HOLLYWOOD — The standings hang from the backstop at De Longpre Park on a laminated sheet, updated in dry-erase marker by a man who guards the marker the way some men guard a wallet.
The Cole Avenue Senior Softball League — six teams, sixty and over, a season that runs March into August — plays two mornings a week on the diamond behind the recreation center. It takes its standings with a gravity that first-time spectators tend to find funny for about an inning, until a called third strike draws an argument serious enough to change their minds.
“People come by and say, oh, isn’t this cute, the old guys are playing softball,” said Hal Bregman, 71, who has run the league for nine years and keeps its records on a laptop at home and the laminated sheet at the field. “Then they watch Sy slide into second at his age, and they stop smiling. We are not out here for our health. Well — we are, technically. But not only.”
The league plays slow-pitch, which sounds gentle and is not. The gentleness is in the arc of the ball; everything after it is contested. This season already has a protested game on the books — a dispute over whether a runner left third early on a caught fly — that Bregman spent two evenings adjudicating by text message before ruling, to nobody’s full satisfaction, that the run stood but the protesting manager had a point for next time.
Injuries are the league’s real opponent. A pulled hamstring can end a man’s season, and the rosters carry the marks of a knee replacement, two bad hips and one shoulder that its owner, Ernie Delacroix, 68, describes as “held together with the medical equivalent of duct tape.” Delacroix still plays third base, still charges the bunt he probably shouldn’t, and still, he says, thinks about the throw for a full second longer than he did at fifty.
The competitiveness is not universally beloved. A few players have drifted away over the years, put off by the edge that creeps into a close game. Most stay because of it. Frank Ozeki, 74, who drives in from Glendale twice a week, said the seriousness is the whole point. “I sat behind a desk for forty years, and nobody kept score of anything I did that I could see,” he said. “Out here it’s on the sheet. Win or lose, it’s on the sheet by noon. I like knowing.”
Bregman keeps more than the standings. He keeps a second, unofficial list — the men who have aged out, moved away or died since he took over — and reads one name from it aloud at the start of each season, once, without comment, before the first pitch.
On Thursday the game ran long, tied into an extra inning, until Sy Kaufman, 70, lined a single past a diving shortstop to end it. He did not slide. He had, he explained afterward, promised his wife he would stop doing that, a promise he described as currently under review.