Photo: JUN2 - Getty Images
Baseball on infield dirt
With the Milwaukee Brewers’ baseball season underway, I find myself thinking of how old-time New Yorkers loved to tell me about their legendary, much revered street game—“stickball.” A man named Hector Lilo was their herculean hitter.
But growing up in baseball-happy Black Milwaukee cheering the minor league Brewers and major league Braves, I’d often tell them about “strikeout”—the “stickball” of my youth. My uber-athletic cousin, Tommie Gee, was my Hector Lilo—a long-ball hitter and super-fast-ball pitcher. They were fascinated.
I mentioned how I yearned to follow in the famous footsteps of my father, Milwaukee’s late Sanford Carter, a great player in the old Negro Leagues. But after it became clear that my limited talents would fall far short, I sought another outlet in the Black inner-city.
The answer was “strikeout”—a fast pitch, one-on-one game at smallish playgrounds in a turf-conscious neighborhood. Disputes between rival groups (gangs, I guess) often were settled by “strikeout.” Their best against ours.
Rules of the Game
Home plate at Palmer Street Elementary School, between Palmer and Brown, was a schoolhouse window protected by wire mesh, or a rectangle chalked chest-high on the wall. The object was for a pitcher to steam a tennis ball by a batter. Three strikes and the inning was over. One strike per-out, called or swung-at. And unless you’ve tried to make contact with a speeding, or dipsy-doodling fuzzy tennis ball, you haven’t felt frustration.
For the hitter, the fun part was trying to lay a white Louisville Slugger or a brown Hanna bat on that thing. If so, you could kiss it goodbye. Good wood on a 95-mile-per-hour fast one often meant going, going, gone. And there was no chasing the ball. We just used another one.
Over the fairly distant fence was a homer. Airborne against the fence—like a frozen rope—was a triple. On the fly past the pitcher was a double, and a grounder past him was a single. But getting good wood wasn’t easy. No sirree bob!
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For the pitcher, “strikeout” was like feeding Christians to the lions. It was a sadist’s dream, especially if you could really hum it. I can’t recall how many times my mouth watered over the look of abject terror on waiting batters. This was close-range (about 60 feet), overhand tight!
Winner Takes All
In “strikeout,” we played until somebody won. And with all the swinging and missing, games usually lasted into the dark. On one such occasion, Wilbur—a tough young rival of mine with a V-shaped back we all envied—provoked a game by smarting-off. When we played, I paid him back by parking one out of sight in the 23rd inning of a scoreless contest.
In another game, my ace-buddy, big Sam Johnson, bragged about his pitching prowess as we were ending a 90-degree day of girl-watching at Bradford Beach. The next thing you know, there we were, still in our swim trunks, at Palmer playground for “strikeout” at about 7 p.m.
Sam was a bodybuilder with arms like cables on the George Washington Bridge, and could really smoke it in there. When he threw, I lined one past his head at about 150-mph. He was still ducking when it rocketed off the fence. “Man on third,” I said with a laugh. And it was no contest after that.
But my brightest moment in the “strikeout” sun came on a distant-past Memorial Day, in a hard-fought joust against Tommie who usually beat me like a drum. It was scoreless in the ninth inning when Tommie —who fired ‘em in like Sandy Koufax—wound up to deliver. Then I stepped out and announced, with a Babe Ruth-like flourish, I was about to send his next pitch into eternity. He roared with laughter.
Then I pointed, a la the Yankees’ Bambino during a World Series in Chicago. Tommie threw high and hard and, in my best timing prior to spotting a certain young lady in a Cleveland reporter’s bar, I drove that sucker into the next county.
It was game time. I had won. That was “strikeout” in Black Milwaukee, and I’ll always remember it.
