Sean Kirst of the Buffalo News reports on a man rediscovering a piece of his baseball childhood:
Joe Carosi makes a point of driving along Fries Road whenever he’s nearby. He’s a retired police captain from the Town of Tonawanda, and Fries remains his standard, think-about-the-old-days route through the neighborhood where he grew up, decades ago.
He was taking that road, a few weeks ago, when he glanced toward the tiny parking lot of a little building at Fries and Sheridan Drive, now occupied by a podiatrist. At the back, on the raw cinderblock wall of a neighboring building, Carosi saw a childhood relic he had trouble believing still exists.
It was a simple box, painted more than 50 years ago in now-faded yellow paint, that neighborhood kids used for their own version of a baseball-inspired game they called “strikeout.”
Carosi, stunned, parked his car and wandered into the tiny lot. He was overwhelmed by memories of running there from his childhood home on Werkley Road, maybe three doors away, to play strikeout for hours with his buddies.
The rules were simple: If three strikes landed in that box, you were out. A home run was a blast across Fries Road. The bases – if enough friends showed up to run them – were a downspout, the sidewalk and a spot by a garage.
BuffaloNews.com
Carosi posted on Facebook and received an outpouring of memories.
I do remember one day walking onto the playground at Nathan Hale Elementary School in Bridgeport, CT, I think during the summer, and seeing a piece of graffiti on the side of the school at the back of the building. It was a White Box with an X through it. At that time, the city ran summer playground activities. There were a couple of adults there organizing games and such, but it was just a good place to hang out as well.
Tony Masone, probably in fifth grade at the time, stood next to the graffiti and proclaimed, “This is my strike zone.” Indeed, the bottom line was at his knee and the top line at his shoulders. (Strike zones were bigger back then.) The strikeout game started then and continued until the school was reduced to rubble many years later.
Masone was a couple of years ahead of me, but was probably the best athlete I knew. Every year, on the last day of school, the sixth grade would play the fifth grade in a game of softball. The sixth grade always won. A year makes a big difference in size and ability at that age. They always won except the year Masone led the fifth grade class. He went on to be a star football and baseball player at my high school. He bowled a perfect game. A quarterback and punter, he won a scholarship to Clemson to punt for their football team. While at Clemson, he asked for permission to play baseball in the spring, and wound up drafted by the Cincinnati Reds.
And it all started with a white square on the side of a school.
