Copyright 1999 The American Reporter. All Rights Reserved.

Allan R. Andrews is vacationing. This column, in slightly varied form, appeared in the February 27, 1994, edition of Pacific Sunday Magazine, published in Tokyo, Japan, by Pacific Stars and Stripes.

A SUMMER MEMOIR: STICKBALL IN THE CITY
By Allan R. Andrews
American Reporter Correspondent

WASHINGTON -- The game is associated with Willie Mays, but every city boy played it. Occasionally someone will suggest the game was played with a mop handle and a tennis ball.

Mop handles, however, made lousy bats, and tennis balls -- well, they were made for rackets and people who wore white uniforms in the park on Sundays.

The authentic stickball bat was fashioned from a straw broom. After the straw was mostly burned off and strewn in the street when the anchoring nail was pulled, the remaining handle, usually a bright red, blue, or green wooden rod, made a superb bat. It tapered from the thin gripping end to the fuller, more solid broom end about an inch and a half in diameter.

Ideally, the broom destined to become a stickball bat had been coaxed from someone's mother's closet. On rare occasions, we pooled what coins we had and dispatched someone to Hazelkorn's Variety Store to purchase a new broom.

With its straw removed, the broom died and a stickball bat was born.

The ball had to be purchased. During my stickball career, the price of pink Spalding Hi-Bounce balls -- known all over the city as Spaldeens -- went for 15 to 35 cents.

The best balls were brand new and didn't yield too easily to pinching and squeezing. A new Spaldeen thrown hard against the asphalt street would probably bounce 35 or 40 feet into the air.

A good hitter could drive one the length of a city block and half again. Power hitters regularly hit home runs from the manhole cover that served as home plate on Tenth Avenue and 16th Street into Brooklyn's Prospect Park on the other side of the next street.

Fielding a hit Spaldeen was a skill gained only with long practice. The bouncy ball had a way of being consistently mishandled -- into one's hands and out again before the fingers could close around it.

Often the hit ball took on an egg shape in the air; it was called, in fact, "an egg ball" and because of this tremendous backspin was especially difficult to catch.

A Spaldeen might last two good games before it split its seam and flew through the air in two halves. I saw a game in which a batter hit a ball that split in two and both halves were caught by different fielders.

Split a ball and you were out, whether the halves were caught or not.

Authentic stickball was played with pitching. The ball was pitched on a single bounce, and the batter had one swing. There were no balls and strikes and a foul ball meant the batter was out.

A game could be played with three on a side: a pitcher, a shortstop, and an outfielder. Competitive games were played with five or six on a team.

The pitcher doubled as a first baseman, and on a long hit anyone on the field -- usually a good catcher -- raced toward home plate to cover it in the event of a play there.

Outfielders often had to dodge cross-traffic on Prospect Park Southwest. A friend of mine boldly held up his hands to stop traffic -- including trolley cars -- while he camped under a high fly ball. Frequently, the cry of "time out" stopped the game for passing cars and trucks.

Playing fields had a variety of ground rules. Balls hit off the façade of an apartment house behind first base could be caught for an out. Balls hit into a clump of tees could be caught for an out as long as the ball never touched the ground. Balls hit up on a roof were automatic outs, unless they came off the roof again and bounced before being caught.

Balls going into enclosed yards fairly were ground-rule doubles.

Balls hit into Prospect Park on the fly were home runs.

Balls that rolled into sewers were dead, and the batter had to stop at whatever base he'd reached when the ball went into the drainpipe.

Incidentally, balls were retrieved from sewers by brave boys who lowered themselves into the black holes or by carefully using the high-shelf calipers borrowed from the corner grocery store. Spaldeens floated, so they were easily retrieved.

Games would break up if the bat broke or if the ball was lost or if the police, often called by fussy homeowners, came and confiscated our broom handle.

Every inning, a player of the batting team was stationed as lookout for approaching patrol cars, and the cry of "Chickee, the cops!" sent everyone scampering. It was the batter's duty to run and hide the broom handles somewhere.

As much as anything else, the automobile killed stickball. You can't play a great game if you have to battle parked cars all over the playing field.

There were times we played with four or five cars parked on Tenth Avenue. We even painted auxiliary first and third bases away from the curb so we'd still have a base if Mr. Cusick or Mr. Heine parked his car on top of the curbside bases.

Most neighborhoods in the city, however, lost their appeal as stickball courts when curb-to-curb automobiles and alternate-side-of-the-street parking became offshoots of American affluence. Schoolyards were never popular for stickball because it's much more difficult to slide on concrete than on smoother asphalt.

The game is still played, I'm sure, but not with the widespread vigor it once knew.

Cars destroyed stickball in another way. As boys' interests turned to automobiles, the allure of stickball faded. Young women seemed more interested in boys with cars than in stickball sluggers.

Return to Online Meanderings