Comparing the Rules of Kickball and Baseball

Todd Belok is a mental health technician with Temple University’s Hospital Episcopal Campus in Philadelphia. Away from work, Todd Belok stays active through a local kickball league.

While the rules of kickball may differ from one playground to the next, official WAKA rules of the game can be found at www.kickball.com. The rules of kickball mirror those seen in the sport of American baseball in a number of ways, with fielders taking to a similarly shaped and sized field. However, the two sports diverge at a number of points.

In professional baseball, teams field nine players on defense. Kickball teams, on th

Kickball
Image: kickball.com

e other hand, can field 11 players at a time. The other nine players can be arranged as teams see fit. Teams can also opt to field just eight players.

The length of baseball and kickball games differ as well. Professional baseball games last for nine innings and Little League games go for six. A regulation kickball game ends after the fifth inning of play. Like baseball, a team’s inning ends after three outs have been charged to the offensive team. Outs can be secured through strike outs, force plays, or balls caught out of the air by fielders. Unlike baseball, kickball fielders can also throw a ball at runners to record an out, though head shots are considered illegal. For an in depth explanation of the rules visit http://www.kickball.com and download the official rule book.

Philip K. Dick’s Unlikely Tron Connection

Philip K. Dick
Image: amazon.com

Todd Belok has served as a mental health technician at Temple University Hospital since July 2015. An avid reader, Todd Belok is especially fond of the late Philip K. Dick’s science fiction works.

Before his untimely death in 1982, author Philip K. Dick had reportedly been working on an ambitious new book. According to an A.V. Club article, the work was titled The Owl in Daylight, and centered on an amusement-park owner who develops artificial intelligence in order to streamline operations. Eventually, the computer becomes sentient and traps the owner inside the park, forcing him to engage in its puzzles in order to get out.

If that sounds familiar, it should. The movie Tron was released in the summer of 1982, some months after Dick’s death, and follows a similar narrative structure. The writer’s widow went so far as to say that The Owl in Daylight was “a clear rip-off of a movie called Tron,” even though it is unlikely Dick had any foreknowledge of the film’s plot.

Atlas Obscura reports that the details of the book were recently uncovered in a letter Dick penned to his agent at the time, which outlined the major plot points.

Dick’s wife went on to publish her own rendition of The Owl in Daylight in 2009 at the behest of Dick’s fans, and even planned a follow-up, The Owl in Twilight, but that work has yet to come to fruition.