The Kansas Move – Part 3 (Finale)

Guest Post by Campfire Musings

The Moment of Truth

I grabbed my glove, mustered up every ounce of 14-year-old courage I could find, and headed out the door. This was it—time to find out if the new kid could make it in Kansas. I had just turned 14 years old.

I jumped on my bike and made a left on the dirt road, pedaling down toward where those four kids were playing. My heart was doing that thing where it beats a little too fast, the way it does when you’re about to find out if you’re going to fit in or spend the summer as an outsider.

I turned the corner and rode my bike around behind their makeshift backstop, then just sat there with one leg down for support, watching. They were playing some kind of game I’d never seen before, and I didn’t want to interrupt until I figured out what was going on.

Breaking the Ice

Finally, the batter finished up whatever he was doing and came over to where I was perched on my bike.

“Who are you?” he asked, direct but not unfriendly.

“Are you the new kid?”

“Yeah,” I said, pointing toward our mobile home. “I live over there.”

By this time, the other three had wandered over, creating that familiar circle that forms when kids are sizing up the newcomer.

“What’s your name?” one of them asked.

I swallowed hard. Here we go. “Rodney,” I said.

They laughed, and I laughed too. It was a unique name, and I’d gotten used to people finding it a little odd. At least they weren’t being mean about it.

 

Learning the Game

“What were you guys playing?” I asked, genuinely curious.

“We call it ‘Scrub,’” one of them said. “Want to play?”

“You bet!” I said, grabbing my glove and laying my bike down in the dirt.

“What’s Scrub?” I asked as we walked back toward their playing area.

And here’s how they explained it: There’s a batter, a pitcher, and everyone else plays the field. There’s a rotation—from batter to fielder to pitcher and back to batter. As the batter, you get three outs.

The rules were beautifully simple and brutal: Swing and miss? You’re out. Hit a fly ball that gets caught? Out. Foul ball? That’s an out too. They had markers set up in left and right field, and you had to keep your hits inside those boundaries or you were out—because there weren’t enough fielders to cover the whole field.

But if you hit a ground ball or fly ball that wasn’t caught, you had to run to “the base” and make it back to home before the ball got back to the pitcher. If you beat the throw, you scored a run for yourself.

Pure and simple. Every kid for themselves. This was Scrub.

Finding My Place

That afternoon, I met Dennis, Tony, Gary, and his little brother Mike. Gary’s younger sister Vivian was there too, though she was too young to play—she just watched from the sidelines, probably storing up stories for later.

As we played, something magical happened. The nervousness melted away, replaced by that wonderful feeling of being part of something. The rhythm of the game, the trash talk, the cheering when someone made a great catch or got a hit—it was the universal language of kids and baseball, and it didn’t matter that I was from somewhere else.

I was just another player in the rotation.

By the time the sun started getting low and we called it quits for the day, I had that warm feeling in my chest that told me everything was going to be okay.

I was gonna like living here.

Home

That night, I kept thinking about Scrub and Dennis and Tony and Gary and Mike. About how a simple game in a vacant lot had turned a 300-person town in the middle of Kansas from “the middle of nowhere” into “home.”

Sometimes the best adventures aren’t the ones that take you far from home—they’re the ones that help you figure out where home really is.

And sometimes, it’s exactly where you least expected to find it.

The End

Scrub baseball, black Kansas dirt, and the magic of finding your tribe in the most unexpected places. Have you ever discovered that “home” was waiting for you somewhere you never thought to look? Share your stories of unexpected belonging in the comments.

Thanks for following along on these Kansas adventures—from car hood toboggans to vacant lot baseball, these memories remind us that the best stories often come from the most ordinary moments.