Wellington man overcomes paralysis to play stickball

Alan Van Praag, 71, of Wellington, swings at a pitch in the Wycliffe Stiffs Stickball League at Village Park in Wellington. Van Praag was paralyzed on his left side at the age of 18. (Gary Curreri / Correspondent)

By GARY CURRERI, SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT | DEC 13, 2018

At 71 years old, Alan Van Praag is just happy to be playing a kid’s game.

The Wellington senior doesn’t see himself as an inspiration despite the fact he was a promising young tennis player whose career was cut short by a freak injury that left him paralyzed on his left side.

“I thought my life was over,” said Van Praag, who was playing football in the streets of Brooklyn when an object went into his eye and penetrated his brain. He was paralyzed on the left side of his body. He was critical for six weeks and hospitalized for seven months.

“I had great support from my family and friends,” said Van Praag, whose team is the Brooklyn Bums, is one of 85 seniors playing in the Tuesday afternoon Wycliffe Stiffs Stickball League at Village Park in Wellington. He is also a prominent attorney practicing international law. “I came back. I have traveled all over the world and been to more than 100 countries as an international lawyer. There is nothing I don’t do or won’t do. I have had a wonderful life and a wonderful career.”

He quickly dismisses the notion of being an inspiration. Van Praag was a member of the U.S. Junior Davis Cup team when he was in high school.

“I think I am just a regular guy,” Van Praag said. “I don’t think of myself as an inspiration. I just put one foot in front of the other and do my thing.”

Van Praag said the camaraderie among the players is second to none.

“We all care about each other and there is always some good-natured ribbing,” he said. “We always pick on each other and we love each other. If you can’t hit the ball, it’s okay. That’s the way it is. It is a lot of fun. They accept you as a person, which was wonderful.

“I am very tough,” he continued. “I have been hurt a lot in my life and I just keep going forward. I came back, and nothing stops me. I’ve been practicing international law for 47 years.”

The support from the start has been something not lost on Van Praag.

“It makes me feel very comfortable that everyone is rooting for you,” Van Praag said. “Since day 1, they have been rooting for me. I couldn’t hit a ball for a while. They are always giving me encouragement and they always are saying good things about me. They always come over and give me a handshake whether I strike out or not. Whatever I do they give me encouragement.”

Van Praag said he never thought he’d be playing stickball five years later.

“I didn’t think I would be competent enough to play stickball when I first came here,” Van Praag said. “Marty Ross is a great guy, who encouraged me and I came out and the guys just keep me going. I just love what I am doing.”

Van Praag has overcome obstacles his entire life. He used to be a left-handed tennis player and converted to playing right-handed. He also taught himself to write right-handed and went back to college and became a prominent attorney.

“I do everything,” Van Praag said. “I play stickball. I play tennis. I am in the gym seven days a week, two hours a day. I work out all of the time and I have a wonderful, wonderful wife. The best decision I ever made in my life was my wife Lynne. We just celebrated our 26th wedding anniversary.”

Van Praag draws praise from his peers.

“Alan gets up there and tries and there are others that get up there and they can’t do it,” said Steven Menzer, 70, who also plays for the Brooklyn Bums.

Ross, who is affectionately known as “The Commish,” has been running the stickball league for the past 17 years and said Van Praag is definitely an inspiration to everyone he comes in contact with.

“That is the coolest thing to see,” Ross said. “I invited him to play in the league four years ago. He couldn’t even walk properly. This gives him happiness that is second to none. He’s been playing since 2014-15 and we make him feel welcome whether he hits the ball or not.

“He couldn’t even walk or standup when he got here and just by being in this environment, the therapy, the closeness of everything, he’s made just great strides,” Ross added. “He is all heart.”

Street Baseball

Hit Me With A Stick Or Hit The Ball With A Stick It Was Tough Out On The Street

Inner City Street Baseball Rules were Rough and Tumble and Provided Lessons Which were not Classroom...

The following was posted on BaseballFarming.com…

Street Baseball was a brand of playing baseball in the streets of the hood which took no prisoners. The skills of playing were tempered with raw toughness and bravado not found on most or many of the other more structured and friendly baseball playing fields.

