Stopwatch Baseball

Here is another game that is a great time-waster on road trips and rain delays.  You can play it anytime, anywhere, and all you need is a stopwatch, hence the name of the game.  It is amazing how much fun and intensity this game can produce, especially when the scoring gets really high.  I’m pretty sure my high score is 24 or 25 runs – runs as in baseball runs which usually only happens in lopsided high school or little league games.

The game is played 1-on-1.  You could use teams but this is more of a solo team game.  The first player to hit has the stopwatch and starts it.  The object is to get as close to exactly one second as possible.  When the player stops the watch, the time determines what the result of the play is.

• .97 seconds is a single.
• .98 seconds is a double.
• .99 seconds is a triple.
• 1 second exactly is a home run.

Anything other than those four times is an out.  There are no balls and strikes, double plays, or errors.  Runners advance as many bases as the batter, so a runner on first base will go to third base on a double or score on a triple.  Essentially they move base to base with the batter.

After three outs, the next player hits and gets his turn at bat.  The game goes back and forth just like a baseball game.  After nine innings, whoever has the most runs is the winner.  Pretty simple.

The amazing thing is the run total that can be accumulated.  Like I said before, the scores of games I have seen in stopwatch baseball are more like football scores than baseball scores.  If you find the right rhythm, you can “hit through the batting order” a few times in an inning.  Obviously a home run is what you want every time, but when it gets tough, you are hoping to simply get a man on base.  It sounds like real baseball except it is much easier.

To make things easier, you can also assign hits to times above one second.

• 1.01  seconds is a triple.
• 1.02 seconds is a double.
• 1.03 seconds is a single.

Find a stopwatch and have tons of fun playing this game (or get miserably frustrated)!  There are even apps that you can download to play the game if you don’t have an actual stopwatch.  This is just another example of how creative baseball players are and how the simplest things can help pass the time.

That would be a home run in stopwatch baseball!