This image from the Streetplay photo library captures the spirit of Sandlot Baseball even better than pictures of kids in uniforms playing on a baseball diamond. What prompted me to share this photo was an email from a friend quoting this article in Sunday's New York Times Magazine (free registration is required if you want to view this article).

And so, I quote:

The baseball clinic last summer resembled, by design, the casual off-hours scrimmaging of Lee and his pals, combined with favorite drills and exercises from their own childhood sports clinics and Little League. Hooked into the pure fun of the game -- throwing and catching a ball, swinging a bat and loping across a green field yelling ''Mine, mine, mine'' -- they pulled the younger players in after them.

What the little kids did care about was not striking out. So no one ever struck out. The rule was, You swing until you hit something. You could fly out; you could get tagged out. But there is no humiliation in flying out or getting tagged out. At the end of one game, I heard a boy yelling all the way up the hill as he ran to meet his dad, ''I hit a home run!'' Had he? I thought. It didn't ring a bell. Then I realized, He had. He had swung at so many pitches I had lost interest and was reading my book, but he finally connected with the ball. I watched him join his dad and head for the car, with the trace of a swagger.

I Googled my way to this article, where, by chance, I found the following:

The contrast between today’s suffocated, cocooned pre-teens and children of that long gone day is enormous. Today’s kids are micromanaged by parents, by schools, by youth coaches, scout leaders, tutors. The children of that earlier time were allowed an unbelievable amount of personal freedom including freedom of association (choosing friends and making enemies), freedom to play without adult supervision, freedom to be alone, and freedom to entertain oneself turning any everyday object into a toy.

You know, no matter how many times I write and talk about those disappearing things like recess and unsupervised play, it's still hard for me to accept how much things have changed for kids. And even harder to believe that stories like these, about adults letting kids play their own way to their own personal truths, have become so poignant and so rare.