Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson for August 21, 2014

That’s what you call a “juiced ball.”

Poor Hobbes, totally exhausted!!

@A Common ’TaterYou are correct. A baseball has very little bounce and is extremely hard. Baseball is the root for the American idiom, “playing hardball.”

A batted golf ball gets some serious distance!

Heh, we’d use a tennis ball for street hockey sometimes. That was pretty wild.

I think it’s something like a super ball in the center of a golf ball that gives it its responsiveness.

I had one of those when I was a kid. Man, you could bounce that thing a mile in the sky.

Or…so it seemed at the time.

This might be the only strip with Calvin and Hobbes playing their two-guy baseball where Calvin actually scores a run.

Looks like Calvin hit a walk-off home run.

Calvin also had some earlier success at baseball:Click here: Calvin and Hobbes (March 7, 1986)Click here: Pearls Before Swine (March 31, 2013)The Peanuts Sunday strips sometimes contained a lot of action in the early days. Here is Charles Schulz’s 12th Sunday Peanuts:Click here: Peanuts (March 23, 1952)

Not to nit pick, but a tennis ball would not go anywhere near as far as a baseball

“Back in the day we had what was called a superball. I launched one one day, Never did find it.”

Yes, I remember those, too, We’d always try to play baseball with them and end up losing them.

Yes, the SuperBall was black, made of amazing Zectron, so it blended in with the ground and became impossible to find after you tried bouncing it over your house (like in the picture on the package). You can buy the SuperBall today on Amazon. But Wham-O really needs to market a new version colored fluorescent orange, with embedded electronic circuitry for computer location.

My brother-in-law once dropped a superball from the top floor of his house onto the driveway. Never found that one either.

A flat tennis ball makes a pretty good backyard baseball. As a kid we never could afford the new tennis balls but loved the old floppy ones handed down from tennis players.

Someday in the very distant future, archaeologists will be baffled when they excavate the remains of the North American continent and they discover thousands of small, hard, black, spherical objects buried in the dirt from coast to coast. One theory will be that our civilization buried them as religious objects to honor the god Wham-O. The puzzle will continue for years until the day when an archaeologist accidentally drops one of the sacred relics on the floor.

Suck it up Hobbs. Your starting to sound like John McEnroe.

All this talk about Super Balls reminds me of the Happy Fun Ball sketch from Saturday Night Live from 1991.

I used to whap tennis balls with an aluminum bat in my front yard 2 to 3 yards over. Probably lucky I never hit anyone with them or broke any windows XD

Calvin’s face expression in the 2nd panel reads “Time to go remind Hobbes that he needs to get his head in the game”

xxx

Me and Cindy Johnson. 5th grade recess. Every day. Good times! :~)

Hobbes seems to usually have the advantage when he and Calvin play sports. Nice to see the tables turned for once.

To: leftwingpatriot said, about 14 hours ago

@A Common ’TaterYou are correct. A baseball has very little bounce and is extremely hard. Baseball is the root for the American idiom, “playing hardball.”—Wrong!… A baseball has a lot of bounce! You must try one instead of speculating…Doug

@Doug A4 Take a baseball and bounce it off the ground in a manner similar to a tennis player bouncing tennis ball before a serve.Then we’ll talk.-

Bouncing balls

Cheat Rules of basebal.