Aug. 5, 1977 Nightlife: Slow-pitch softball, bar league style

 

Not all of the fun on the barroom beat was at night. 

Aug. 5, 1977 

Merlin’s Magic Strikes Out 

          The Rutherford B. Hayes administration 100 years ago left two enduring doodles on the American tablecloth. One was the Civil Service system. The other was major league baseball.

          For some reason, though, standard history books seem to gloss over the question of why baseball suddenly became so popular back then. Thirty-odd years after it was invented and pow! – it’s big time. Occasionally, the historians will drop a hint. Something like: “Widely played by veterans returning home from the Civil War.”

          How much more straightforward it would be if historians could bring themselves to say our forefathers were out there demolishing kegs of beer. When great-grandpa told great-grandma he was going down to the game, she knew what shape he’d be in when he came back.

          Over the years, going major-league has mutated the scruffy spirit of our national pastime. A certain cool professionalism set in. One’s idols are likely to do such unbaseball-like things in the off-season as own condominiums or sell soybean futures.

          But that’s only the majors. Such is not the case in the New York-Penn League, which a friend describes as “baseball at the Norman Rockwell level.” It’s not the case in the Women’s Professional Softball League either, where the Buffalo Breskis might be compared to a post-Civil War barnstorming team without mustaches.

          Go to the sandlots and you discover what a dangerous mixture baseball’s natural elements of dirt, brew and revelry really is. Ask anyone in Buffalo’s slow-pitch bar softball league. Somewhere on the Manhattan Avenue diamonds behind Central Park Plaza, they misplaced the last two months of Sundays.

          It was the fate of a couple of this reporter’s associates – Paul Stewart and Jim Nellis – to become coaches of a team that last year was the legend of the league’s eight-team women’s division. Merlin’s.

          “They lost all the games,” one of their supporters recalled, “but they won all the parties. Nobody walked away.”

          Nellis and Stewart set out to improve on the weak part of that record. They held practices twice a week and they were rewarded. They went into their eighth and final regular-season game last Sunday with two victories.

          This would make three, they figured. Merlin’s was matched against the women of Birdie’s 19th Hole on Allen Street – a team they’d already beaten. The score had been 19-5.

          “Birdie’s is nothin’,” a Merlin’s fan shouted from the back of a pickup truck.

          “The game’s on for a case or two of splits,” Stewart announced. Somebody’d decided that playing for Screwdrivers would be too expensive. Splits are seven-ounce bottles of beer and their price is written right into the league rules: $8 a case. Pitchers of beer, the league decrees, shall be $1.50.

          “Let’s go like we mean it and have a win,” Nellis instructed the crew of women bar staffers and regulars before they took the field. “We’re the home team. We’re in the field. Get out there.”

          The hardest part about coaching a women’s team, Nellis had observed earlier, was that women hadn’t grown up playing ball. Fine points of the game that are second nature to a men’s team, he said, are things the women generally are learning for the first time. Sometimes they forget.

          “Right field’s out there, right behind first base,” one Merlin’s stalwart assured another as they trotted off to their stations.

          The pitcher wore a halter top, cut-offs and a deep tan. Whenever her pitches didn’t bounce in front of the plate, they tended to plummet vertically through the strike zone. But that wasn’t all the batters had to worry about.

          “Illegal stance,” a leather-lunged heckler shouted at the Birdie’s pitcher when she came to bat. “Illegal bat. Illegal legs. Illegal knot in her shirt.”

          Turned out the bat really was illegal. She got a new one and slugged the next pitch past two outfielders, all the way to the fence.

          “Illegal helmet,” the heckler shouted at the next batter. She wasn’t wearing a helmet. “God,” said a redhead on the Merlin’s bench, “he’s brutal.”

          The efficiency that turns batters into outs in the big leagues is rarely seen in slow-pitch softball. Only the rules of the game hold developments back from utter chaos.

          “In this league, you’re allowed to do just about anything,” the umpire ruled at one point. The umps are pros, but how straight-faced can one be in a league that includes such devil-may-care outposts as Thee Bar, Cassidy’s, the Outside Inn, the Penalty Shot and these two places. They do it for $10 and a laugh. If a play at a base is close, it’s an out. In this league, outs are hard to get.

          It came to pass that Birdie’s accumulated three runs before anyone was out. “We’re not concerned,” Stewart said nonchalantly after a bases-loaded double play ended the inning. “Wait’ll you see them field.”

          “OK, let’s get some runs,” Nellis said as the team came in. It didn’t take long. A couple fly balls dropped in the outfield, a couple bases were overthrown and the score was tied.

          It might have been an even bigger inning if the madness of it all hadn’t overwhelmed a Merlin’s runner as she outfoxed a run-down between bases.

          “Third, third,” the bench shouted, but it was no use. The ball squirted into the outfield. The runner went back and sat down on the carpet square that served as second base.

          After two innings of this, Merlin’s held a 9-4 lead. As crazy as Merlin’s fielding was, Birdie’s was crazier. The hot sun baked the broken bleachers. It became clear why baseball and beer go so well together.

          “I turned my back on my 12-pack for a minute,” one shirtless fan recounted, “and the next thing I knew there were only two left.”

          In the time it took to visit the cooler case in one of the nearby plaza supermarkets, the Merlin’s team lost its touch. Their miracle plays had become disasters. Even their best move – the forced runner at second base – wasn’t working. The five-run lead became a four-run deficit and things just got worse.

          Birdie’s, meantime, acquired the knack of catching fly balls. Three flies polished off Merlin’s in the seventh inning. The final score: 21-13.

          League rules were still in effect as case upon case of beer in splits crossed the bar back on Elmwood Avenue at Merlin’s. Boyfriends hugged girlfriends and all danced as the Doors’ “L.A. Woman” played at a sound level that would raise singer Jim Morrison from the dead.

          In the middle of the pandemonium, the losing pitcher was offered a little sympathy. She wasn’t taking any. “That’s life, y’know,” she said. “You win some, you lose some.”

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IN THE PHOTOS: Pitching for Merlin’s, left, is Barbara Piciulo. On the mound for Birdie’s, right, is Leslie Gray. At lower left are Merlin’s coaches Paul Stewart, left, and Jim Nellis.

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FOOTNOTE: This writer was a regular at Merlin’s in those days – it was just a few staggering steps away from my old attic apartment on Auburn Avenue – and Paul Stewart and Jim Nellis were good friends, good enough to convince me to come to a softball game. I lost track of Stewart after he moved to St. Louis. As for Nellis, he’s alive and well and living in Lewiston.