Point of View: Borne Back
Our lineup is being depleted, as Steve Marley’s death this past week reminded me.
“The Relics can boast a lineup of four players over 50,” Uri Berliner, who went on to become NPR’s business editor and its Olympics correspondent, wrote of our Wolfie’s Relics slow-pitch softball team in these pages 29 years ago. “When the lights are shining at the Abraham’s Path ball field, and Father [Peter] Allen has brought along the insect repellent — on a still July night like this, with the smell of Heet and Ben-Gay thick and sweet in the air — an umpire will dust off home plate and cry out, ‘Play ball!’ ”
“Why it’s enough to make a man feel young again.”
Uri, who, by the way, thinks rugby will in time replace football in this country, quoted Hughie King in that article as saying, “ ‘We’re well-balanced. We’ve got people who can hit but can’t run and people who can run but can’t hit.’ Four consecutive hits won’t necessarily guarantee the Relics a run. . . . Once, during a tense, closely contested game, Jack Kirkwood, who has a plastic hip, lined a sharp single. As always, the Relics started to send in a pinch-runner for their second baseman. But the opposing team, out to win at any cost, refused to allow the substitution. The next Relic batter also stroked a hit and Mr. Kirkwood walked home unnoticed as the team in the field argued over the relay throw.”
“ ‘It was a triumph of good over evil,’ said Mr. Marley.”
“ ‘What the other team didn’t know,’ added Mr. King, ‘was that the guy we were going to send in was slower than Kirkwood.’ ”
Wolfie’s eventually shed us, because we let our kids frolic at post-game gatherings. (Hughie always said playing slow-pitch was simply an excuse to drink beer. Moreover, our children, I’ll warrant, remember those times even more fondly than we.)
When our next sponsor, the Three Mile Harbor Inn, decked us out in Oakland A’s green-and-white uniforms, “Mr. Marley said soiled white pants wouldn’t be a worry because ‘hardly any of us slide.’ ”
In the miracle year of 1983 we swept our last five games on the way to the league championship, “astonishing skeptics and youth-worshippers. . . . The team is the only democratic organization in a league full of rabidly competitive younger players — everyone plays at least half the game.”
Those were the days. There is no league at the Amagansett ball field anymore, and there are fewer and fewer of us.
So, with a fond farewell to our manager, we bat on, cleats against the current, borne ceaselessly back into innings past. Long live the Relics!