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The other day I was talking with a guy I know who plays in a New York City softball league. He told me something I didn’t know but found amusing. If the field has a home run fence and you crush one over it, it’s not counted as a home run.
Bust one out and you’re out. No runs are scored. In Monopoly game parlance, it’s the equivalent of drawing the “do not pass ‘Go,’ do not collect $200” card.
You get punished for belting one out of the hard. You can’t trot around the bases wagging your number one finger in the air or pumping your forearm in the fashion of Kirk Gibson in the 1988 World Series.
This curious and un-fun rule is a stark departure from standard softball rules. Messes with the integrity of the sport. Leisurely and self-centered home run trots are the biggest reason to play softball. The only reason, actually, besides beer afterwards and during the games.
The sit-down-if-you-hit-one-out rule is supposed to discourage players from socking ding dongs because the balls can shatter car windows and bruise the foreheads of dogs being walked and people walking them – as if anyone really cares about that. Rulemakers stipulate high-flying balls could maybe shatter a pizza store window, hit a taxicab, who knows? This is New York City where anything can happen and usually does.
“So the other night I smoked one over the fence and walked to the bench,” my guy said. “It felt great.”
This struck me as not team-oriented. He didn’t care about scoring a run for his team nor getting on base. Sure his cheap thrill got satiated; he could show off his hitting power and tell friends, such as me, he rocked a home run and didn’t have to run the bases. But to what end?
Oversharing softball stories
Softball stories, whether they occur on 2nd Street in downtown Manhattan or Manhattan, Kansas or Mesopotamia, tend to be worth regaling people about if you’re in the mood for, are social intelligence-challenged, have a tendency to overshare, and focus on things that aren’t important.
Suspect softball throw
I want to regale you with another life-altering softball vignette about my best friend Rudy who – as you should know by now – plays a leading role in just about all sports stories I share from boyhood unless the narrative is about winning and classiness. When I share boyhood memories, Rudy doesn’t make cameos. He’s on stage always breaking things.
As nine-year-olds we competed in the softball throw contest at the Georgetown Prep Day Camp in Rockville, Maryland. As an aside, all we did was compete plus bicker throughout and afterward then for a nightcap go to Rudy’s house where his older brother was waiting to beat both of us up usually by spreading our fingers far apart until we begged him to stop.
In the softball throw event the rule was simple: the boy who heaves the ball the farthest wins. Stunningly, Rudy’s chuck outdistanced mine by an eighth of an inch. In 78-point Helvetica font, a feature article about this monumental upset ran on the front page of the next day’s Rockville Gazette with this quote from Rudy in a call-out box: “Sportface sucks at the softball throw.”
Reflecting on this episode now, I think he won because at that age he had bigger Robert Newhouse thunder thighs than me that gave him the extra power; a year or two later once my Robert Newhouse thighs expanded to a broader circumference, I never lost to Rudy in any athletic competition. In all sports we were often teammates but even then we focused on being at odds trying to beat each other more than our actual opponents.
If I’m being honest, I was slightly impressed and half-way forlorn in the aftermath of Rudy’s spectacular softball throw performance. At the moment it unnerved me. I had this fleeting thought: Maybe I had a real contender in the athletic arena.
But those concerns dissipated quickly. Something went awry with Rudy. In Little League baseball I don’t recall him ever once using that hose of an arm to gun down a baserunner chugging for third or home. Rudy’s throws were never accurate – exactly like his all over the lot dipsy doodle passes in basketball that powered him to the top of the Street & Smith yearbooks charts for posting the most turnovers in the 100+ year history of schoolboy basketball. Perennially, he averaged double-digit turnovers and, more stunningly, didn’t care. It was illogical then and remains so.
Being totally transparent, Rudy did “beat” me at one other sport if you want to be open-minded and call it a sport: roller skating. Once he realized I fell a lot when trying to skate he shouted: “Hey everybody, look at Chuck. He sucks at roller skating.”
The real reason Rudy humiliated me – with Rudy you could always count on a self-centered motive – was because he, having blossomed into puberty in all his wondrous glory right then at the roller rink, wanted to hold hands with the prettiest 7th grade girl during the holding hands session of roller derby. Being astute in his mischievous way, he knew the prettiest girls would beg me to hold hands with them but may not if they saw me skating like a clod. Rudy milked my rollerskating wreckage for all he could.
But this is about softball. See how rabble-rouser Rudy gets me sidetracked even now? The scars won’t fade.
Hot dogs and beer after the title
There’s another softball story, and it happened in the college intramural league. Our team was in the championship game, and we beat the crud out of the Law School team. Not surprisingly, they were jerks, so the win felt as sweet and chewy as Cherry Twizzlers. I stroked a bunch of hits because I had the hand-eye coordination of Tony Gwynn. Without me, we probably wouldn’t have won.
But my talent, albeit remarkable, is not the real nugget of the story. It was afterward that we had a party with 10 kegs of beer and fried 500 hot dogs on our outdoor grill. Countless co-eds showed up. The ladies wanted to be with the champions; they always do.
