THE OLDER BOYS OF SUMMER : Meet the Grays: Hard-Driving, Feisty Ballplayers Who Get Better With Age

Tom McCarthy, the dean of the San Diego Grays softball team pitching staff, glared in disgust at the umpire. There were runners at first and second, and McCarthy was counting on a double play to get him out of the inning. But the umpire, as umpires often do, suddenly changed the entire complexion of the inning.

“I thought the count was 2 and 1. Now, you’re telling me it’s 3 and 0,” yelled the white-bearded McCarthy as he stepped off the mound and walked toward the plate. Peering through black-framed glasses, McCarthy continued the argument. “You called the last pitch a strike!” he continued.

The umpire put both arms in the air, signaling for time, and shot back: “I said, ‘short.’ The pitch was short.”

Someone on the Grays’ bench chuckled and explained the misunderstanding. He blamed the hearing aids that McCarthy wears in both ears.

“In a game situation,” said the amused teammate, McCarthy, 80, sometimes turns them off in order to concentrate. This was, he continued, possibly the only time in baseball history where the umpire was blind and the pitcher deaf.

Meet the Grays, a softball club of motley senior citizens between 70 and 80 years old whose love for baseball has not diminished with age. They are men in the autumn years of life. But as long as there is the smell of green grass, the lure of blue skies and a smooth infield, they will always be boys of summer.

Willie Mays once said: “You’ve got to have a lot of little boy in you to play this game.” Some of the old-timers who play for the Grays kept the little boy inside for more than half a century, when they were too busy with life’s more mundane matters, like making a living and raising a family.

But the Grays’ lives have come full circle. Retirement has taken them back to those carefree days of youth, to summer days filled with the wonderful cacophony of infield chatter, the plop of a ball hitting the pocket of a leather glove and that sweet sound of a pitch crunched by the meaty part of the bat.

But do not let the Grays’ self-deprecating humor fool you. These guys are not out there simply to entertain their grandchildren and

great-grandchildren. They are good ballplayers and the only ball club in San Diego County that is made up of 70- and 80-year-old men. Using what is probably the most overused cliche in sports, they are competitors. Besides McCarthy, the characters that make up the Grays’ roster include:

- Alberto (Chi Chi) Flores, 71, a member of the Puerto Rican Baseball Hall of Fame. Flores, who still carries the burly frame of the professional catcher that he once was, played ball in the Puerto Rican leagues with Pedro (The Big Bull) Cepeda, father of Orlando (The Baby Bull) Cepeda, a former power-hitting San Francisco Giant first baseman. Golfer Chi Chi Rodriguez, a fellow Puerto Rican, borrowed Flores’ nickname.

- Jack Leonard, 71, a slick-fielding third baseman who retired after working 36 years with Life and Sports Illustrated. Leonard, who is the team’s spokesman, is the father of NBC “Today Show” correspondent Mike Leonard.

- Pat Padillo, 70, the fastest man on the team. Other team members said that Padillo has been clocked at 13 seconds flat while running around the bases. He has been clocked at 3 seconds while running from first to second or second to third. With Padillo in the outfield, it is pretty hard for an opposing team to hit a ball in the gap.

- Andy Rock, 70, a left-handed, line-drive hitter with a sweet, level swing. In addition to having a ballplayer’s name, Rock looks like a ballplayer when he is in uniform.

- John Donley, 72, a wiry shortstop in the mold of Luis Aparicio. Donley has a strong arm and can go to his right with the best of them. Leonard and Donley played high school ball in Patterson, N.J., more than 50 years ago and were reunited two years ago when the Grays were put together.

- Dolph (Soup) Campbell, 76, McCarthy’s batterymate and the other half of “the world’s oldest battery.” Campbell, 76, insists that he is related to former Brooklyn Dodger first baseman Dolf Camilli. “Dolf’s my 15th cousin, twice removed on my mother’s side. Camilli is Italian for Campbell, and we later changed his (Dolf’s) name to Campbell,” he said. Campbell’s teammates, however, remain skeptical about Campbell’s alleged ties to Camilli.

- Bing Williams, 70, a power-hitting first baseman. Williams, no relation to Ted Williams, grew up with the Splendid Splinter in North Park. Both Williamses played for the North Park Grays before Ted went on to star for the Boston Red Sox. Bing claims that he batted cleanup behind Ted when they played sandlot ball in North Park.

“With Ted batting third, I never got any good pitches to hit because he was never on base,” Bing said. Someone else commented that Ted was never on base because he was always hitting balls out of the park.

The Grays are always looking for that 70-year-old phenom, but they do not give a uniform to anyone who wants to play.

