On the south side of St. Louis, where I spent most of my childhood years, beer and baseball were and still are king. As kids, we had to turn to baseball. But it was a rare day when you could throw together two full teams of nine from the kids who floated around our neighborhood. On hot days, we were lucky if there were two of us to play catch.
The field was another issue entirely — there were plenty of asphalt schoolyards with bases painted on, but for the true hops of a grass field, all we could find was an abandoned church lot that was mowed once a month. We made do, even made some amateurish attempts at groundskeeping, but if one of the older kids got hold of a pitch going the opposite way, the ball was gone, possibly through an apartment window.
We played anyway, of course, when we could muster the players and the equipment; but it was hard to pretend we were the Cardinals when the pitcher had to lob the pitch in and back up as quick as they could to play the infield and hopefully chase the runner down.
>It was Dave Cook, a squirrelly guy from two buildings down second only to me in his obsession with baseball, who came up with the rough idea for a game we would call “Fuzzball.” “My uncle from New York played it when he was a kid,” he said, grinning and bouncing a tennis ball in one palm. “All you need is a tennis ball and a bat — or even a broomstick. You pitch up against the wall, so you don’t need a catcher.”
I’d seen strike zones painted and scrawled up in back of our school, so we picked the lowest one and started playing every day, developing the rules of the game as we went. In Fuzzball, which reached its Zenith in fourth grade, when Dave hit 72 home runs and I struck out 350 batters, the focus was on the purity of batter vs. pitcher. We drew lines in the schoolyard for singles, doubles, triples. There was already a fence at perfect home-run distance. The pitcher could field anything on the fly or try to stop a ground ball, but there wasn’t any base running. After a double- or triple-header of Fuzzball, our hands were red, our arms aching. If other kids showed up, we played two-on-two or three-on-three, and every kid in the neighborhood did come out and play at least a little. But Dave and I were the Fuzzball gurus.
On the East Coast, they call it “Stickball,” and they bounce the ball, a pink Spaldeen, down the middle of the street. They actually run the bases. Grown-up (sort of) men play the game today in leagues. Chicagoans know it as “Strikeout.” In suburbs all over America, Wiffleball satisfies the same need — the space needed is similar and the threat of broken windows is less. Decades ago, inner-city youth tried to hit whirring bottle caps with their broomstick in the most extremely urban derivation of the game. For the solo player, stoopball and off-the-wall allow something close to baseball action.
The beauty of Fuzzball, and all the bat-and-ball games like it played all over the Western World, is its ease of play. The equipment, a tennis ball/Spaldeen/Super Pinkie and a bat/stick, are readily available to kids of all socioeconomic classes. The games are made to fit into the nooks and crannies of urban life. The rules are fluid, easily adapted to any city or milieu. Pick-up games are the preferred method of play. The essential skills of America’s Pastime are encapsulated in these games; if you can throw a curveball without seams on your ball, you’ve got something, and the 70+ swings taken by each player in a typical “Fuzzball” game have to help.
The popularity of basketball in most city neighborhoods has put a dent in the bat-and-ball games of my generation, but you might still come across a cluster of kids up against the back of a grocery store or scurrying between parked cars on a narrow street. If nothing else look for the strike zones painted or taped or scratched on brick walls in cities across the country.
Paul Barger sifts through a handful of bottle caps, discarding the ones that are flattened or crimped. He picks a choice cap from the remainder, likely separated from a Bud not more than a month before. Barger moves a cap into position with his thumb and middle and index fingers. He glances askance at the batter, standing a regulation 39 feet 6 inches away. Barger is all concentration as he winds the pitch and delivers sidearm. Veteran league players swear that bottle caps in flight reach a velocity of 90 mph or more, and Barger’s pitch looks to be a prime example. Down the length of asphalt, the squinting batter swings a broomstick at thin air. The cap is caught by the catcher. “Dang!” barks the batter, stalking from the plate amid catcalls and jeers. Back on the mound, Barger gingerly rotates his pitching shoulder, readying for the next opponent. Someone yells, “Next batter!”
“They’re vicious — stick in your arm, slash you in the face like a razor blade. You’d be bloody at the end of the day.” — Kevin Lavin, league commissioner, on the old-style cork-lined bottle caps. – Photo by William Stage
It is Thursday evening in Overland, and the Shamrock Bottlecap League is in full swing. Between players and spectators there are perhaps 55 people gathered in the parking lot of the San Bar, a modest little tavern in the 9400 block of Lackland Road. There are buckets of beer — in bottles, naturally; this ain’t no pop-top league — and free hot dogs and popcorn. There is a lot of good-natured razzing and a helluva lot of talent. “This game is the ultimate in hand-eye coordination,” says Kevin Riner, league batting leader, with a .590 average in mid-August. “If you can get a hit against a guy like Paul Barger, you’re doing good, real good.” What Riner doesn’t mention — probably because at 42 he’s an old pro and has forgotten the travails of rookiedom — is that a neophyte facing a Paul Barger can’t even see the cap as it zips across the plate. It takes time to develop an eye for the tiny, speeding bottle cap, but meanwhile it’s tough because you can’t hit what you can’t see.
