Stickball Team Keeps Tradition Alive After 40 Years

In the late 1950s, when stickball was the game of choice for New York City children, a group of friends on the Lower East Side had a regular game with the same players each day.On Saturday, more than five decades later, those childhood friends traveled from as far away as Virginia and Puerto Rico to Gouverneur Street with sticks in hand to play a game that has given way to skateboarding, hockey, and soccer in the city.The group of about 40 Puerto Rican men — including a lawyer, a retired police lieutenant, and a number of postal workers — are all a little slower now, but they still get together in the Lower East Side three or four times a year to dust off their sticks, catch up, and visit surviving family members who live in the old neighborhood.One stickball player, Otto Gomez, now a Staten Island resident and a mental health administrator at Kings County Hospital, was 5 years old when his family moved to a 13th-floor apartment in a housing project on Rutgers Street in Manhattan.“I thought I’d gone to heaven,” Mr. Gomez said. “I never took a vacation as a kid. We had all the excitement we needed on our block.”The reunited group from Rutgers Street, one of four teams that played in this weekend’s tournament, lost their title to a team from Avenue C.They had held it for 10 years.In their youth, the Rutgers Street team was never at a loss for games. If it wasn’t stickball, it was kick the can, Wiffle ball, or another game that didn’t require fancy equipment or going too far from home.“We played football against the Jewish kids, baseball against the Italians, and basketball against the Chinese and Afro-Americans,” Mr. Gomez said. “We all got along okay, though we had a mutual respect for the Italians’ territory in Knickerbocker Village.”Their lives have been far from easy. Several died of AIDS, Mr. Gomez said, and some became addicted to drugs.“Heroin was king,” Eddie Velez, one of the few who stayed in the neighborhood, said. “We’ve lost a lot of friends to drugs. Some of the guys here today have been in and out of programs.”Mr. Velez, Freddy Roldan, and Ralph Pagan are now in charge of rounding up the members of the old stickball team.“The friends from our block live all over the place now,” Mr. Velez said. “You pick a borough, we’ve got a guy there.”“We’re like homeboys, and once you’re a homeboy, you’re always a homeboy, no matter how many years pass,” Mr. Gomez said. “We have this affection for each other that’s kind of extraordinary. Stickball holds us together.”Now in their early 50s, all of the men are still devout Yankees fans, as they were as children.“We all want to be baseball heroes,” Mr. Gomez said. “Stickball gives us the chance.”At a game last month, Mr. Roldan — nicknamed “Wolf” for his big, bushy eyebrows — got a crucial hit after a notable slump.On Saturday, as the Avenue C team defeated the Rutgers Street group during a lively game, family members cheered, as did the honorary guest, the team’s high school basketball and baseball coach.

Stickball Team Keeps Tradition Alive After 40 Years

Stickball Team Keeps Tradition Alive After 40 Years

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