“Love the Huddle” by Michael Stahl

It’s day two of the 2013 Emperor’s Stickball League Memorial Day Tournament on Stickball Boulevard in the Bronx. The sidewalk is lined with beach chairs and benches. Hundreds of people are there to watch the games — relaxing in the sun, but staying wary of zipping rubber balls and bats tossed by burly Hispanic men motoring to first base. There’s chicken and rice, empanadas and beer. Salsa music pumps out of two speakers, each with a red stencil of a stickball batter painted on it. Some people dance on the sidewalk. Others chat about the days when they were younger over old photos of chiseled teenagers glistening with sweat, laughing loud at the memories.

But the players on the blacktop wear scowls. One belongs to Ricardo Torres, Jr., nineteen, batting for the Bronx Emperors, the reigning tournament champions who’ve also gone undefeated so far this weekend. Though already well ahead in this game of self-hit stickball, a Bronx tradition in which players toss the balls themselves rather than have it pitched to them, the Emperors have men on base again, and Torres wants them to score. “Pretty Ricky,” as he is often called, goes into a little routine, bending over with his bat pointed skyward in his right hand and repeatedly bouncing the ball with his left. After a blink, he tosses it one last time, this with a slight thrust forward. The pink ball bounces once, twice, peaks in the air, and thwack! Torres hits a line drive up the middle of the street, right into the defense, but, with the ball hit so hard that it ricochets around the field, they can’t throw Torres out before he reaches first. Two runs score.

The name of the game.

“This kid is like me,” observes George Osario, known in stickball quarters as “Lolin.” (He was given the nickname as a young child in Puerto Rico, when he was known to chase after a girlfriend named Lola; neighbors took to calling him the masculine form, “Lolin.”) A dark-skinned, deep blue-eyed man of seventy-six, Osario still plays stickball every Sunday, just as he has since the 1940’s, then a child living on 114th Street and Madison Avenue in Manhattan. “Most of the kids today just want to hit home runs. But he’s fast,” Osario says of Torres. “That’s much more important in stickball.”

“I just try to hit line drives,” says Torres. Last season’s Emperor’s League Most Improved Player, the young Torres was also in the running for the 2012 Memorial Day Tournament’s MVP and, after playing for five seasons, is now making a name for himself as a strong defensive outfielder and speedster. “I still want to be a better hitter though and just make good contact,” he says.

When a ball is hit in play in stickball, “it’s all you can get” on the base paths, Osario explains. The line-drive ground ball can bounce off cars, curbs, trees, and lampposts that are in-play, while hitters run until the ball is finally secured and the defense can legitimately threaten them with a tag. If a batter attempts to hit a home run, slamming a ball high into the air, no crossed bases will count if the ball is caught on the fly.

“Lolin was one of the best because he always hit the ball hard on the ground and was so fast that nobody could throw him out,” remembers Carlos Diaz, sixty-three, curator of New York City’s Stickball Hall of Fame on East 123rd Street, of which Osario is an esteemed member. “He was also very clutch,” Diaz adds. “Lolin was so reliable at the plate that his team could put a hit-and-run on and they just knew it would work.”

As good as Torres is, he plays in a self-hit league, where there are no hit and runs because there are no hard-nosed pitchers to stare down. It is a different form of the Manhattan version of stickball, which is called “pitching-in” and more closely resembles traditional baseball. Pitching-in is what Osorio grew up playing…

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Originally published at narrative.ly. Click the link to read the complete story.