The Ball Games of the Back Alley
I was originally going to call this “The Ball Games of the Back Yard” because that is what we called the long, narrow, city block long cement area behind our apartment building in Queens. The one long side was bounded by the six story apartment building itself. The opposite long side was bounded by the rear of the various one story stores that were adjoined and lined Queens Boulevard, just around the corner.
A few years ago, I decided to stop by for a look, having not been there for over forty years, and a back yard is not what I found at all. I know that things seem larger when you are a child, but I was overwhelmed by what now looked to me like a nothing more than a very, very long alleyway. It couldn’t have been much more than fifteen or twenty feet wide.
So there you have it. A city block long alleyway, very long and very narrow, with a one story wall with barred windows on one side, and a six story apartment building filled with glass windows and those legendary six flight fire escapes on the other side. And yet, this area, our apartment dwellers’ “back yard”, was transformed daily into an all purpose playground for all sorts of ball playing.
For generations, children growing up on the streets of the New York City boroughs invented imaginative ways to use their immediate neighborhood surroundings to mimic all sorts of ball playing areas. Many used the street itself, with sewer covers often acting as the bases of a baseball diamond. We were more fortunate. We had the “back yard.”
Most of our games centered around the creative use of a small, pink rubber ball, about the size of a tennis ball but without the felt. Two manufacturers dominated this market and like Hertz and Avis, Coke and Pepsi, or Good Humor and Mr. Softee, you had an allegiance either to Spalding or Pensie Pinkie. I was a Pensie Pinkie guy.
Our primary game was punch ball, an aberration of fungo style baseball. We usually played this one on one or two on two. That’s about all the players that you could field, given the unique geography. The ground rules were ingenious. No “cheapies” which would be akin to bunting. No “Baltimore Choppers” where you punched the ball down so hard that it rebounded up several stories high, allowing you to circle the bases before it came down, given how close and narrow these bases were. No “bank shots” where you ricocheted the ball just off the stores’ rear wall to angle its rebound into a recessed courtyard separating the two halves of the building where it could roll down a ramp to the basement door. No “off the wall” catches for outs if you sliced a fly ball into that recessed courtyard two or three flights up against the far wall. The granddaddy of all of our ground rules had to be the fence that crossed the alley at its very, very far end, almost a city block away. For anyone fortunate enough to punch the ball over that fence on a fly, we awarded an automatic ten runs. This required a Ruthian shot, but long, very high and absolutely perfectly straight. The slightest inaccuracy would result in the ball landing up high in a protruding fire escape where it was reduced to a ground rule double. Talk about a game of inches?
We played handball there too, most often the more unusual Chinese style and sometimes the more classic American. We played flies up and we played variations of stickball. Each game was set in a different portion of the ”back yard” to maximize the creativity afforded by the surroundings. Most incredibly, we rarely if ever broke apartment windows with our Pensie Pinkie, given how frequently we played there. Retrieving a poorly landed ball required several techniques: climbing the fire escape, entering the apartment building and riding the elevator to knock on a resident’s apartment door, or scaling the barred windows of the stores’ rear to reach their one story roof. My favorite, though, had to be walking around the corner into the local seafood restaurant, Scott’s Seafood, to beg the owner to let us walk through his establishment of lobster dining patrons to the upstairs in the rear of his restaurant to access his otherwise inaccessible roof.
Well, Yankee Stadium, it wasn’t. No grass, no painted lines, no lights. It wasn’t even diamond shaped. Nor did it resemble the classic handball court. No large rectangular wall. No crowds, no fans. But it was ours and it served us well. Play Ball!
