Half-rubber

Half-Rubber, also known as halfball, is a bat-and-ball game similar to stick ball or baseball. The game was developed in the American South around the beginning of the 20th Century, possibly moving north with the Great Migration where it was widely played by the 1950s. It can be played will as few as three players and involves no running of bases.

The sport was typically played on a city street, now played in parks or the beach, using a baseball-sized rubber ball, that's been cut or sawed in half. Legendary origins of this "half-ball"' vary: from kids splitting a ball so that two games could be played at once; to an accident where a pimpleball broke in half and kids had no money to buy a new one so they played with a half-ball; to an innovation by adults who wanted to reduce the chances of the ball breaking windows on nearby buildings.

The cities of Savannah, Georgia and Charleston, South Carolina both claim to be the birthplace of half-rubber as early as the 1890s. In his book Halfrubber: The Savannah Game, Dan Jones interviewed players who dated the game as far back as 1913. In the August 1927 edition of American Speech Journal, English teacher Lowry Axley claims that the game originated in Savannah "some eight to ten years ago by two boys who got the idea when they were hitting pop-bottle caps with broom handles." In the January 1975 issue of Western Folklore, Hugh M. Thomoson says that he played half-rubber in rural Georgia in the mid-1930s.

In South Carolina, half-rubber traces its roots back to the Charleston neighborhood of Little Mexico. Other accounts record the game as coming from the freed slave community of Pin Point, Georgia. Half-rubber was played by African-Americans in the streets in and around both Savannah, and Charleston during the Great Depression. Some young half-rubber players went on to play professional baseball for the Negro Leagues during segregation, claiming that they got to be good hitters because it was easy to hit a whole baseball with a thick bat after years of swinging at a half-ball with a skinny broomstick.

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