The Game
This is the sport that the narrator and the other children loved to play.
What is baseball?
The pitcher stood in line with these two things.
What are the batter and first base?
This person enjoyed watching the children play from the rectory porch.
Who is Father Zavala?
The children played baseball on the grounds of this type of school.
What is a parochial school?
The narrator remembers the game with this positive emotion.
What is joy/excitement?
The children used this type of stick as a bat.
What is an old mesquite stick?
The distance to first base depended on where this object was thrown.
What is a stone?
After an out, the catcher moved to this position.
What is the batter?
The children sometimes used these trees to hide from the ball.
What are hackberry trees?
Arguments sometimes happened because someone moved this object marking first base.
What is the stone?
This was the only base the children used in their unusual version of baseball.
What is first base?
If a fielder caught the ball on the fly, that player immediately became this.
What is the batter?
After an out, the pitcher became this.
What is the catcher?
The game sometimes continued several blocks down this direction.
What is toward town?
The players' game demonstrates that children can change familiar rules to create something more ________.
What is imaginative/fun/creative?
After every out, the players did this.
What is rotate positions?
When the ball hit the ground, one option was to throw it to this player for an out.
Who is the first baseman?
After an out, the first baseman became this.
What is the pitcher?
These older men would stop their conversations to watch the children run by.
Who were the old codgers?
Uncle Adolfo called their use of his baseball a waste because they were not playing the game according to ________.
What are professional rules?
Unlike normal baseball, the children could run far beyond the playing field while trying to do this.
What is avoid being hit by the ball?
The more dangerous option allowed the fielder to do this to the batter after chasing them.
What is throw the ball at the batter?
Uncle Adolfo had played professional baseball for both these teams.
What are the Yankees and the Cardinals?
The narrator describes the game as requiring an enormous ________ to provide enough freedom and space.
What is stadium?
Father Zavala's enjoyment suggests that he found the children's game entertaining because it had this quality.
What is freedom?