A hot, sunny, summer day in the old neighborhood usually meant that it was time to go round up the ol' gang of bubblegum chewin', baseball-card tradin' buddies of yours, and head out to the nearest ball field in your hometown for a sweet escape from reality.

Those days seem like a thing of the past.

I can drive by my old neighborhood anytime of day in the summer and look at an empty ball field. I know that this neighborhood is filled with kids. Where are they?

Video games, iPods, and computers could be a part of the finger pointing, but they're not entirely to blame. Being overweight and not exercising as a child seems to be on the rise also.

What I really notice is that kids have so many options to choose from nowadays.

Especially if both parents are working. When I was a kid, we breathed baseball. Mom was a housewife, and I can tell you that on a nice day, you weren't layin' around the house. You were outside.

And we wanted to be outside. "Let's get Tommy, He's got an extra mitt!"

Tommy also had a pool for after the game.

I know that as I got older, I would get tired of playing ball in the summer, mainly because I was playing organized baseball at school. It turned into a chore. Then it turned into a dream of yesterday.

Where are the sandlotters like when I was a kid? And as for bubblegum cards, most kids can't afford the cards anymore, and most of them don't come with that gnarly gum that splintered into a thousand pieces of sugary bliss and tasted too damn good to be true anyway.

It truly is a different era. I would put Whitey Ford in the spokes of my bike, not in a binder to sell off later on eBay when the market was right.

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