When Baseball was King
The year was 1979 and I am sitting in my grandmother’s room holding my 1978 All Star game trophy from Towanda Rec. That year was so significant. Not only did we - Towanda Astros - win the baseball championship that year against the Royals (August 3, 1979, to be exact); but its the year of the snow storm that kept us out of school for a week. It’s also the year that this new sounding music and a group called The Sugar Hill Gang hit the national airwaves. This sound quickly became a new genre called hip hop/rap.
Back to baseball - I balanced the summers between playing for Towanda rec and our informal neighborhood team. Both were fun and offered their unique experiences. Rec ball meant playing among your age group while neighborhood ball assembled whomever was available. That meant me and my homie Joe at 11 or 12 yrs old, would be the youngest playing on a team with 16-19yr olds. It seems odd today that before cell phones and even pagers, how simple it was to get 18 of us to show up for a Sunday game and only notified the day before.
We would play at Druid Hill Park or my elementary school - School 18. And, we had some girls that could play too - shout out to Nettie and Jeanette. With so much love for baseball at that time, I could not have imagined that decades later the love of the game amongst Black youth would decline so much. Some have said the game is too slow compared to basketball and football, while others liken the decline to social implications.
2013: A Traveling baseball team - Randallstown, MD
There are community leagues, high school programs and MLB itself that are doing their part in keeping the sport an option among Black youth. Either way, I can’t forget the imprint that Towanda Rec and my neighborhood left on me and my peers. Through baseball, they showed us the power of mentors, teamwork and how to win and lose together. FIST BUMP to all the teenage coaches and young adults that volunteered their time to us. You may not remember all of us, but all of us remember you.
