by Ralph Maltese | May 28, 2017 | Uncategorized
The Triangle Part 2
If truth be told, it was the fault of Joe Croce and his brother Stephen for initiating our attempts to upgrade the Triangle (see previous blog, The Triangle Part 1). Joe and Stephen’s older cousins played semi-professional baseball, and they donated their old uniforms to their kin. When Joe and his younger brother showed up at the Triangle sporting blue-striped cotton uniforms with logos and laces and attached belts, we were all envious. Suddenly our dungarees with worn spots or even holes in the knees seemed rather shabby. There was not much we could do to improve our personal appearance, but we decided to spruce up the Triangle, our playing field.
Paint was not available, so we thought we could more clearly define the baselines by running string between bases. A few nails hammered into the ground and wrapped with twine seemed to do the trick. The actual bases, which were nothing more than bare spots in the grass, needed upgrading. Over the following week parents of the Triangle Gang began missing patches of extra carpet and one or two small throw rugs. Behind home plate was the heavily trafficked Edgewater Avenue, and, as our pitching (and catching) had a tendency to miss the fine corners of the strike zone, catchers were constantly dodging cars to retrieve errant pitches. Over the succeeding week, parents of the Triangle Gang noticed the disappearance of hammers, nails, and planks of wood. We built a rather large wooden backstop, not particularly symmetrical, but hopefully wide enough to prevent wild pitches (which, for some players, were all pitches) from bouncing off Chevy’s and Ford’s and the occasional Mack truck.
After two weeks of after school stringing, and nailing and hammering fingers blue, the Triangle Gang was ready to play its first game on the renovated Triangle. With some difficulty, we dragged the five foot by six foot high (some of us, acutely aware of Gundy’s propensity to make Ryne Duren look like a pin point pitcher in comparison, wanted the backstop even wider and higher) down the sidewalk along Shaler Boulevard. Pulling and tugging, we finally had the backstop in place, and we gathered in a circle around it, marveling at the massive structure that loomed over us much like the chimpanzees in awe of the monolith in the movie, 2001 A Space Odyssey.
The Triangle seemed to gleam with newness, the taut strings of twine connecting the bases, the bases themselves testimonies to our parents’ taste in carpeting and throw rugs, and the sentinel over all of it our wooden backstop, like the billboard eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckleberg from The Great Gatsby looking over the entire expanse of the Triangle and seeing all. No township officials seemed to mind what we were doing—after all, the only value the triangle of green grass spotted with brown patches possessed was its importance to the Triangle Gang. The township officials also did not express any appreciation of our enhancements.
We also dressed appropriately for the occasion, sporting our best baseball caps and dungarees. The Croce brothers showed up in their cousin’s semi-pro uniforms of course. The night before I had worked some linseed oil into my Mickey Mantle Glove. The lettering identifying the glove as America’s Choice was beginning to fade, but the manufacturer’s tag, Made in Japan, was still legible. I was ready.
We spent the usual two hours choosing sides, this particular occasion adding a wrinkle to decide which team captain had first choice of players. Whoever won the hand over hand contest with the Louisville slugger now had to hold the bat with the tips of his fingers while the opposing captain had three chances to kick it out of the first captain’s frail grip. That settled, sides chosen after much deliberation about fairness (“if you pick Don then I get two picks”), and positions determined in the field, who was going to play where, it was time to play ball.
Gundy struck out the first batter, Bernie, which was to be expected since Bernie swung at any pitch this side of the Hudson River. Next, Sal Grasso got the meat of the bat on a Gundy changeup and hammered it to left field. We were all cheering as we encouraged Sal to keep going after he rounded first. Sal obliged and picked up speed rounding second. We watched his brother Joey have trouble picking up the ball from Mr. Arnuff’s front yard, and so we screamed at Sal to keep going. Sal put it into fourth gear and had just passed third when it happened. He tripped over the string delineating the baseline between third and home and staggered like a wounded and drunken sailor trying to regain his balance into Englehardt Terrace, a street that usually accommodated light traffic, but, at this moment, looked more like the New Jersey Turnpike. There was much honking of horns and some adult language issued from anonymous drivers, but Sal avoided getting run over, although when he slid on the macadam he tore his dungarees and his knees needed massive doses of mercurochrome that evening.
