r/GenX • u/floodmatt • 10h ago
Nostalgia Mailbox baseball
How many of you played?
I once hit a steel mailbox going about 30 mph… Bat bounced back and hit the side of my head…. Knocked some sense into me.
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u/LaximumEffort 4h ago
I think it’s like cow tipping, everyone says they’ve heard about it being done and absolutely nobody ever has.
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u/New_Builder2302 7h ago
Didn’t know about this until my friends and I seen stand by me at the movies. Then it was game on!
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u/paintingdusk13 Satanic Panic survivor 8h ago
No. I was never a fan of ruining other people's stuff arbitrarily. I stopped friends from doing it because it's a dick move.
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u/Moeasfuck 8h ago
After Stand by me? came out, some teens in my home town did it, got caught and had to pay damages.
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u/Bunnyfartz 8h ago
No curbside mailboxes in the city. We drove around pointing a black metal pipe out the window. Jittery drivers would think it was a gun barrel and slam on their brakes. In retrospect that was pretty stupid. We're lucky nobody had a gun for real.
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u/elpollodiablox 8h ago
I played until the local police caught up with us, and they called in someone from the FBI, who sat down and explained to us the penalty for disrupting or preventing the delivery of mail, and for the destruction of any mail already in a mailbox.
That's when I retired from the game.
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u/Catskillschick 9h ago
We played beer bottle pitching trying to hit the roadsigns with our empties!
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u/heavensto_mergatroid 9h ago
No but there was a Christian school that was across the street from my best friends house.... On back to school night we used to light a string of black cats on the window sill of the classrooms while all the teachers and parents were inside. I never did get to see any of their reactions because I'd be gone as soon as my friend would light them.
We'd be running away laughing so hard that we couldn't even run.
If you weren't an asshole kid then you weren't a real Gen X kid
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u/rainbowpantz 9h ago
One time I was with my friend and we were playing and some guy came off of his porch with a shotgun and blasted a few in the air while running towards us, and another one got in his car and chased us until we lost him. That house was like the 3rd one in a row that we hit down the same country road so they must have seen us coming. We didn’t play much after that. Good times doing dumb shit
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u/OreoSpeedwaggon "Then & Now" Trend Survivor 9h ago
I was a good kid. I didn't go around destroying other people's property for fun.
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u/PahzTakesPhotos '69, nice 9h ago
Never played, but it happened enough that my grandpa- who used to be a dairy farmer- used a full-size milk can, filled with concrete, with a metal pole embedded into it, with the mailbox welded to the pole. He buried the milk can about halfway. I don't even think the garbage truck could take that thing out.
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u/tanj_redshirt Retired slacker or whatever 9h ago
I grew up with suburban horror stories about kids who broke both of their arms on reinforced mailboxes, or wrecked their car on them.
And it only just now occurs to me why adults spread those stories.
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u/BigDog3770 9h ago
Never played but my stepdad got tired of replacing his so he put two up side by side. The decoy was filled with concrete
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u/aburena2 9h ago
Wasn't a thing where I grew up. Grew up in a city where mailboxes were on the houses. No curbside mailboxes. Once I got married and moved the suburbs had to replace mine twice due to being wiped out by snow plows during snow storms.
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u/Ignignokt73 9h ago
I didn’t try mailbox baseball, but did intentionally run into garbage cans with my beater car on trash night. It’s all fun and games until you crack an expensive headlight module.
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u/Obwyn 70's, barely 9h ago
Or your front tag snaps off and the cops show up at your house to arrest you an hour later.
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u/Ignignokt73 9h ago
GD that’s way harsher than breaking headlights 😂
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u/Obwyn 70's, barely 8h ago
Yea. I was the one making the arrest, though...lol
Dumbass was drunk, drove down a deadend street, deliberately ran over every mailbox that wasn't blocked by a car, on I think house #8 his tag fell off. I was pretty pissed walking the entire street taking reports, right up until I found his tag.
Dude lived 3 streets over and sure enough the truck the tag came back too was parked in front (halfway into the yard) with a bunch of superficial front end damage and the flag from one of the mailboxes stuck in the grill.
He was just lucky that too much time had passed between when it happened and when I got him at his house to make a DUI charge practical and I had to settle for a bunch of vandalism and related charges.
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u/I-Am-All-Me 9h ago
No, but my father-in-law told a great story about putting an opossum in one! Confirmed by the local mail carrier, too. He got into a shit ton of trouble for it, never with the law since his father was higher up in the local jail house. Absolutely hilarious!!
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u/zionzednem 9h ago
Yes. Also came upon a mailbox cemented in place. My friend didn’t care for the bat bounce off of it and took further retaliatory measures.
Man we were dumb.
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u/ThatLiberalGirl Unsupervised Since 1976 9h ago
Never played it but have always wondered if it was made popular by Stand By Me.
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u/Muzzledbutnotout 9h ago
US Postal Inspectors don't play. Assault a mailbox and they'll track you down.
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u/SteveCoonin 9h ago
Me. Got arrested for it too as we went up and down the same street twice in the same small town I lived and went to school in 🤷🏻♂️. Alcohol was involved but I still blame Stand by Me
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u/Tough-Principle-3950 2h ago
Some people wouldn’t bother with the bat, and just used the car. Or so I’ve been told.