Stickball isn’t a game … it’s a tradition
No Big Bertha’s here … only sticks, rubber balls and your bare hands.
In the Bronx, all roads lead to stickball.
Forget about working the count, you get one swing for the money in stickball.
NEW YORK — It’s nearly noon on the last Sunday in May, and Pedro Eliza walks hurriedly toward a parked black Mercedes SUV in which his friend, Eddie Espada, sits with a baggie of unused syringes. Eliza, 40, who has made the short commute up to Unionport from his home in Spanish Harlem, opens the front passenger-side door and reaches for a piece of rubber tubing that Espadahas extended to him.
The sharp of a severed syringe is clamped to one end of the hose, and to the other a small, 250 CC air compressor. From the dashboard, Eliza grabs a pink ball — indistinguishable in size and consistency from a racquetball — eyes a random spot on it, and eases in the needle. He flips on the compressor and counts off seven seconds before sliding it out. Plugging the pinpoint rupture with his thumb, he hands the ball to Espada, who draws a viscous rubber cement from a jar with a separate syringe, inserts the sharp into the same hole, and plunges out a touch to seal it. Eliza looks up and grins. “That’s how you pump a Bronx stickball.”
Espada and Eliza are two of the nearly 130 men, ranging in age from about 18 to 65, who have descended on this Bronx neighborhood near Parkchester for the New York Emperor Stickball League’s Memorial Weekend tournament. Fourteen teams, including squads from San Diego and Miami, participated in the NYESL’s 24th annual event, generally considered the World Series of self-pitch stickball by those who play the game. There’s no money or trips to Disneyland awaiting the winning team, only a trophy and bragging rights.
Like 16-inch softball in Chicago, stickball has and will always belong to New York City. It’s a sport that has rarely existed outside the confines of a movie screen for the bulk of Americans. To hear the word conjures images of the Big Apple circa Eisenhower: uncapped fire hydrants arcing their precious cargo onto narrow streets while neighborhood kids toss together pickup games on blistering summer afternoons. Many of the NYESL’s older members did inhabit such a landscape growing up, but stickball’s spot as the preeminent preoccupation of New York’s young began to weaken in the late ’70s and early ’80s. As kids started to gravitate more toward basketball courts, a couple of stickball diehards, Frank Calderon and Frank Sanchez, decided to organize a league in the Bronx for those who still loved playing. The NYESL held its first game in 1984.
Richard Marrero has been involved with the league for 22 years, initially as a participant and currently as both a player and the league’s president. Imposing at first glance, with a bull-like physique, dark, heavy beard and a low-set black cap, Marrero’s visage is less that of an ambassador than it is a bouncer, though he embodies the former. Both affable and alert, he stands at the curb and watches a game unfold not four feet ahead on Stickball Boulevard, a side street that the league has adopted as its own.
“This here is the real deal,” he says, taking in the scene. His own team, the Gold, is playing one of four games happening simultaneously in a two-block area. (The Gold are the closest thing to a dynasty in the league, functioning as stickball’s version of the Yankees. They’ve taken more titles than any other team, winning again this year for their third consecutive victory.) For the tournament, every team plays six games, three each on Saturday and Sunday, and the eight teams with the best records going into Monday are seeded accordingly and play single elimination matches until there’s a champion.
The NYESL plays “fungo” or Bronx-style stickball, which means that instead of utilizing a pitcher, batters toss the ball up and pick it off one or two bounces. Games are seven innings, three outs to an inning, and scoring typically mimics that of baseball in that runs are hard to come by. The pumped balls are also unique to Bronx-style, employed so that the ball travels farther. There are eight fielders, positioned in the same roles as in baseball, as well as first, second and third bases 80 feet apart. It’s 90 feet from home plate to first, and the batter is allowed the full range of that first ten feet to hit the ball. If he steps on or over the line painted at the ten-foot mark, it’s an out.
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