Of course, since all the strings between bases were connected, Sal’s dragging of the third base to home line meant all the strings between all the bases were now fettered to the sneaker of his right foot. Identifying the baseline by stringing twine had been a colossal mistake. In a half hour or so, we were able to free Sal’s entanglement with the twine and he endured our taunts referring to his appearance as a piece of prey wrapped in silk by a giant spider.
The problem was, of course, what to do with the play. While Sal struggled furiously to extricate himself like a fly in a spider’s web, Joey retrieved the ball, tossed it to Stephen who tagged Sal out. What ensued was one of the thousands of arguments involving fairness. To kids, fairness is a perpetual ethic that permeates every deed, every action, every observation. Kids are obsessed with fairness. Adults not so much. Was it fair that Sal was called out because he tripped over a field enhancement that, for him, became an impediment? We argued and deliberated and shouted our opinions on universal justice without either side convincing the other. Later on in college, the Augustinians taught me to examine the morality of every action, especially as a causality of future events. But even as a youthful member of the Triangle Gang, I pondered the fairness of the call. Was Sal an operative of his own free will, and thus responsible for being tagged out, or was he a victim of predestination, his destiny determined by the community stringing the bases together? The arguments, heated as they were, settled nothing. Fortunately for us kids, we had a fall back stratagem, a tactic of last resort, if you will. It was called the “Do Over.” The Do Over was anchored in fairness, the history of previous events totally forgotten, life beginning anew for both sides. Sal got to bat again….and struck out, but no one questioned the fairness of the Do Over. In my more naïve moments of fantasy, I imagine the adult world, married couples, political parties, even nations, employing the Do Over. “Okay, let’s settle this argument by a Do Over. Let’s go back to the beginning of the conversation involving loaning money to your brother.” “Maybe we were too hasty in voting to eliminate that health care bill. Do Over.” “Invading your country may have been a mistake. Do Over.” But the adult world will never adopt the Do Over. We attach our egos to historical decisions and can’t start anew from the moment. Pity.
Despite Sal’s destruction of our baseline guidelines, our inaugural game went smoothly until the third inning when two things happened. Ernie was a short, muscular boy who approached every sport with a snarl. If sneakers could be sharpened so that sliding into the second baseman would result in a hospital visit, Ernie would carry a rasp. On the first pitch of the third inning, Ernie grounded to short, and, with Kevin bungling the ball, Ernie had a chance to be safe at first. Ernie decided to slide into first which resulted in the base (which was Bernie’s mother’s laundry room throw rug) zipping out into Shaler Boulevard and plopping down on the windshield of a Ford, blinding the driver. There was much honking of horns and adult language and Bernie begging the driver to give him back his mother’s laundry room rug. Our “bases” obviously had their shortcomings.
In the same inning came the third disaster. Dennis, the largest member of the Triangle Gang, was perched on third, thanks to a series of errant throws. Dennis tagged up on Joe’s fly ball to shallow centerfield and raced home to beat the throw. Bernie, the catcher, reached far to his right to catch the wild throw as Dennis barreled to the plate, his mass and his momentum propelling him past Bernie, past home, past the throw and into the backstop smashing the planks of wood into, essentially, kindling sticks which sprayed Edgewater Avenue. We gathered around Dennis as he lay there, studying cloud formations and trying to recover from the collision with two hundred pounds of wood. We surveyed the ruins. Baseline strings gone, bases themselves disappearing in the muck of mud, backstop shattered. We could have continued the game, but our hearts were not in it. Our collective dream of playing on a world class venue had evaporation in the vicissitudes of reality.
The world changes with time. All four of our children played organized sports—baseball and basketball and soccer and field hockey. I assistant coached on a variety of township and travel teams, and Polley was a basketball league commissioner. Our kids seemed to have fun, we met a number of nice parents, and we enjoyed our children’s participation. I cannot recall, however, any of my four playing in a pick-up game. And I regret that. Ted Williams, noted slugger and baseball manager, was asked why the quality of hitting in the major leagues seemed to be in decline. Williams laid the problem at the feet of organized sports. His rationale was that in organized baseball, each kid comes to bat maybe four times a game. At the Triangle, we got to bat four times an inning, depending on the quality of fielding, and we would play two or three games a day…..at least.
