Kickball is an incredibly popular pastime in St. Louis. Though I couldn’t say how the sport gained adult popularity in the first place, on the most primitive level it’s a fairly reasonable excuse to go out and drink during the day, and a moderately good cover for pretending to exercise.

After two seasons of kickball and multiple high school summers of slow-pitch softball under my belt, I present to you: The Bonafide Unathletic Guide to Winning at Kickball.

PART ONE:

If you care to take only one thing from reading this guide, let it be this: Winning at kickball is not about kicking (hitting). It’s not about pitching. And it’s hardly about intelligence or experience. You’re misled by Kickball’s faster, more athletic cousin, Baseball. In fact, winning at kickball is first and foremost about fielding and defense.

Simply put: The team that wins a kickball game is not the team that kicks the most homeruns, but rather, the team that makes the most outs on the balls put in play. We’re talking real basic stuff: Catch fly balls, throw batters out on grounders, and don’t cause unnecessary errors. Subsequently, you’ll want to position your team so as to optimize the likelihood of the fundamentals of baseball happening.

We’ll assume for the tenure of this guide that your team has twelve players whose skills fall along a bell curve: Three Great, Six Medium, and Three Awful.

1. Garth
2. Gerald
3. Greta
4. Matt
5. Meena
6. Mike
7. Molly
8. Murdoch
9. Myron
10. Abner
11. Alice
12. Azzyzx

Also assume that the typical team fields 10 players (4 outfield), and your diamond looks like this:

Here’s how we’ll field our squad:

P: Meena (5th best athlete)
CA: Abner (10th best)
1B: Mike (6th best)
2B: Myron (9th best)
SS: Greta (3rd best)
3B: Garth (1st best)
LF: Molly (7th best)
LCF: Gerald (2nd best)
RCF: Matt (4rd best)
RF: Murdoch (8th best)
Bench: Alice and Azzyzx (11th and 12th best)

Here’s the biggest secret to fielding in kickball: The most important position on the field is third base. This is where you want your absolute best throwing arm (in our case, Garth). Why? Most teams opt to position their best fielder in Center Field, where a slight difference in running speed, throwing strength, and catching ability won’t make all that much of a difference. On the other hand, as most girls (and wimpy guys) opt to kick a slow dribbler to third base and try to outrun the throw rather than actually putting a ball into play, the extra half-step will come in to play far more frequently.

The 3B on my field diagram above is playing shallow intentionally. And the strange hockey-stick shaped line is a rule unique to kickball—the third baseman can’t position himself closer to home plate than that. So, for any given at bat, Garth will need to charge a weak grounder and make a rocket throw across the field in one swift motion. Yikes. At the very least, putting Garth at third makes the prospect of the slow dribbler a little more intimidating.

Some other tips:

• Right-legged batters tend to kick to the left side. We’ll prioritize our better fielders there.
• There’s always one guy on the team who’s “the pitcher.” He/she just is. On this team, we’ll just assume that’s Meena.
• I like putting my team’s tallest competent fielder at SS. This makes it hard for the batters to kick line drives into the outfield, and like having Garth at third, makes kicking the ball to the entire left side of the field more intimidating (see: Tip One).
• Just like baseball, 1B is where you want to hide your weakest fielder—that is, your weakest fielder who has the capacity to catch everything thrown at them (including the bullets from Garth at third). In kickball, however, you can’t take the ability to consistently catch balls for granted. I’m of the impression that catching is pretty much a binary skill: either you’ll usually catch the ball, or you usually won’t. On our team, I’ve presumed Mike (6th best) is the otherwise worst fielder who can consistently lock the ball down.
• The easiest position to fill and field is Catcher. Even in the event of a play at the plate, typically, the pitcher or first baseman can cover. We’ll put Abner there. And we’ll put Myron at 2B—he’ll be able get help from P, 1B, SS, RCF, or RF on most any play, and it’s fairly difficult for batters to kick there—most who try end up kicking an easy out to the pitcher or first baseman.
• Beyond that, we’ll put our two stronger remaining fielders (Gerald and Matt) into the CF positions—not only because there’s more ground to cover and more balls get kicked here, but also because it’s typically the LF and RF’s job to chase down wildly errant foul balls. Better off not wearing down your top talent.

We’ll conclude with two simple, overarching fielding strategies: 1) If the ball is kicked to you, holding on to it is probably always a bad fielding decision. When in doubt, don’t think and throw the ball to the pitcher. And 2) Pegging a baserunner is always harder than it looks. Just throw it to the guy fielding the base in front of the runner.

Part 2 next week.