(In his classic monologue “Baseball vs. Football”, comedian George Carlin famously pointed out that baseball is a 19^th century pastoral game that is played in a park.  The object is to go home and be safe.  On the other hand, football (like basketball, hockey and soccer) is a 20^th century technological struggle that is contested on a battle field with the objective being to march into enemy territory and punch holes in the defense.) 

Around these parts, the locals know winter is over when Rita’s Ice opens its doors and the Amish take their shoes off.  As the winds warm and the land greens, barefoot farm boys drive steaming teams of giant horses over the fields, filling the air with the thick smells of overturned soil, rotting manure and fresh-cut alfalfa.

Driving your car along the low, rounded ridges of Lancaster County is like riding on the back of a gentle serpent.  The landscape opens slowly as each low rise unfurls before you and disappears behind.  Woodlots transform into farm fields and farm fields drain into tiny creeks.  As you travel down quiet country roads, you have the road to yourself; the real traffic is on the State highway that runs parallel, about three-quarters of a mile south. 

The road turns sharply right following a long forgotten fence line, crosses a small creek over a one-lane bridge and then climbs carefully to the next rise.  At the top of a rise a small one-room school house appears.  It is white in color, simply built, well-maintained.  It has no steeple, no gymnasium, auditorium or library.  It is strictly functional.

The Amish build simple, sturdy, functional school buildings.  But as if to show where their priorities really lie, they appropriate precious little in the way of land.  They leave the land for farming.  Most schools are built on what appear to be quarter acres, leaving room for little more than a schoolhouse, two matching outhouses, a place to tie horses and park wagons and a small playfield for the children.  If you look carefully at the playfield, you notice that it is built upon a baseball field: a pitcher’s circle, and place to bat and four bases to run. 

When the students are in class the field is quiet and empty.  Nothing moves but the flitting of birds and the switching of the long tail of a horse hitched to a wagon under the trees.  A group of young mothers with babies and toddlers talk quietly in the shade.  But when class lets out, the students spill out into the yard and the worn diamond is filled with the scamper of bare feet as black wool trousers and long, heavy dresses scurry from base to base, calling for the ball excitedly - stretching singles into doubles and converting fly balls into outs.  Young girls in dark bonnets wave excitedly “throw it to me” while lads in broad brimmed hats peer wide-eyed over their shoulder and run with all their might to beat the throw.  There is a sweaty dustiness about the Amish that they wear proudly like a patina: filthy feet, dusty skin, body odor and bad haircuts.  The bats and balls are old and worn.  There are no baseball gloves because none are needed. 

But when you look more closely at the baseball diamonds of the Amish schoolhouses, you notice that they seldom have outfields.  The most obvious reason for this would seem to be the lack of space (although you can usually see how they could be reconfigured to have one).  As you watch them play the game, you notice that balls are seldom hit beyond the infield.  It may be that they don’t need an outfield because their goal is not to hit the ball hard.  After all, when the ball is hit hard it just means that someone will have to run and get it. The Amish seem to play a good old-fashioned, sand lot, base-to-base game of infield hits with a maximum of interplay between the players. The goal is to PLAY the game: to throw, to catch and to hit the ball, tag runners, run the bases, and scream wildly for the action.

They seem to be out playing baseball all the time, or at least it appears that way.  But the problem is, you can’t stop and watch.  Observations are fleeting, gained in brief snippets as you drive past on your way from here to there.  The Amish are very private, but in the wake of the tragic 2006 Nickel Mines school shooting, they are more suspicious of strangers – especially around their school houses, around their children.  In the past few years, blinds have been placed in the windows and sturdy fencing put in place around the perimeter, especially along the road.  You just don’t stop and watch.  (This is why there are no photos of Amish kids playing baseball in this article.)

•     •     •

One day last summer, I was able to put my Amish baseball theory to test.  In a small rural public park just outside of Smoketown, on a well-manicured diamond with an infield of crushed clay and an outfield of lush grass, a group of Amish youngsters were engaged in a game of baseball.  They had walked over to the park from the small schoolhouse a short distance down the road.  The players consisted of boys and girls of all sizes and ages from gangly post-teenagers to the tiniest tots.

There were the usual playground sounds: the thump of bat against ball followed by excited hoots and yelps.  The ball was tossed from one gloveless player to another as the runners churned around the bases.  As always, the most obvious thing was the dress: thick, dark and cumbersome.  The next thing I noticed was the language.  It was subtle at first because I assumed that I knew what they were shouting because I understand the game.  Arms wave, fingers point, bodies jump up and down excitedly.  But as I listened more carefully, I realized that the children were shouting to one another in an old German dialect which, along with the clothing, began to give the game the feel of a movie about Europe in WWII. 

I realized that I had no idea what they were saying.

I turned my attention to the outfield.  On the vast green expanse of lush grass, the only “players” were very young children, in groups of twos and threes with young mothers and older girls.  All were virtually oblivious to the baseball game, luxuriating instead in the grass itself.   The game remained largely on the infield.  Occasionally one of the bigger children would hit one into the outfield, where it would roll amongst the little ones.  But when that happened, everyone including the runners, slowed down and watched to see how far the ball would go.  The game stopped until the ball was retrieved and then started anew. 

In other words, Amish kids may very well play a brand of baseball in which the object of the game is the game itself.  The score is irrelevant, the degree to which you are skilled is only a gift which, like cars and chrome and fancy buttons, simply draws unnecessary attention to yourself.  They like the game for all the reasons that George Carlin pointed out.  It is cooperation yet competition.  The object has less to do with marching into your opponent’s territory as it does with scampering craftily through his garden.  Baseball is to football and soccer as picking flowers is to stealing vegetables.  The object for the Amish is to play the game: to put bat on ball, to run as fast as you can, to catch an object in flight, to throw with all your might, to laugh with your teammates – on both sides – and to enjoy the company of friends having fun.

Maybe I’m reading too much into this.  Maybe I’m the one in the WWII movie.  Maybe I’m sitting here on the sidelines in some sort of modern romantic fantasy and the players on the field are really trying to kick each other’s butts just for the sake of winning the game.  Maybe they really do play hardball, throw chin music, steal bases, perform twin killings, gun down runners and attack the plate.* 

Maybe they dream at night of a high hard one – in the wheelhouse - that they can hit so far that it never stops rolling. 

*  While talking to locals about this article, I ran across a man who regularly played in a softball league that included Amish players.  “They’re some of the dirtiest, meanest, most aggressive players I’ve ever seen,” he said. “I think it’s because they’re so frustrated.”