Backyard Batting Stance, Suburban Driveway, 1960s

Archive & AtlasEstablished · MMXXIII

Backyard Batting Stance, Suburban Driveway, 1960s — Archive & Atlas

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Backyard Batting Stance, Suburban Driveway, 1960s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1960–1969

AA-2026-EB4046

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The elbow is up, the front foot is planted, and the eyes are locked on a pitcher who exists only in the boy's imagination, because no league in America required a chain-link fence and a wheelbarrow as its outfield. The red cap is the only uniform he owns, worn with the seriousness of a man who has studied a television broadcast closely and concluded that posture is ninety per cent of the game.

Behind him a perfectly ordinary postwar street does its part: a brick duplex, a patch of foundation shrubs, a fence installed to keep dogs in rather than to define a ballpark, all pressed into service as Yankee Stadium for the afternoon. This was the standard equipment of a 1960s childhood summer, a bat, a borrowed patch of grass, and the total confidence that someone, somewhere, was watching the at-bat that mattered.

No one else is in the yard, no ball is visible, and the count could be anything he wants it to be. He'll swing when he's good and ready, and the neighbourhood will have no say in the matter.

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