It is February and it would be nice if it were warmer. If it were warmer we could be playing stickball, a sport best played when the days are longer than now and being barefoot is more appropriate.

The rules of stickball are similar to baseball, but they are also unique to each stickball field and its geographical features. Uniform rules would not suit stickball.

Stickball is played on city streets. It is played in suburban schoolyards with cinder block backstops that are also used as schools. In the Midwest, it is played on the side of barns. Redwoods, 200 feet tall, are home plates in Oregon, with pine cones for balls and branches for bats. It has been said that in Idaho they play inside moving train cars, using potatoes. Chicago is blustery, so pitchers keep a bucket of water next to the mound to give some heft to their balls. And in the Sunshine State they use oranges, where hits are determined by the size of the explosion. Alaskans use ski poles and snowballs.

In Chilmark stickball is played at the Community Center against a plywood wall. The wall sits awkwardly between the post office and the Community Center’s suggestion of a baseball diamond. Some years rocks or bats, or a combination of the two, left holes in the green square that acted as its strike zone. There were decades when divots where the batter would stand looked like the deep grooves from car tires skidding out in soft sand. That was back when the game was more popular.

Stickball is played with a stick and a tennis ball. No one has ever played stickball in Chilmark while wearing shoes. It is a spring-to-fall sport. Winter is left for reading. In the spring the ground is colder, especially so after a frost, meaning stickball is played in the late afternoon. In summer it is better to swim during the heat of the day, therefore stickball is also played in the late afternoon. If you’re going to play stickball at the Community Center, it’s most convenient to swim at Lucy Vincent Beach where the surf can be rough, the rocks are frequent and some people are naked.

The sun sets behind the backstop, between a rock and a rosebush, above the post office parking lot and Stanley Larsen’s house, and Julie Flanders hidden cow pastures, and that sprawling property with the big white houses off Flanders Lane, and Everett Poole’s shop that smells of pipe tobacco, and the jetties and the bell buoy and Dogfish Bar where it eventually disappears into the ocean beyond the Aquinnah Cliffs (that are the same color as the sunset) and Devil’s Bridge.

Though if you are playing stickball at the Community Center you will only see the sun set through the oak tree canopies, where the rules have changed over the years. Keeping track of those changes fell on Peter Simon, who headed the Chilmark stickball league for many decades until his death not too long ago. As a player and commissioner there were some conflicts of interest, but Peter never abused of his power.

Each spring Peter would hold tryouts for the upcoming season by playing at the Community Center with a few friends consistently enough that inevitably some local teens would stroll over and ask Peter and his friends if they would ever consider letting them play in a game. Peter always gave preference to the ones who came prepared, the ones who were barefoot, by allowing them to tryout on the spot. They had initiative, he said.

If selected, the local teens could show up to the stickball field any afternoon around 30 minutes after Peter and his friends last swam in the ocean. If there weren’t enough regulars to field two teams then the local teens could play. If there were enough regulars the local teens had the option to stick around in case an injury occurred. The regulars were old so they were injured more often than the local teens who were teenagers and therefore more pliable.

If a game was knotted after the allotted six innings it would head into extra innings, which is when the pliable local teens were really valuable. The local teens could often be found hunting and pecking around the outskirts of the tennis courts looking for balls with more pop to use during their half of the inning at bat and for balls that looked like they had more pop but were actually flat for the innings when they would pitch.

As arms tired, elbows ached and tempers flared it was common for broomsticks to be substituted for heavier alternatives like broken shovel handles. The idea behind this being that one swing of the bat in a battle with a pitcher who themselves were battling the golden glow of the sunset could end the game — a walk-off home run in a game where there was no rounding the bases.

The shortest path to such salvation was in centerfield where the 10-foot vine covered fence surrounding the clay tennis courts stood. With clean contact a local teen could go from an alternate to regular in an instant and ride their bike home on the hills of South or Middle or North Road with a new found faith that everything might be all right after all.

Chris Fischer lives in Chilmark and New York city.