But I also wonder about the larger picture, about more than developing good baseball hitters. Someone once said, “The business of children is play.” Working out the fairness of things, not only abiding by the rules but negotiating and collaborating on establishing the rules in the first place (with no adult as overseer) is a huge part of growing up. We made the rules, and from them evolved certain ethics which formed the core of our adult consciences. We tried and failed and tried again thus attaining a definite stick-to-it mentality, a skill now identified in educational circles as perseverance. Our parents did not have the need or desire to organize every activity. Our choices were left to us, intelligent decision making another important attribute of the healthy ego and learned through practice, through trial and error. And, when mistakes were made (and they were made in abundance) we peacefully strategized our way out of them with the Do Over. Many adults would profit from learning how the Triangle Gang got along, and I hope the youths of today form their own Triangle Gangs and enjoy the opportunities to make the rules and struggle with fairness.
by Ralph Maltese | May 7, 2017 | Uncategorized
The Triangle Part 1
Tis the season. A spring breeze wafts through my body, bringing futuristic images of standing in a green valleyed mountain stream casting a fly to anxious trout. And with the imagined future comes remembrances of things past, of searching the bottom of my boyhood closet for my baseball mitt and Louisville slugger. Once I gathered my equipment and checked with my father to see if any chores needed to be completed, I let the screen door slam behind me as I joined the other aspiring heroes of the baseball diamond at the Triangle…..except our baseball diamond was not a diamond at all.
The Triangle (a scalene triangle for you geometry majors) was a patch of grass with a couple of trees near the edge of the hypotenuse, and a bus stop bench snuggled between those trees, an oddity since no bus stopped anywhere near the wooden seat anchored in concrete.
Our playing field was bordered by the heavily trafficked Shaler Boulevard along one side, Edgewater Avenue at the base, and Englehardt Terrace on the third side. As the Triangle Gang gathered, we jostled for seating positions on the bus stop bench. Our town had a large and well equipped park with several basketball courts and two baseball fields, but those were the playing grounds of the big kids, those older guys who were just entering ninth grade, and who guarded their recreational domains with great fervor. Sometimes one of the scouts for the Triangle Gang would alert us to the fact that Memorial Park was void of big kids and thus available, but, as often happened, halfway through the first inning the big kids would show up and shoo us away. Once in a while, needing someone to play deep, deep right field, they would allow the tallest of us to participate. But this was rare. The Triangle was our recreational home.
On the bus stop bench we waited for more screen doors to slam as our friends, dragging baseball bats girdled with baseball gloves, showed up. Our first order of business was to choose sides, a dynamic that followed a rigid etiquette, was of supreme importance in our dedication to fairness, and which usually took about two hours. Once we settled on the rival captains, usually the two best players in the gang, we watched as they alternatively grasped the bat, working their hands up the Louisville slugger to the end of the bat handle for the right of first choice of player. All of us gathered around to see whose finger got the very tiniest tip of the handle, thus winning. Once that was settled, the choosing of sides began. We all knew each other’s strengths and weaknesses. Bernie was skinny and fast around the bases, but his ability to get on base was limited since he could not hit a ball the size of a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day balloon. Gundy was a good pitcher, but a hothead and threw wild when agitated….which was often. All of us sported ribs dotted with black and blue bruises raised from Gundy’s frustration. The Grasso brothers were even in their mediocrity. Don, my best friend, could hit and field, and was always one of the first to be chosen. As we waited to be picked, the nervousness grew. As the captains deliberated, the unchosen begin to look down and dig holes in the grass with their big toes, embarrassed by not yet being picked. I was often chosen somewhere in the middle, my ability to hit with power a big asset, but my fielding incompetence a well-known, even legendary, liability. Teams constantly worked to find positions in the field where I was least likely to field a ball. My father taught me to fish with the bait you brought, so I hunkered down at home plate and tried to make my teammates overlook my poor fielding by hitting the ball hard and far.
Once the sides were chosen and judged to be fair, the captains needed to make some rules: if we were short players we had to shorten the playing field–“no hitting between first and second base;” “no sliding with cleats;” (this rule originated when Dennis, one of our larger players, wearing his cleats, slid into skinny Bernie sending him to the hospital for stitches and causing Bernie’s mom to complain, “He can’t take out the garbage no more!” This rule was easily observed since most of us wore sneakers. “no tagging any base.” This rule heightened the challenge of tagging someone out since it meant we actually had to throw to the base the runner was heading.