Some of baseballs Hall Of Fame greats earned their spurs, in a manner of speaking, in the streets. Yogi Berra knew the street as a ball playing mecca.

His first hard disappointment came when by fate of baseball playground rules made him “wait his turn” while his buddy from the streets of St Louis Joe Garagiola was picked from the streets of St. Louis and signed with the St. Louis Cardinals.

Yogi by fate (or if you will in the rules of life) was destined to be one of the most loved of the Bronx bombers of our fabled and leading world champion teams the fabulous seeming perennial winning New York Yankees.

My capability to speak from on site experience is limited. The stories and movies depicting play on the streets of New York and San Fransisco provides adequately the portrayal of this play.

In the deep south our street baseball rules were more subdued and with less traffic to contend. There was toughness associated with a street playing style of, “take no quarter”, you were expected to be tough.

In most games of street baseball rules the game was often modified and a version of Corkball took on a life of its own.

Street baseball rules was so prevalent on the streets of New York one of the all time greats Willie “Say Hey” Mays was often caught joining the youngsters there. Willie Mays our Baseball Hall Of Fame great player playing with the then New York Giants.

The Giants and Willie moved on west and settled in San Francisco the city by the Bay and the place where Tony Bennett “Left His Heart” high on a hill.

Corkball was popular in the streets and replaced street baseball in the urban living places other limited space areas, where windows were an ever present deterrent from using a baseball. Cork use was simply what it was.

Did I get a surprise when I recently received an email about Corkball via my Baseballfarming website. Corkball has been alive and well through the years in some parts of the country and folks you too now have a chance to join the Corkball playing action.

The cork was nothing standard when the game was played here in the South. Whatever size cork that anyone had is what we used.

Buster I did not during my corkball playing time at the boys dormitory at Alabama Polytechnic Institute (API) realize it had life and was an organized play with a standard official Corkball and Bat with St Louis being the center of attention and the Corkball hotbed capitol of the Country.

Just chalk it up as this lad growing up without a lot of travel and experience of the world around me. All that is not of importance the only thing we knew back then was that we played our game and St.Louis apparently played their game.

Boys who lived in families that enjoyed fishing normally had access to many corks and of sundry sizes. Many times we had use of a round red and white colored cork. These round corks were prizes for the most common cylinder shaped corks, small on one end and larger on the other end, were real doozies to hit.

For the corkball bat, eureka, it was usually moms broken broom handle. Many a mom never knew how her good broom lost a handle.

She would see the games in progress but being the good mom she was, she never complained about her broken broom handle. She knew. We simply thought we were sneaky slick. The most cork ball that I personally ever played was inside the inner courtyard of what was once Auburn’s Magnolia Hall. Magnolia Hall was the main boys dormitory during the 50’s on the Loveliest Village On The Plains, Auburn University, Auburn, Alabama.

Bill Sparks, Ronnie Syphers, Ross Wommack and Rip Riggins, were corkball playing whammer jammers. Now the folks at Midfield High School probably never knew their coach was the corkball hitting champion of Magnolia Hall.

The only person that I knew who could hit better than Bill Sparks was Ross Wommack (he was a hitter too).

The only time I remember observing a successful cross handed hitter was in cork ball. His name has completely slipped my mind. It has been several years.

My Dad also would bat cross handed. The corkball hitter would make me think of how Dad would hold the bat. Dad told me he used the cross hand to hold the bat because when he was young and helped Grandad clearing land to cultivate, he swung an axe that way.

My Dad was not a ball player so he did not cotton to street baseball, however he truly enjoyed the games of baseball and football, but his lot of being a country farmers son he had precious little time for ball playing.

He did raise up six boys and two girls. The girls played some but all of us boys were given the time to enjoy playing ball.

He started a family just as the depression was upon our land. His time was taken with making a living for us youngsters to enjoy baseball and other sports which he had missed.

Being from the country and rural America my dad never had the exposure of playing baseball by street baseball rules.

Baseball players from all walks of life learned to love the game and how to play from all the playing diamonds or from any corner even in the streets by Street Baseball Rules. Street Baseball was baseball playing by the baseball playground rules.

Free time, Let’s go play a game!

Fuzzball and Other Bat-and-Ball Games

Aug 31, 2000 by Colby Vargas

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.