put those up soon.

My pictures of the games. I’m not a great photographer, but I liked how some of them turned out. I’m going to go through and add some captions to them, but feel free to browse.

The league has, at the moment, four teams- the Sun City West Black Stockings, the Sun City West Red Stockings, the Bisbee Bees and the Phoenix Senators, and a fifth one is being formed. If it weren’t for the hefty investment needed, I would be signing up this very second.

So, what’s the difference between baseball as the Diamondbacks play it, and as these guys (and ladies) play? Well, I think they were playing by this set of rules, but here’s a summary of the big changes:

-Pitches are thrown underhand.
-No called balls and strikes, unless the umpire feels you’re holding up the game. Otherwise, the only way to strike out is to swing and miss three times- fouls are not strikes.
-Wherever the ball hits first, that’s how it’s played. if it lands in fair territory and bounces foul, it’s fair.
-No leading off of the bag, no stealing, and no sliding.
-A ball caught on one bounce is an out. This applies to foul balls, too, so there were a number of times that the batter (striker) hit a foul tip that bounced once and was caught for an out. On a bounce-out, though, the runners don’t have to tag up, and can advance.
-No over-running first- if you’re off the bag, they can tag you out.
-Gloves are optional.
-When you cross home plate, you then go to the scorer and ask the scorer to tally the run (or "ace") for your team, after which you ring a bell. It doesn’t count as official until you ring the bell. (Yeah, that one was a little odd.)

So, how does it play? It was a lot of fun to watch. I mean, it’s baseball, how can it not be fun? In particular, the “one bounce” rule makes the game play quite a bit differently- that line drive over the second baseman may not be enough to get you on base. And there were quite a number of times when players remembered they couldn’t over-run first just as they were over-running it.

The game moves pretty quickly, which is nice after a season of professional baseball- I’m pretty sure I saw innings start and end in the time it takes for a reliever to come in from the pen for the Diamondbacks. The focus is a lot less on pitching, and a lot more on what happens when you make contact with the ball- in the two games I watched, I probably saw fewer than five strikeouts, if even that many. As an added bonus, the people are friendly, the players are out there having fun, and the league is smart enough to schedule games from November to March. Can’t argue with that.

Looking around, I did find websites for the Phoenix Senators and the Bisbee Bees- the Bees site has their schedule up, and their games look to mostly be split between Peoria and Papago Park in Tempe, so there’s plenty of opportunity for people on either end of the Valley to check them out.

Oh, and if anyone is interested, the Black Stockings won the first game over the Bees off the strength of an 8 run third inning, with the final score 11 to 1, and the Senators beat the Red Stockings in the second game 5 to 1, thanks to some very nice defense for old guys without gloves.

the report and pictures – they provide a better feel for this operation than any of the sporadic coverage I’d seen previously.