I wrote a column the other day about sandlot baseball in Syracuse and Pat Murphy, the World Series-winning manager of the Milwaukee Brewers. Bob Campese and Dave Venditti, who grew up with Murphy in Eastwood, remembered – pushing toward 60 years ago – how the boys would spend long summer days playing pickup baseball at the old Nichols Field.
Campese described it beautifully: In the summer, you woke up, brushed your teeth, grabbed your glove and ran out the door. You hung the glove from your handlebars and pedaled straight to Nichols. Someone brought a ball, which you could not afford to lose in the tall grass. Maybe – if you were lucky – you had a couple of bats.
You played until you ran home for lunch to check in and stuff down a sandwich, and then you turned around and went back to play again all afternoon. You did what you could – cardboard or whatever – for bases. The more kids you had, the better. If forced to do it, right field became an automatic out.
In late afternoon you went home for dinner, and in the evening you returned to Nichols to either play Little League, or to watch the other teams.
My question to you: Does that resemble your childhood?
If so: Where did you play?
Send me those memories at skirst@centralcurrent.org, and I’ll put them together as a column.
Campese said that was basically his life – and Murphy’s life – from the time they were 8 or 9 until they were 12. The column is still receiving a passionate response from readers I’ve known for years throughout Upstate, readers feeling the same communion that struck a deep chord with me: What Campese described was a mirror version of my own childhood.
I spent a lot of the years while I was growing in a two-floor wooden rental down the street from the old Allegheny steel plant, in Dunkirk. As third or fourth graders, we started playing pickup in a nearby Central Avenue lot that was created when an old mansion burned down. Once we outgrew that makeshift diamond, we moved to the New York Avenue playground and then to a spot we called Jacob’s Field, a couple of empty lots of roughly Little League dimensions, and we finally ended up – as junior high kids – playing pickup baseball in the open space of the nearby Cardinal Mindszenty High School football field.
Then we hit eighth grade or freshman year, and everyone was playing organized sports or starting to worry about teenage years, and the simplicity of all those pickup years ended.
Once I grew up, I embarked on a newspaper journey that took me to Rochester and Niagara Falls and Oswego and Syracuse and Buffalo and finally back to Syracuse – all of them, like Dunkirk/Fredonia, great baseball communities. I have heard countless stories in all of those cities regarding sandlot baseball and the parks or schoolyards or brick streets or parking lots where kids would gather to play the game on long summer days.
The other deep connection I felt with Campese: I’m 67, roughly the same age. My parents were part of the World War II generation – so deeply influenced by baseball – that started local Little Leagues across the nation in the years after World War II. For countless cultural reasons, the baseball-centric childhoods I describe here seemed to fade away, at least as we knew it, bit by bit throughout the 1970s and 1980s (though I would love to hear about the more recent exceptions).
Drive through any of these Upstate cities now – as I illustrate with images of nearby Elmwood Park, in Syracuse – and baseball diamonds on which basepaths were worn to dust by countless feet in the old days are now, all so often, overgrown with grass.
Anyway, again: If you have powerful memories of playing pickup baseball in childhood, please write them down and email me. I’ll assemble them in a collection within the next week or so. If you have great childhood photos of those games, send those as well – though few among us, as 10-year-olds in those Kodak camera days, were worried about “pictures.”
The importance? Well, this thought is a bit of a sigh: Pat Murphy might be the last manager to win a World Series who will truly lived and understands the baseball era we’ll try to recapture here. I’ve already lost too many of the friends who played alongside us in those days, and I’ll be thinking of them – and an absolutely irreplaceable time in life – as I read your replies.
By the way, before I took the photos of the overgrown diamond at Elmwood Park that accompanies this piece, I went down in the basement to dig out the glove I used more than 50 years ago. I still have it. I suspect I am not alone.
