On a recent Thursday at the Ludlow Fish and Game Club, things were abuzz. The skies were repeatedly ripped through with the blare of engines as aircraft traveled the skies around Westover Air Force Base; gunfire crackled from the firing range nearby. Amid that din, the irregular thunk of softballs hitting plywood echoed. The senior softball players of Western Mass Relics play with underhand pitching, and the ump gets a hand from that plywood — a ball that hits it has just unequivocally arced through the strike zone.
The field is full of old guys. Many a knee brace is in evidence. There’s no rush. Still, pitcher Ron Bergeron, from behind his aviator shades, eyes batters with an unflinching, even steely gaze. He unleashes the ball, and the batter watches it closely.
“It gets pretty hot,” Relics registrar John daSilva tells me. “No one’s here to lose.”
The bat rings, and the ball threads beautifully between the short stop and second baseman. The batter chuffs off for first base with determination, if no particular measure of grace. There are two first bases.
DaSilva says there are plenty of artificial joints on the field, and the Relics make accommodation for such infirmities. “That’s where our rules come into effect.”
Those rules are, he explains, largely about avoiding collision. A runner heading for first base as the ball gets directed to the first baseman can shunt off toward the second first base — the first baseman tags on the first. Likewise, he says, there are two home plates, and nobody’s allowed to slide. Pinch runners stand ready for the less-mobile.
Some of the players look their age — some are well into their 80s — but most of the Relics don’t appear too relic-like. DaSilva, a former Air Force Chief Master Sergeant, barely looks his 60 years. He points out a player standing by the fence nearby. The guy looks like a strong 70. “He’s 85,” he tells me. “He’s a former Mr. Massachusetts.”
League Commissioner Joe Conway joins in. He’s 72, formerly in sales and management. He points out an advantage of senior softball via a story about a player who recently had a cardiac event. “He had it in the right place,” Conway says. He’s clearly onto something — having a cardiac problem when you’re surrounded by people could certainly make the difference in keeping on ticking. “We were about to send him home,” he tells me, “but we called the ambulance and the EMT guys said he wouldn’t have made it if we’d done that.”
DaSilva adds, “We keep the Ludlow Fire Department busy!”
T he Relics recently aired on New England Sports Network, and it painted a particularly vivid picture of the senior softball league. The film is locally connected, directed by Boston’s Brendan “Spookie” Daly with production assistance from Northampton’s Spirithouse Records. It’s narrated by Danny Aiello (Moonstruck, The Godfather 2, Do The Right Thing, and others), who reads dramatic, often death-heavy poems which combine with equally dramatic string-heavy music to accompany images of The Relics in action, doing everything from hitting and running to eating barbecue and visiting doctors. There are moments of humor, too, particularly in The Relics’ one-on-one interviews.
The film reaches a particularly high peak with this quotation from a 1972 essay by Roger Angell: “Baseball’s time is seamless and invisible, a bubble within which players move at exactly the same pace and rhythms as all their predecessors. This is the way the game was played in our youth and in our father’s youth, and even back in the country days there must have been the same feeling that time could be stopped. Since baseball time is measured only in outs, all you I and have to do is succeed utterly – keep hitting, keep the rally alive, and you have defeated time. You remain forever young.”
By the time you get to that quotation, The Relics has strived to create a deeply felt, extraordinarily dramatic picture of what these players are up to, exploring depression, illness, and death as much as softball.
Sure, issues of age can’t be avoided entirely, but the real Relics are anything but decrepit, and anything but grim. There’s a straightforwardness about their manner that says a lot. These guys are out for fun and competition — age is pretty much irrelevant. They’re having such an obvious good time that a lot of players want to join, and there’s barely room for newcomers — the league offers two divisions, Silver for guys 50-65, Gold for 65 and up. Right now, the league, which began in 1994, has 12 teams and just over 200 players. They’re busy, with two games per week per team plus practice, and the long season (basically everything except winter) is augmented with road-trip tournament play for the more ambitious.
DaSilva does acknowledge the sort of age transcendence that plays big in The Relics. “Somebody was saying, ‘You keep playing, you don’t get old. You stop, you get old.’”
The Relics don’t seem keen on stopping. There doesn’t seem to be much thought about Thoreau on the field. Players round the bases with whatever gait they can manage, from halting to full-tilt. They look like they’re having a blast.
As the game winds up, Bill Austin fields the ball and splits his finger open. He’s quickly patched up, ready to go. That is, to mix sports metaphors, par for the course around here. The idea, Conway tells me, is to do whatever it takes to “play ’til you can’t play any more.”
“It’s all for the love of the game,” daSilva says. “All for the love of the game.”•
James Heflin can be reached at jheflin@valleyadvocate.com.
