Senior softball league, whose players are 70 and older, takes to the field even in summer heat

The sun glared down, the temperature on the artificial turf field already pushing an oppressive 92 degrees Wednesday morning at Cantiague Park in Hicksville. The next field over, where the kids from the Blue Chip Collegiate Baseball League were playing, the pitcher was already laboring in the sweltering heat.

Glancing over at the game, Jules Balistreri smiled.

“They’ve got a long way to go to catch up to us,” he said. “Just about everybody out here in our game’s been playing ball fifty, sixty years now. Some, even longer.”

Balistreri, 79, of Lake Grove is commissioner of the New York Senior Softball Association, a Nassau County based softball league for players 70 and older. Sponsored by The Bristal assisted living facilities, the league has nine teams, all named for Major League clubs, and more than 150 players — none residents of The Bristal.

The seniors play all summer, two seven-inning doubleheaders a week, Mondays and Wednesdays, at Cantiague and Wantagh State Park — a total of 56 games each team. On Wednesday the league held its annual All-Star game, complete with a featured theme: this season, celebrating the 50th Anniversary of the 1973 World Series between the Oakland A’s and the New York Mets.

Playing softball to win

“If I left it up to them,” Balistreri, a former lefthanded pitcher for Bushwick High School in Brooklyn, said, “they’d play even more games. There’s something about playing ball, being with friends. There’s no conflicts out here. Well, on this side of the lines. Get out there on the other side, on the field, and men will be men.

“They don’t go out there to lose.”

Catcher Carmine DeStefano of Bethpage played Wednesday for the A’s. He’s the oldest player in the league at 92.

He grew up in Astoria, but never played ball at Long Island City High School, instead first playing softball for an Army team during the Korean War. He stopped when he got out of the service, going to work for Western Union, then one afternoon stumbled on a seniors game at Eisenhower Park. That was a 1991. Soon he joined a 60-and-over league. He’s been playing in the NYSSA 70-and-over for more than a half-dozen years despite aching knees and a herniated disc in his back.

“Without it I never would have met half these guys,” he said. “The social aspect, everyone out here talking? It helps keep you in a certain frame of mind. It helps keep you young.”

 How young — and, competitive — was obvious after Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman threw out the first pitch. 

At one point, Joe O’Shea, 81, of Floral Park, a retired NYPD sergeant, hit a ball past a diving second baseman and into the outfield gap. He ended up hustling around the bags for an inside-the-park three-run homer.

“I used to be very fast,” the Bronx native said. “No more. But, it gets me out of the house, helps me stay active.”

Later in the game O’Shea made a pick at first base on a bounced throw from shortstop Joe Rondinelli, 82, of Melville, who’d gone to his left in the hole, backhanded a two-hopper, and thrown across the diamond to just get the runner.

Pitching softball, feeling vibrant

Jack Battaglia, 81, of Huntington said he’d come back to play softball after a quadruple bypass in 2020, a kidney transplant in 2021 — and a double hernia operation in between.

He was a lefthanded pitcher at Adelphi, having played on the same Bushwick High School team with Balistreri.

“After all I went through I just wanted to be out here again,” he said, noting he’d played semipro baseball until he was 45, then played windmill and fast-pitch softball before becoming a player in the slowpitch NYSSA. “I just love being out here.”

“You just love getting together with the guys,” NYSSA executive board member [and, equipment manager] Harvey Brittman, 81, of Westbury said. Brittman played football at James Monroe High School in the Bronx, then was a Long Island football official for decades before becoming a softball outfielder.

“When you have something going on outside the home,” he said, “something you’re active in, you’re not old anymore.”

Though the A’s beat the Mets, 4 games to 3, in the 1973 World Series, it was the Mets who broke a 5-5 tie to beat the A’s, 8-5, in a heat-shortened game Wednesday.

As O’Shea scored the final run on a jaunt from second base to home after hitting a double that made it 7-5, one of his teammates shouting: “I didn’t know you still had wheels!”

As he walked off, O’Shea laughed and said: “I don’t.”

By John Valenti

john.valenti@newsday.com

John Valenti, a reporter at Newsday since 1981, has been honored nationally by the Associated Press and Society of the Silurians for investigative, enterprise and breaking news reporting, as well as column writing, and is the author of “Swee'pea,” a book about former New York playground basketball star Lloyd Daniels. Valenti is featured in the Emmy Award-winning ESPN 30-for-30 film “Big Shot.”