My friend Rob and I played on our high school varsity baseball team. “Played” might be a stretch—we mostly rode the bench all season. One humid summer evening in Houston, desperate for our baseball fix, we grabbed a plastic bat and ball and started, headed out to the street in front of my house, and started pitching to each other. We made a game of hitting the ball over a light pole. And just like that, Home Run Derby was born.
Over the next few weeks, we formalized the rules, loosely modeling them after the Major League All-Star Home Run Derby. We experimented with different plastic balls before settling on smooth polyballs—durable enough not to break. We also devised ways to block the storm drains that loved to eat our balls.
We fine-tuned the scoring system. A home run was any ball that cleared the fence in the air in fair territory. Any swing that was not a home run was an out. A caught ball? Two outs. A round lasted for ten outs. If a round ended in a tie, players would go into a hit-off that lasted two outs. We meticulously tracked stats on pen and paper, then entered them into my computer at the end of each night.
When we played on the street, our line drives would often ricochet off our neighbor’s roof. The hollow balls never caused damage, but they’d make a lot of noise hitting a house, especially in the middle of the night. My neighbor would come outside in his bathrobe and scream at us from time to time. We eventually found that the community tennis courts offered the perfect dimensions for our game, so we moved our game there. Home Run Derby was slowly evolving.
We’ve introduced the game to a few others, but no one loves it like Rob and me. Even now, whenever we see each other, Rob and I track down some tennis courts and play a few rounds. We’re grown men, but it’s still fun.
When I finally learned how to build websites, I made one for Home Run Derby, complete with official rules, stats, and a deep dive into its history. Nerdtastic!
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