Fifty of those who played with and against Kenny Weldon in Amagansett’s slow-pitch softball league during the course of almost half a century turned out at the Terry King ball field’s parking lot Saturday afternoon to wish him a fond, final farewell as Mr. Weldon’s daughters, Christine Indeglia and Melissa Wallace, played Carly Simon’s “Take Me Out to the Ball Game,” which had been his wish.
“He was the best,” Len Bernard said of his teammate, who died, at the age of 83, on April 19 of the novel coronavirus at the Westhampton Care Center, where he had been since March of 2019. Mr. Weldon was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in 2015.
In the back of Mr. Bernard’s truck, which was second, behind Rob Nicoletti’s, in the long line of vehicles that awaited the arrival of the Yardley and Pino Funeral Home hearse, was a sign that said, “Number 10 on the Field, Number One in Our Hearts.”
When he had posted Mr. Nicoletti’s plan for the Saturday drive-by, after which the cortege followed the hearse and Mr. Weldon’s family out to the entrance of Fort Hill Cemetery in Montauk, Brian Turza replied that Mr. Weldon was the GOAT, “the greatest of all time,” when it came to slow-pitch softball here.
“And he was right,” said Mr. Bernard. “Kenny played in the league from its beginning, in 1966. He must have won close to 500 games as a pitcher, he must have had the most at-bats, he must be in the top 10 in total hits, and he won the most championships, at least 20. . . . He pitched us to our last playoff championship there in 2010, when he was 74.”
The Independent dropped out of the rapidly dwindling league in 2011, though Mr. Weldon was reportedly ready to play.
Mr. Nicoletti, a teammate of Mr. Weldon’s for 37 years, said, “When he was 74, I asked him if he ever was afraid of being hurt. Remember, he was lobbing pitches in to 20-year-olds, from about 48 feet out, and the juiced balls would come screaming off those new aluminum bats. Pitchers elsewhere in the country were wearing helmets and chest protectors. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I can catch anything.’ He was an even-tempered guy, as you say, but he was also competitive.”
In a letter to The Star last week, Mr. Nicoletti said, in part, that Mr. Weldon had been a big part of his life since he first met him at the age of 10, a year after his and his older brother Jim’s father had died. Mr. Weldon, he said, had filled that void.
“He was my coach in Babe Ruth baseball for three summers and led us to an undefeated championship season in 1971. . . . I’m 64 now, and still playing softball, and occasionally someone will say, ‘You’re going to be another Kenny Weldon.’ There will never be another Kenny Weldon.”
Kenneth Weldon was born on Dec. 1, 1936, in Brooklyn to Peter and Margaret Morris Weldon. He grew up in Brooklyn’s Bushwick neighborhood, where he played nine stickball games a day, and in Nassau County, where he played second base for St. Dominic High Schools varsity baseball team. After graduating with a bachelor’s degree from the University of Dayton in Ohio, he joined the Army National Guard, from which he was honorably discharged in 1966.
Not long after he and Loretta Chorney were married on Nov. 11, 1962, the couple moved to Montauk, where Mr. Weldon worked as a land salesman for Frank Tuma’s Montauk Beach Company into the 1980s, at which point he became a wine salesman on the East End for Eber Brothers Wine & Liquor Corporation of New York City, retiring from that position in 2000.
“He was one of the boys of summer,” his daughters said of their father, who, besides loving all things baseball — as well as his family, music, photography, reading, running, wine, Italian wine especially, and dancing — would jog throughout Montauk several times a week, and would play pickup basketball at the Montauk School in the wintertime. “He loved the ocean and walking on the beach or on the cliffs,” they said. “He used to say, ‘The wind knows my name in Montauk.’ He was loving, funny, caring, always happy. He had a gentle spirit.” He ran marathons as well, in creditable eight-minute-per-mile paces. Mr. Nicoletti found in one of Mr. Weldon’s old scorebooks a certificate attesting to the fact that he’d run the Stephen Talkhouse marathon in 1982 in 3 hours, 32 minutes, and 6 seconds.
A die-hard Yankees fan — Phil Rizzuto was his hero growing up, with Pee Wee Reese of the Dodgers a close second — Mr. Weldon coached Montauk’s Babe Ruth teams for many years and, as aforesaid, played softball, first fast-pitch then slow-pitch, here for a half-century, on teams sponsored by Marshall’s, Montauk Improvement, Ecker Insurance, the Tipperary Inn, Pacific East, Della Femina, and The Independent. Second base was his natural position, but when double-play throws began taking a toll on his arm, in 1991 he turned to pitching — “a challenge,” he admitted in a 2005 interview in these pages, because “slow-pitch is a hitter’s game.”
But despite the constraints, Mr. Weldon quickly became and remained the league’s leading pitcher, painting the corners and arcing the ball deep into the strike zone so that youthful home-run-happy hitters would pop the ball up. When his mound opponents would be giving up seven home runs in a game, say, he would be giving up two.
Still, said John Goodman in that 2005 interview, “It’s not so much Kenny’s longevity but his spirit that impresses me. He loves the game — it keeps him young. He’s hitting over .500. He’s really amazing.”
In addition to his wife and daughters, Mr. Weldon, who was a member of St. Therese of Lisieux Catholic Church in Montauk, is survived by two grandchildren, Bobby and Alexandra Indeglia.
He was buried in Fort Hill’s Section A, Plot 10 — “of course,” his daughters said. A memorial service, they added, will be held in the future.
