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Funny thing: by age 6 (again, remember the era) at least half of those playing already knew the basics of strategy and such when they arrived. You didn't have to explain a suicide squeeze to the better half of the roster, didn't have to explain that picking dandelions in the field was a bad idea (cause your ass would be sitting down if you did it more than once), that you ran out everything.
Baseball, in my neck of the woods, was king. (no doubt in part because of a decades long tradition of sucking at football, but still)
Another oddity you might not expect: intergender baseball was common at that point. The first team I played on had as many as 4 girls at a time, including one of our two best players. Softball was still kind of niche as a youth sport and competition was scarce, so the better players often opted to play baseball instead. And nobody did much more than blink about it once or twice, the proof was in seeing our best female break up a doubleplay with a textbook hard slide. Again, that didn't have to be taught, she arrived knowing.
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"I lit another cigarette. Unless I specifically inform you to the contrary, I am always lighting another cigarette." - from a novel by Martin Amis
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