Flashback! 15 years ago. Fall League Champs: Standing (left to right): Ron Pennington, Gary Hillabolt, Dick Moran, Henry Ellis, Al Grefsheim, Dennis LePore, Larry Kaufmann; kneeling (left to right): Steve Schaider, Larry Wolfe, Stan Shores, Reggie Reese, John Seigla. Trivia question: Which four guys are still active? Answer: Gary Hillabolt, Dennis LePore, and John Seigla are still playing, while yours truly, Larry Wolfe, has resorted to umpiring. Larry Kaufmann moved to California, and all the others have “retired.”
Larry Wolfe
No, this article isn’t just about The Long Season, a book published in 1960, which chronicled pitcher Jim Brosnan’s candid personal diary of the 1959 baseball season when he pitched for both the St. Louis Cardinals and Cincinnati Reds. That book was one of the first “tell-alls” regarding what life was really like in the big leagues. Up until that time, sports books were “sanitized” to protect the private lives of athletes who were almost always portrayed as “squeaky clean.” The book naturally didn’t go over well with his fellow players. However, the book was critically acclaimed, and years later, Sports Illustrated magazine named it the 19th best sports book of all time. And Washington Post book critic Jonathan Yardley wrote, “In retrospect, the book not merely changed everything, it remains, decades later, the best of its kind.”
But this article is really about the Sun Lakes Senior Softball Association’s long season. Our summer season started in late-April and is still ongoing. Our guys have participated all summer long, enduring high temperatures to play the game they love. Even though we start at 7:30 a.m. and usually complete the scheduled doubleheader by mid-morning, the temperatures are already in the mid-90s or higher. But that doesn’t seem to deter the die-hards who’d probably also want to play if it were below freezing and snowing! The long season will end in mid-September to allow for infield maintenance and overseeding of the outfield grass. During that “time off,” we’ll have batting practice and informal pick-up games at Snedigar Park on Alma School Road. Check the home page of our website www.sunlakessoftball.com for specific dates and other details. Note that anyone wishing to sign up for our Fall Season should come by Snedigar Park to do so. The Fall Season is tentatively scheduled to open the last week of October.
Baseball joke of the month:
What’s the difference between the D-backs’ Sonoran hot dog and the Los Angeles Dodgers’ Dodger Dog?
If you said the taste or the size, you’re wrong!
Nope. It’s that you can buy a Dodger Dog in October! BOOOO!