The impromptu championship party went on for hours and late into the night, and the rest of that memory is now fuzzy. All that remains from that rubble is my hand-eye coordination and Hanby’s bat going cold late in the season. He’s the guy who never comes by Starbucks anymore, where I am now because he doesn’t like me.
A few weeks later this same softball team and many others drove after final exams to the expansive, hard-sanded beaches in Myrtle Beach. We hung out a softball throw from where we never slept in the roach-riddled Sea Shell Motel. Sixty something of us college students lay on the towels. Rebecca Riggs was one of them and that was awesome. We felt energized – largely because of Rebecca – so wanted to play games.
We thought about softball on the beach but no one brought a bat. Somehow, somewhere, someone found an eight-foot-long broomstick. I know what you’re wondering: Who sweeps the sand on the beach? On that day none of us wondered or cared what the answer to that question was and we still don’t nearly half a century later.
“Hey,” someone said, probably Sillie Willie, “we can play stickball.”
None of us had played that except Sillie on the riot-laced side streets of Fort Lauderdale with his high school football teammate Terrence Ewell.
“Sweet T we called him,” said Sillie, who backed up Sweet T as a second string wide receiver on the Fort Lauderdale high school football team. Will’s socially conscious teammates relegated Will to the back of the bus for away game rides to an eclectic assortment of Lauderdale-area football fields.
To set up stickball we made makeshift softball bases – a frisbee for first, a towel for second, a Goebels beer can for third – something like that. Under the sunniest skies you could ever imagine, with treacherous, tumultuous, tedious, terrible and time-consuming final exams now in the books to haunt us the rest of our lives, with grain alcohol in a trash can one beach down in case we needed our thirsts quenched, we started playing stickball.
The broom was half the width of a softball bat. It took Tony Gwynn-like hand-eye to hit the tennis ball, which meant I dominated the game. Home plate was at the back of the beach so center field was the Atlantic Ocean, which is big and blue and has 2,341 sharks in it. I smashed a few into the deep blue sea – a couple hit a dolphin fin which was where I was aiming. Feeling haughty, I showboated around the bases as fielders heaved beer cans at me and spit out the beers in their mouths into my face.
Bopping homers was a learning experience, kind of like final exams but not really, as well as a display of egotistical “look at me” behavior. I learned, as did everyone else, that if you did connect with the tennis ball on the fat part of the stickball bat it would get launched just as far as a corked Major League Baseball bat especially if you had been inhaling anabolic steroids for 10 days before stepping to the plate.
You had to hit the ball flush and almost no one was able to do this except me and Pumpkin Head. So it was a great day for everyone watching me dominate in stickball for six hours straight on three consecutive days before we had to go home for the summer fully cognizant and regretful we would never play stickball together again.
Wonders of wiffle ball
Then there are wiffle ball stories. They’re pretty much the same as softball stories except different. The main thread is they’re unimportant.
Any wiffle ball tales I will tell have to start with my older brother. At our beach house we had a makeshift field. We still do but none of us play anymore which I will get to later.
All my brother cared about was hitting grand slams. That’s how he got his kicks. So he would deliberately hit three dribblers into the ivy which, by our rules, equated to automatic singles. With the bases loaded, he’d then start eyeing the barbed-wire always rusty home run fence in center that separated our property from the neighbors behind us. With the sacks full he would get patient and start to dial in, and talk trash to me, the pitcher, about he was “going to take me deep.” This went on for about 25 years.
“We should make those dribblers an out so you can’t load up the bases just so you can get your jollies trying to hit a grand slam,” I would complain. “And plus you never run out those singles so those should be outs. You’re so lazy.”
Not only was my brother myopically focused on one thing – cracking grand slams – he detested running out his hits even more. All he wanted to do was stand at the plate, manipulate the situation so he could get the sacks full, then see if he could launch one into the beach sky, over the fence, and not move.
Then brag to me the rest of the day and the rest of his life about the time he cracked a grand slam off me in wiffle ball. Big brothers and little brothers behave poorly. We get petty.
Ushering in the next generation
Speaking of petty, another generation in our family started arriving at the beach. My brother and I introduced them to wiffle ball rules: never run, only try to hit grand slams.
No matter how many times we spelled out these simple rules, my nephew never bought into them. He would pitch to me and try to get me out. I think it’s because of the way I acted.
“That’s not what this game is about,” I would say politely trying to educate the young man. “You pitch meatballs to me and I try to crush the ball over the fence. That’s it. No pitching. No curveballs. I know you can throw curves with a wiffle ball but that’s not why we’re here. Your job – and it’s your only job – is to imagine you’re a kitchen chef putting gigantic meatballs on a silver plate for me to whack to the moon.”
Our profound misalignment never got resolved. Every summer for years we would debate this exact point of contention and the wiffle ball games got more contentious and less focused on grand slams. Finally, we all just gave up and stopped playing wiffle ball.
It’s probably just as well.
You’re free to disagree.
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Sammy Sportface, a sports blogger, galvanizes, inspires, and amuses The Baby Boomer Brotherhood. And you can learn about his vision and join this group's Facebook page here:
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