In its 24th season, the Shamrock Bottlecap League is a throwback to earlier, less complex times when folks easily amused themselves with whatever was at their disposal. Danny O’Connor, league president, says the game of bottle caps, a cousin of corkball, was invented in St. Louis. “It began in downtown alleys during the Depression and was called ‘bum’s delight,'” says O’Connor, 59. “They played it at the brewery during lunch; that’s when they had corks in the caps. The game gradually moved north.” Today the game is played in the vicinity of St. Ann and Overland, always within easy distance of a nice cold one.
Still, the league has been somewhat nomadic, moving from tavern to tavern some seven times over the years. This bar owner didn’t care for the exhaustive postgame policing of bottle caps, and that bar owner may have had a problem with the crowd’s drinking outside. Whatever, the game goes on. This is the league’s second year at the San Bar, and owner Kay Genail hopes they stay forever. “I love it!” she says, meaning the brisk trade in longnecks on Thursday evenings but also the players and the camaraderie they bring. As for cleanup, Genail pays “some kids a few bucks to pick up the hundreds of caps scattered around the lot.” It’s a high-tech operation — they use a stick with a magnet on the end.
There are a minimum of five guys on a team, and there are seven teams in the league, up one team from last year. The league runs from May-September, and the ultimate prize is the Shamrock Cup, contended for in mid-September playoffs. As with the Stanley Cup, the victors take the coveted trophy back to their bar, clubhouse or wherever and get to keep it for one year.
The game is somewhat like baseball in that a guy with a stick tries to hit a fast-moving object, but because it is really hard to hit a whizzing, dipping bottle cap, there are some strange rules. In terms of fair and foul, for example, the cap is played where it stops, not where it hits. The games last five innings. There are no balls or strikes. There are no home runs, only runs. But there is no running of bases. Four hits score a run. And there are four ways to make an out: The batter swings and misses and the cap is caught by the catcher; the batter swings and misses and the cap hits any part of his body; the batter hits a foul tip; or, finally, the traditional catch of the cap on the fly. There is no ref or neutral party on hand to settle disputes. “There’s been many an argument,” says O’Connor, “but the catcher has final say.”
The pitcher is certainly an important player. Because of the peculiar aerodynamics, a cap thrown by Barger — upside down to gain more velocity — can curve like a question mark or drop 3 feet in the last 8 feet from the plate. Randy Johnson would kill to be able to throw like that. But just as Barger throws the hardest, his pitches are the hardest to catch — and, as O’Connor will tell you, catching is vital, more so than pitching. Remember the rules: If the catcher catches a cap on a missed swing, the batter is out. So, says O’Connor, “The batter can swing all night, but if the catcher don’t catch it, it don’t mean nothing.”
Riner not only holds the high batting average, he is widely considered to be the best catcher in the league. He’s a hands catcher, snatching the cap in flight with his bare mitts. He doesn’t miss many. “A lot of other guys are body catchers,” he explains. “They let the cap hit their body, and then it dies in their hands. A hands catcher has more range — you can go low or high. A batter up against a good hands catcher, it’s going to be a one-swing deal. That’s my job, not to drop the cap all game. A perfect game to a catcher is, nobody swings more than one time and I catch it every time.”
The league goes through a bucket of caps during the course of play, and it’s probably a good thing that the old cork-lined bottle caps, with that extra ounce of heft, became obsolete in the 1960s. “Every now and then,” says Kevin Lavin, league commissioner, “someone will bring a bucket of those old corked caps that they found in a corner of their basement. They’re vicious — stick in your arm, slash you in the face like a razor blade. You’d be bloody at the end of the day.” Yet, even today, there are a few mishaps. “One guy was hit in the eye with a pitched bottle cap,” says the commish. “He had to go to the hospital, but that’s rare.”
A half-dozen bats lean against a brick wall directly behind the plate. Actually they are wooden broomsticks, which, according to league rule, must be a regulation 39 to 40 inches long, with tape on one end. And it had better be a broomstick you take to the plate, warns O’Connor, a plumber by day: “We don’t tolerate any nonsense. Some people, you know, try to sneak them commercial mop handles in.”
The league comprises mostly blue-collar types — roofers, painters, a ceramic-tile installer and what have you. Pat Grady, 65, a first-year rookie with the Top Cats, owns a Hallmark shop in Bell Center downtown. “C’mon, Pat, reach out and touch someone,” yells fellow teammate John Curtin to Grady, at bat. And though there are some young turks on the lot — 16 is the minimum age — most of them are in their 40s and 50s, getting a kick out of keeping alive a novel game their fathers and grandfathers played.
