Triumph and Tragedy in Mudville Read Online Free PDF Page B

(about half Jewish and half Catholic in our vicinity of rising working-class families, “ruled” by fathers still recently returned from service in World War II) lived and breathed baseball all the time, for our city then boasted three truly great teams. Nearly all our street games—the main point of this chapter—applied baseball rules to the object of the contest. To this day, my memory remains tickled by the diversity that I can remember, and frustrated by the several versions beyond my recall.
    I don’t mean to claim that we did nothing else but adapt our activities to the rules of baseball. For example, I was also an avid philatelist (particularly on rainy days), but I never really warmed up to the Lionel electric train set that my Uncle Milton insisted on giving me. A few outdoor games did not follow baseball conventions. I did enjoy my roller skates, and we did play touch football, but only in season. The big kids hogged the few basketball courts in the schoolyard, while adults took constant possession of the four handball courts. Indeed, in the weirdest “time warp” I have ever experienced, the same men have never yielded their ground. When my mother moved back to the old neighborhood about twenty years ago, I walked over to the schoolyard and found the very same men—not their sons and not their cousins—still presiding over the handball courts!
    I remember only three street games not played by baseball rules, and only one of these held any interest for me. Some kids played marbles (I didn’t), or one of the various versions using bottle caps and known as skelley. Others played mumbledepeg (called “land” or “territory” in my neighborhood), but you needed a switchblade, or at least a pen knife. I owned neither and couldn’t have brought such an implement to school in any case.
    Chinese handball enjoyed substantial vogue and was the single exception that captured my participation. As a key to spontaneous street games in major cities, one must acknowledge the two controlling variables: the nature of the projectile (the ball), and the geometry and distribution of sidewalk boxes. To play Chinese handball, you first need to put together a substantial and uninterrupted row of chalked boxes, all abutting a wall. Each player gets a box and the game proceeds as follows: using the canonical pink rubber ball (not always called a “spaldeen,” but more about this in a moment), a player hits the ball with his palm against the wall on a bounce. The ball must bounce into the chalked box of another player, who must then bounce it against the wall and into someone else’s box. Whenever a player fails to execute this maneuver properly, and his ball does not bounce clearly into another player’s box, then he has “lost” the round and must move down to possess the box at the end of the line, while all players below him move up a box. And so the game proceeds, until Mom calls you in for dinner. Really good players—not including yours truly, who never really got the hang of this particular activity—could hold onto their top boxes nearly forever.
    Let’s get to those spaldeens. Yes indeed, those smooth, hollow, pink rubber balls made by the A. G. Spalding company were the sine qua non of boy play. Prices varied, but I remember ten or fifteen cents as the usual cost. And you never abandoned a ball until all potential utility had been extracted. Each was made as a two-piece mold with a full center seam. Eventually, the ball would split in half, and Roger and I played many a full stickball game with half a ball—either because the drug store was closed on weekends or because neither of us could get our allowances for another day or two.
    Quite a bit has been written about New York streetball over the past two decades or so, and I have tried to follow the claims carefully. As usual in such circumstances, a few prominent errors emerge and then become entrenched by constant and mindless repetition. Let me then