Life in the poorer neighborhoods of American cities can be crowded and confining. Streets are often congested with traffic and a good park with a sports field and playground may not be so conveniently located. The summer days in city streets may be sweltering in heat and the neighborhood park may be nothing more than a small playground with swings, seesaws and monkey bars for children. American cities are generally laid out on a grid pattern creating blocks. The streets made from these blocks are long but narrow and the cars of the local residents line the curbs taking away much needed play area.

While basketball and volleyball can be played in the confines of a school playground, to find the open spaces needed for a baseball game may not be an easy task. So, faced with this challenge and adding a bit of imagination, the city streets themselves are often transformed into both a playground and a ballpark. To accomplish this feat the rules of baseball are cleverly altered to accommodate the city traffic and the narrow streets are improvised to create a ballpark. The new game which emerges from this adaptation is called stickball.

Instead of a standard baseball bat, a sawed-off broomstick will suffice to hit the ball. The regulation-sized hard baseball is replaced by a soft punch or tennis ball. Home plate is the manhole cover found in the middle of any city street, and the front fenders of two parked cars are adequate substitutes for first and third bases. Second base is the next manhole cover down the street or simple marked off with chalk and "time out" is determined by the automobile traffic heading towards home plate on its way down to the main boulevard. The baseball diamond is thus disproportionately elongated but serves its purpose for the adaptation borne from necessity.

The game is not without its hazards and many a window of a home may be broken if the ball should be hit with greater force than necessary and in the wrong direction. When this occurs, there is a mad scatter among the players to find hiding places while the homeowner searches in vain for the culprit who broke his window.
Most residents in such neighborhoods, however, are more forgiving than vindictive and accept the consequence as part of city living.
Stickball is a ghetto adaptation of baseball for kids who love the game, but find it necessary to adapt it to their living situation and the limitations of space which are imposed by urban life.
Somewhere locked in the fantasy of their imagination these kids would much rather prefer to run on grass than on asphalt and to hit a real baseball with a real bat than to swing at a tennis ball with a sawed-down broomstick.

Yet, in spite of the disadvantages which come from urban living, most young people are still able to derive great pleasure from their adaptation of America's national sport.