HOLLYWOOD — The first pitch of the Sunday game reached the catcher a few minutes after nine, and two rosters of grown men returned to a sport most of them were advised to give up years ago.
They play in a wood-bat amateur league open to anyone 18 or older, with no cutoff at the far end. The season runs on the Griffith Park diamonds from March into October, nine innings, hardball, umpires paid out of a coffee can that travels down the bench between innings. No one is scouted here. Almost everyone has to be somewhere else by early afternoon.
The line the players keep drawing is between what they do and softball, which several describe as the thing you switch to once you have admitted something to yourself.
“Softball is a barbecue with bases,” said Eddie Sandoval, 46, who plays second base and keeps the league’s ledger of dues and forfeits. “This is the real game, at whatever speed we have left. The ball is hard. The pitcher is trying to get you out. You strike out and it counts, and everybody saw it.”
The league carries eight teams and a waiting list that never fully clears, because rosters thin in the ordinary ways — a hamstring that no longer heals on its own, a job that moves to the far side of town. Tom Redfern, 63, has played since the Clinton years and now pitches almost entirely on guile, a catalog of slow curveballs he calls “junk that used to be a fastball.”
“I can’t throw it past anybody anymore, so I throw it around them,” Redfern said. “The young guys hate losing to me more than they hate losing to each other. That is most of my scouting report.”
The younger players tend to be recent college washouts and old high-school standouts who were not ready to stop. Andre Whitfield, 26, hit over .400 in the outfield rotation last summer and says he came out the first week to stay in shape and stayed for the arguments.
“Nobody out here is going anywhere with it, so the only thing on the line is the game,” Whitfield said. “You would think that makes it loose. It makes it worse. Guys will argue a call for ten minutes over pure pride.”
Costs are modest and shared. Bats crack and get replaced, balls scuff and stay in play longer than they should, and the umpire fee comes to a few dollars a head. The league does not advertise. New players turn up because a cousin or a coworker mentioned a Sunday game, came to watch, and could not sit still in the bleachers.
By the middle innings the shade had left the third-base line, and the older men were reapplying sunscreen between at-bats. The game ended past noon, tied and uncounted after the umpire ran out of time and patience. The players shook hands, agreed on nothing, and wrote it onto the schedule for the following week.