It seems as if every other player has some familial connection here. Paul Barger’s father-in-law taught him to pitch. “He got me to practice throwing strikes starting at half the distance to the plate,” says Barger, a sweat-soaked blue bandana around his neck. “Then, when I got that down, it was ‘take a step back,’ ‘take a step back,’ ‘take a step back’ until I’m throwing tolerably well from the regulation mound. But that took 10 years.”
On one league night, O’Connor brings the Shamrock Cup and sets it on the trunk of his car. O’Connor says that this year the trophy will get another tier added because there’s no more space left for the little bronze plates with the names of the season victors. Riner points to several plates dating from the early ’80s. Though Kevin lived out of state at the time, the Riner name was well represented. “You see that?” he prods, pointing to the 1980 plate bearing five names, among them Tut, Tut-Tut and Tut-Tut-Tut. “That’s my grandfather, father and brother,” he proudly notes, “three generations playing at once. My grandfather, Tom Riner — the original Tut — played until 1996, when he died at 84. And he was no handicap case — he won a lot of games for us.”
No one knows how many more years the league will last. One thing is for sure: The game gets in your blood, and you can’t seem to shake it. “I’ve been around this game forever,” Riner says. “I was weaned on this. In ’98 I thought I’d try something different. I joined a golf league. Halfway through the season, I knew it wasn’t right. My life felt empty. I missed my Thursday-night bottle caps.”
ODD-BALL ST. LOUIS DISPLAYS “A LOVE FOR MUTANT BASEBALL”
By John M. McGuire of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Sunday, 8/20/2000, EVERYDAY MAGAZINE
Indian ball is just one of the peculiar games that have made St. Louis the center of the odd-ball universe. Or as Esquire magazine noted, “St. Louis has been giddily creative in constructing games around the concept of hitting a thrown object with a bat.”
The best known and oldest is the hardball variation called corkball, a game so St. Louis that it gave the city a curious reputation during World War II when local corkballers played the game on the decks of aircraft carriers or on military parade grounds. Back then, homegrown corkball was played in “cages,” most of them attached to the side of a tavern.
Other local variations are fuzz-ball, featuring a singed tennis ball that moves like a sphere possessed, and perhaps the oddest game of all, a batter-pitcher diversion called crowns or caps. In this game, usually played against the exterior wall of a saloon, the batter uses a broomstick and tries to hit a beer-bottle cap that is hurled with a vengeance, bobbing about like a crazed dragonfly.
These distinctly St. Louis games have one thing in common – kegs of beer, taverns and buckets of chili.
How did it all begin? The most precise story is that corkball was born at Mueller’s, a boardinghouse and saloon at Grand Boulevard and Greer Avenue. The year was 1890, and the story is that some members of the St. Louis Browns — an American Association team that a few years later would be rechristened the Cardinals in the National League — were sitting on the porch at Mueller’s polishing off a keg of brew. Chris Von der Ahe, a colorful saloonkeeper who called himself “Der Poss Bresident,” owned the team, which featured a player who would go on to become a baseball legend. He was Charley Comiskey, founder of the Chicago White Sox.
Comiskey might have been there the night that one of the players decided he needed exercise. He took the bung out of the keg, carved it into the shape of a ball, while another Brownie found a broom handle for a bat. Five players, not so tipsy, set the ground rules: One would be a pitcher, the other a catcher, with the remaining three playing the outfield. Like Indian ball, there was no running.
Eventually, the game evolved into organized leagues and manufactured equipment. For a time, the corkballs — baseballs slightly larger than golf balls — and slender bats used in the game were made by Rawlings Sporting Goods. Rawlings, based in St. Louis, dropped the line years ago, and now Markwort Sporting Goods on Forest Park Boulevard carries on the tradition.
Leagues such as Sportsman’s Corkball, South St. Louis and Santa Maria or Lemay Corkball became so identified with St. Louis that Bill Vaughn, the late Kansas City syndicated columnist, wrote: “St. Louis without corkball is San Francisco without cable cars, Baltimore without crabcakes or Boston without spaghetti,” noting that Bostonians eat more spaghetti than beans.
Corkball’s popularity has faded, but it’s still played at Jefferson Barracks Park, and there are seven teams and some 42 players, according to Len Renfrow Jr., 34, of Oakville, a second-generation corkballer with the Sportsman’s organization.
In June, corkball and St. Louis were featured in an Esquire article headlined “The Sport That Time Forgot.” Writer Charles P. Pierce noted that “St. Louis has a love for mutant baseball that is richer and more diverse than even that of New York, which has produced stickball, which hardly anyone plays anymore.”
The league comprises mostly blue-collar types — roofers, painters, a ceramic-tile installer and what have you. Pat Grady, 65, a first-year rookie with the Top Cats, owns a Hallmark shop in Bell Center downtown. “C’mon, Pat, reach out and touch someone,” yells fellow teammate John Curtin to Grady, at bat. And though there are some young turks on the lot — 16 is the minimum age — most of them are in their 40s and 50s, getting a kick out of keeping alive a novel game their fathers and grandfathers played.
Cork & Fuzz 