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In the idyllic schoolyard days of my youth the game of stickball was king. Any kid worth his salt back then loved the game with undying passion. You didn’t need expensive equipment to play. The stick bat was a sawed-off broom, which I am ashamed to admit, was stolen from someone’s backyard. The ball was rubber with nubs all over that we indelicately called pimples. They cost 10 cents apiece. While many kids pitched to a painted box on a wall, we threw to a teammate with a catcher’s mitt. The whole thing became quite quirky because your teammate called the balls and strikes, not exactly a dispassionate arbiter.
Three older guys joined our games on the weekends. Their work was through and, for a few hours on a Saturday afternoon, they too could return to the days of their youth when there was no better way to spend time than playing stickball. Back in the day in South Philadelphia, men carried the nicknames into adulthood and for the rest of their lives. Even today, I am not sure whether the names we knew them by were real or imagined. All we knew was it was a fine day for stickball when Joe Blondie, Rudy Shmay and Ralphie Day were seen entering the schoolyard.
Shmay and Day liked to pitch, but like many adult men, they had left their best stuff in their teens. Shmay threw a blooper pitch, a change-up off the change-up. He wore taps on his shoes that clattered on the cement pavement when he finished his windup. He was the son of a shoemaker, if memory serves right (maybe that explains the taps), and I think, a veteran of the Korean War, though he never spoke about it. How I know this I am not sure.
Day was my favorite pitcher to hit against. He would contort his hands in the windup and you would expect the ball to do all kinds of dipsy doodles. But after a few pitches, you realized no matter what Ralphie did to the ball, it came in as straight as the proverbial string. Day’s forte was his dogged persistence. No matter how many line drives you would smash off him, his facial expression never changed. And back he would come with the next pitch, another straight ball that would travel not too fast and not too slow, the perfect batting practice toss.
The key to the success of these three amigos was Blondie, named because his hair was kind of a dirty blonde, a relative rarity in our Italian neighborhood. He always was the catcher whether Shmay or Day pitched. Since the catcher called balls and strikes the guys rarely walked a hitter. With Blondie, they each had the control of great Hall-of-Fame pitcher Christy Mathewson.
The three amigos were good sports. It was understood they would purchase a carton of pimple balls prior to the game from Ben’s Luncheonette, a place where you could buy loose cigarettes without identification. You might think a carton of balls was a lot just to play one or two games, but on the days when I faced Shmay or Day, sometimes a carton wasn’t enough. Some of the balls would burst or get lopsided from being knocked around, and they were immediately tossed aside and used another afternoon to make halfballs. Others would fly with some frequency over the roof, gargantuan drives that would do a big-league hitter proud, especially on days when I was matched up against Shmay or Day.
Day affected a kind of cockney accent for some strange reason. It was as if he were doing a bad Stan Laurel impression. "Guvner," he would say, "step in the batter’s box and take your licks." If you were inclined to wait for a genuine strike at which to swing, chances were Blondie would call you out on a pitch over your head or bouncing in front of you. "A perfect strike," he would say, "now get the bat off your shoulder." No matter how many runs you scored, you could never shake Shmay or Day’s confidence.
I read recently where Ralphie Day passed away. Shmay has been gone for quite sometime, and I haven’t seen Blondie since he coached my kid in Little League football. But some of the best days of my youth were spent in that old schoolyard, in those epic stickball battles against the three amigos where the secret to success was always swing at the first pitch.
