I’m waiting for Atari or Intellivision to bring out a 1950s stickball cartridge. That’d be real hard software, man. You know, twitch the joystick and you wham the ball foul onto Mrs. Moclair’s fourth-story fire escape. Or down some bottomless airshaft. Backpedal to catch the final out and—blip!—get cronked by a 1949 Studebaker. Imagine those computer graphics. Street stickball was all hot corner. When someone said suicide squeeze, they meant just that. In what other game could you go from first base to the precinct house on an infield single?
Last summer, at my neighborhood mom-and-pop bodega, I saw machinelathed stickball bats for sale. I mean friction tape on the handle and everything but a Huntz Hall autograph. This bent my purist sense out of plumb. First: stickball bats are never bought, they’re always stolen, or, um, borrowed. And you don’t manufacture one, any more than you’d coin-operate your own brain. In my day—this is 1951 or 1952 —we had to unscrew Mother’s broom handle while she was doing the wash with Rinso. Risky business that. New York police had a crusade going against swung wood. Far as I could tell, seven of ten men on their Most Wanted list must’ve been stickball players. After all, what else did policemen have to do? No one had yet invented pot or cocaine or even sex. Hoogie! Hoogie! somebody would yell. We’d slam-slide our bats under a parked truck and book it. Still the squad car caught us up. I can remember one sergeant rapping me but good across the shins with my own family’s mop handle. Yet what could I say? They hadn’t invented police brutality back then either.
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