Usually my team assigned me deep, deep, deep centerfield so I was standing at the intersection of the heavily trafficked Shaler Boulevard and the not-so-heavily-trafficked-but-still-dangerous Englehardt Terrace. Playing in the outfield, it was necessary to keep up appearances and the chatter. “No player!!! No player!!!” “Easy batter! C’mon Gundy! Easy batter!” “Let’s go guys! Easy out! Easy out!”
I am chattering all this encouragement, but what I was really thinking was, “Oh, God, please Merciful God in Heaven, don’t let him hit a fly ball to me! Please, God!” Far too often God was in the stands in Memorial Park watching the big kids play. There would be the crack of the bat, and the ball would begin its long, high arc toward my position. My eyes would pick it up, and eons would pass as I imagined the embarrassed heckling I would endure as I fluffed this catch. Circling, looking up, circling, looking up, glove raised, I would dance in the intersection of Shaler Boulevard and Englehardt Terrace, trying to avoid tire tracks suddenly being impressed on my body and praying that the ball would find my mitt because my mitt was sure as hell not going to find the ball.
Most times the ball bounced somewhere in the general area I was circling, and a collective moan would rise from my team as I chased down the ball. Not to equate playing baseball with World War II, but my father, a navy veteran of that conflict, shared his experience by recalling a common G.I. refrain: “War is long periods of extreme boredom punctuated by moments of extreme terror.” My moments of terror tracking a fly ball were interspersed with stretches of time staring deep into my glove which had Mickey Mantle’s signature (Mickey was my baseball hero—along with Yogi and Elston Howard). Across the back of my glove was the lettering “America’s Choice,” and on the tiny tag that protruded from the base of the glove was the manufacturer’s identification: “Made in Japan.” As I stared into America’s Choice and lost concentration on the game I was playing, my mind ran through a hundred fantasies involving school, fishing in the Adirondacks, and becoming a world famous writer. Occasionally I would be rattled out of my reverie by a honking horn from a car whose driver thought a boy standing in the middle of the street with a baseball glove to be an imposition.
There were other dangers. Englehardt Terrace is a nice sounding street name that befits a nineteen fifties suburb. Just the word “terrace’ evokes images of a villa in a Venetian olive grove. But Englehardt Terrace was the residence of one of the most fearful adults that terrified the Triangle Gang. Mr. Arnuff, was a burly, thick armed man who always wore a sleeveless undershirt which revealed the jungle of bushy hair that hid his skin. Mr. Arnuff employed a German shepherd to patrol his cyclone fence.
I owned a Lionel Train set, and one of my prize accessories was a flag man who popped out of his station swinging a lantern whenever the train rumbled past. When a baseball came within twenty feet of Mr. Arnuff’s yard, he would pop out of his house and, waving a fist (or a can of Schlitz) he would yell at us and scream for us to go play somewhere else. We called him Adolph, but never within his earshot. Considering the post World War II mindset that shadowed all us kids, this was an apt moniker. One of us had to go retrieve the ball, and this was done on tiptoe, head down, never daring to meet Adolph’s gaze. Once, slowly inching up to the cyclone fence to pick up the errant baseball, I glanced up to see Mr. Arnuff’s head eclipsing the sun and his German shepherd baring its teeth as it watched me bend down and reach for the red stitched orb. “Sorry, Mr. Adolph.” I mistakenly used our code name. His mouth opened wide in anger and his body grew and grew until it seemed to fill the universe. Horrified by my faux pas, I turned and ran only to see that the rest of the Triangle Gang was way way way ahead of me dashing madly down Shaler Boulevard. We did not play ball at the Triangle for a week after that debacle.