Tough to Make the Roster

“We give anyone who indicates an interest a chance,” Rock said. “But we look them over closely to see if they can hit, run, field, and if they have the skills to help the club.”

If the new player is impressive enough during a tryout, the team’s board of directors, which includes Rock, Donley, Flores, Leonard and Henry Antosz, have to vote him onto the team. Antosz, who came up with the idea to start the team two years ago, worked on the U.S. government’s Manhattan Project to develop an atomic bomb during World War II.

On this particular day, when a visitor went to see them play, the Grays were scrapping with a Pacific Beach team of 55-year-olds. “They’re just kids,” said Leonard. “But we often give up 150 years when we play.”

The Grays had already beaten the Pacific Beach team twice this year, but the PB team had gotten to McCarthy early and the Grays were down 8-0 in the fourth inning.

Jack “Rosie” Rosalia, 75, came in to relieve McCarthy and promptly silenced the PB bats. In the fifth and sixth innings, the PBers got the first two batters on base but the Grays brought the infield in and quashed both rallies. In the seventh inning, the first Pacific Beach hitter got on, but, thanks in part to a great stab by Williams of a wicked line drive, no runs scored.

“Tell them you saw me put some sandpaper in my back pocket. I’ll do anything to win, even scuff the ball if I have to,” said Rosalia, a Brooklyn native and “die-hard New York Yankee fan.”

The Grays’ uniforms, along with their major league-style caps, are patterned after the Red Sox road grays. Leonard, a Boston fan, “procured” the uniforms with the assistance of a friend who works at Wilson, a sporting goods company. Wearing the Red Sox-type uniform must be particularly galling to Rosalia, who is almost as old as the bitter Yankee-Red Sox rivalry.

The Grays’ bats came alive in the fifth inning, when they rallied for three runs. In that inning, Vic Rocco, who is somewhere between 70 and 80, hit a line drive over the third baseman’s head. The ball had extra bases written all over it as it rolled down the line and the Pacific Beach left fielder hustled after it.

But when the throw reached the cutoff man, who was standing in shallow left field, Rocco was just stepping on first base. Age had nothing to do with Rocco’s lumbering running style, said one teammate.

“He’s just slow, you know, runs like he’s carrying a piano on his back,” the teammate said. “Rocco’s the only guy who can stretch a triple into a single.”

But Campbell is quick to admit the undeniable.

“When you get to be our age, you slow down a lot. You think you’re running fast and you’re not. Baseball is all timing. You see that the throw is not coming very fast to the first baseman and you think you can beat it, but you don’t,” Campbell said.

Van Vanderwall, 71, tripled against the Pacific Beach team. Vanderwall, a tall, bespectacled, graceful outfielder, joked about the Grays and his teammates.

“We’re trying to recapture our youth by playing ball,” he said. “But my wife says it’s advancing senility.”

Graceful Aging

Campbell, who retired as a western regional manager for Dupont, explained the Grays’ love for the game.

“Playing ball is a graceful way of growing old. This bunch lived through the Depression, when times were tough. Most of us played semi-pro ball through the Depression to pick up a dollar here and there. But the game is a lovely game, intricate and on the order of a ballet.”

All of the Grays are in remarkably good shape for their ages. But once in a while, the realities of age prompt questions during a game that everyone would prefer not to ask. But like everything else on this team, such questions are handled with humor.

In a recent game, McCarthy, who is called the Elder Gray, seemed to have a hard time running to first base and grabbed his chest in mid-stride. Worried team members quickly asked him if he was all right.

“I’m fine now,” responded McCarthy, who thumped on his heart. “I just kicked it in again.”

The Grays lost the game against Pacific Beach, 10-5, but Leonard pointed out that there will be other games. For Pete’s sake, even the 1928 Yankees, widely acclaimed as the greatest team ever assembled on a diamond, lost their share of games.

“I don’t like to lose,” McCarthy said. “We beat ourselves today by not executing. The guys better be ready to work their butts off at our next practice. They were too nice out there today.”

Most wives approve of their husbands playing with the Grays. But the players admit that some feelings have been hurt when wives are suddenly left to fend for themselves while their husbands are playing or practicing.

“I used to swim with my wife every morning, until the Grays started up,” Rock said. “That used to be my exercise. But now I play ball two, three times a week, and more if I could. That’s a lot of exercise.”

Meanwhile, the Grays are looking for opponents 55 years old and over.

“We’re a hell of a team now, but we’re gonna get better,” Campbell said unabashedly. “We haven’t peaked yet, and when we do, watch out. If we’re this good now, think how good we’re gonna be when we’re 90, when we’re all veterans.”