What was worse than Adolph, popping out of his house to yell and threaten us, were the times when the ball landed in his yard, and he did not appear. We would gather at a discreet distance to decide who would undertake the almost suicidal mission of retrieving the ball. This argument over who had the most to live for took about three hours. Whoever owned the ball, before we began playing, called “Chipsies on the ball!” meaning whoever was responsible for losing it would have to recompense the owner. Despite the fact that I had not hit the ball, amongst the outfielders it was my turn. Besides, I had to atone somehow for dropping the last five fly balls that had come my way. I crawled up the slight slope to Mr. Adolph’s cyclone fence. His house loomed above me, the Alcatraz of Englehardt Terrace, from whom no youthful outfielder ever escaped. I climbed by jamming my sneaker toes into the chain link fence and lifting myself over. To me the waving of the metal fence sounded as loud as Morley’s Ghost rattling his chains. I crept on all fours into the Dwarf English Yews and Blue Hollies where I thought the ball had landed. My knees became moist from kneeling in the wet grass and earth. I found a Spalding, a rubber ball that looked like the one I had homered into Adolph’s yard two years before. In a short time I discovered three more fully functional Spaldings and stuffed them into my pants pockets. No baseball. Still on all fours, I crossed a cobblestone path and, as I did so, I saw to my right the German Shepherd. He was facing away from me, nosing through a square of peat moss. I froze, then quickly hid in a patch of Rhododendrons beneath a window. I could feel my heart beating in my face. I waited until I could breathe again, and then I heard a familiar noise. “One on, one out, Kubek on deck.” It was the Yankee game on radio! Adolph listened to the Yankees! Everything stopped, and I mean everything. “Red sox are up by two, and Yankees hope to at least tie it up in the bottom of the ninth.”
“Where is Buttercup?” A female voice asked. There was a Mrs. Adolph? Eh, Mrs. Arnuff? None of us had ever seen her.
“Buttercup is out back sniffing through the peat moss,” Adolph responded. The ferocious and frightening German Shepherd’s name was Buttercup?
“Well, make sure he doesn’t mess up the bale. I need it for my tea roses.” I wished they would keep quiet. I couldn’t hear the game. Suddenly I became aware of a presence behind me. It was Don….my best friend.
“What’s taking you so long?”
“Can’t find the baseball.”
“Let’s get out of here. Didn’t you see the dog?”
“Buttercup?”
“Buttercup?”
“That is its name.”
“What its teeth named? Let’s go.”
“Swing and a miss. Strike two.”
“Ssssh.”
“If Adolph or Buttercup find us here, we are dead men.”
“Ssssh. Bottom of ninth, Yankees down by two.”
Don was a Giants fan….before they moved to San Francisco. “Come on! Forget the ball. I hit it. I’ll pay Bernie for it.”
“You go.”
“Richardson bounces one to second base. Petrocelli up with the scoop and fires it to first. Two out. Kubek up.”
I turned around underneath Adolph’s window and sat down leaning against the stucco wall. I felt a bulge in my butt. It was the baseball!! I whispered to Don, “Hey, here it is!” and flipped it to him.
I watched Don climb the fence, noisily.
“Come on, Tony. Get on.” Adolph was rooting for the Yankees, my team.
“Kubek slams one to the opposite field, Howard advancing to third. Two on, two out. The Mick up next.”
“Okay, Mickey, you can hit this bum. Come on, Mickey.” Adolph was really into this.
I echoed his sentiment….softly, like a prayer. “Come on Mickey.”
“Swing and a miss. Strike one.”
I leaned tighter against the wall.
“The pitch…. Call strike two.”
I heard Adolph erupt from his chair. “That pitch was this side of Jersey!!! Lousy call.”
“Mantle steps out of the box, rubs his bat and steps back into the box.”
I probably just imagined this, but I thought Adolph and I were breathing in sync.
“The pitch…Mantle swings……LONG FLY BALL TO RIGHT FIELD….GOING GOING GONE!!! Three run homer for the Mick, Yankees win, five four.”
I almost jumped up, but it wouldn’t have mattered. Adolph wouldn’t have heard me for all his jumping and whooping. I leaned around the corner to make certain Buttercup was still scrutinizing the peat moss, and I calmly re-climbed the fence and escaped from Alcatraz.
After that adventure, whenever I saw Adolph I tipped my baseball cap. One Saturday I strolled over to retrieve a ball that landed at the base of his fence. He was standing on the cobblestone, watching my every move. As I picked up the ball, I said, “Mr. Arnuff, the Mick went four for four yesterday.”
A flash of surprise crossed his face, either because he was shocked that I had the audacity to address him or that I knew Mantle’s numbers. He recovered in seconds, nodded his head, pointed to the bottom of the fence. “Watch my wife’s petunias.”
Next blog post: The Triangle Part 2 Learn how we tried to upgrade the Triangle.
