A SEASON FOR THE AGES : Jovial Burbank Bluebirds of 55-and-Older League Coax Enough Out of Their Tired and Aching Bones to Land Berth in World Series of Senior Softball

Remember a TV show several years ago called “Bay City Blues,” about a minor league baseball team? Of course not. Nobody does. They only filmed eight episodes before someone with a thread of common sense jerked the plug on it. But if you did remember the show, you’d also remember the uniforms that the actor-baseball players wore. Very distinctive. Blue and white and snazzy.

Well, the show may be dead, but the uniforms live.

In Burbank.

On old guys.

They belong to the Burbank Bluebirds, a slow-pitch softball team comprising players 55 years of age or older. The Bluebirds will be flying south this fall, to Greensboro, N. C., as one of 16 teams in the country to qualify for what is being billed as the first World Series of Senior Softball.

The Bluebirds attained this honor with a lot of hard work. And a lot of bandages and knee braces and rubbing ointment. Although 55 is by no means old, it is a relatively advanced age to be playing a running and hitting and throwing game like softball at a very competitive level.

Most of the Bluebirds, after all, were playing organized baseball at the dawn of television. And according to a few of their bodies, some of these guys began playing baseball not all that long after another significant invention--the wheel.

“Last year I went after a ball hit in the hole,” said shortstop Wally Lammers, 62, “and something popped in my hip. And then I had a hernia problem. This year, my right arm is about to fall right off. It hurts when I throw and it hurts when I swing a bat and sometimes it hurts when I field a grounder.”

Lammers, who played for the Los Angeles Angels in the Pacific Coast League in 1957 and then went on the 30-year inactive list, said that his previous life as a baseball player has made his new softball career very hard on his body.

“The competitive spirit is still there,” he said, “and I remember when I would dive and stretch every muscle in my body to get to a ground ball. Today, when a grounder comes my way, there’s a battle going on. Part of me wants to go after it in a full dive and another part of me is saying, ‘No, Wally, no! Don’t do it! Don’t do it!’

“Sometimes I forget that voice, and I pay for it. That’s how I popped my hip last year.”

And, Lammers says, the decline in physical skills isn’t always measured by decades.

“It’s not that I can’t play like I did 30 years ago,” he said. “I can’t even play like I did two years ago. Balls I would get to two years ago I can’t get to now.”

Bill Burton, whose son Tim was the director of the film “Batman,” is sort of a batman director himself. He is the director of sports for the city of Burbank and is the manager of the Bluebirds. He took the job because he created the team. And he created the team in 1983 because he had the uniforms. He bought them from Mary Tyler Moore Enterprises, which produced the “Bay City Blues” series, which was filmed, albeit briefly, in Burbank.

“I run the softball programs in Burbank, and I figured those uniforms would be nice to have,” Burton said. “Then I thought about getting some guys to wear them. At first the people I asked were very hesitant. They had been away from the game for so long that the idea of coming back was not very appealing to them.”

But Burton did round up enough local men to start a team. At first, it was strictly for laughs. But gradually, as they played and practiced together and found themselves getting better, things got a bit more serious.

The key word here is bit .

“When we play, we are serious,” said Burton, whose team qualified for the World Series by finishing second in a regional tournament in Reno last month. “But when the game is over, it’s over. We don’t have sleepless nights if we lose, like we might have 30 years ago. There is a lot of laughing when we get together.”

Which leads us--preferably tripping comically over something and wearing fake arrows through our heads while looking for a victim for a prank--to Tom Mankey, a 60-year-old, very funny 230-pound combination of Ted Williams and Robin Williams.

Mankey once hit four home runs during a game in Las Vegas. He is also credited with telling four jokes in one inning during a game in Long Beach. He is equally proud of both feats.

“We’ve made it to the World Series, and I don’t know how good we are,” Mankey said. “But I do know that we are old. I always played baseball and I always loved it. I still love to play, but there are some differences between then and now. Like now my legs don’t like to play at all and my wife thinks I’m pretty dumb to keep trying.

“What keeps me going is the fun of the game and camaraderie it creates. Some games my whole family comes out to watch, even my grandchildren. I just hope I’m smart enough to cut this stuff out before my great-grandchildren start coming out to watch.”

The main difference between playing the game as a young man and playing it at the age of 55 or 60, according to Mankey--who plays first base, the outfield and catcher--is that the gap between good days and bad days is roughly as wide as Dom DeLuise.

“Just like always, there are those good days and bad days on the field,” he said. “Some days we really look good out there. We make the plays and really look good. But other days we look like the 10 Pillars of Salt out there. Some days I see the ball coming by my left ear and I look up and I’ve put the glove by my right ear and I wonder how that happened.

“What bothers me is that sometimes, by the age of 60, you find yourself dozing off out there. When you start waking up between hops of a grounder, then you know you’re in trouble.

“With me, my arm was the first thing to go, and that was five years ago. Check that. My mind was the first thing to go, and that was 10 years ago.”

Mankey said he realized that this was no ordinary league during the tournament in Reno. While sitting in a casino, he met a player from another 55-and-over team, a player who also was a chiropractor. Mankey began describing his injuries to his knee and how the soreness had persisted and the next thing he knew his new friend had taken hold of his leg and was twisting and turning it, telling Mankey how he would pop it back into place.

“I’m sitting at a blackjack table and this guy grabs my leg and jerks it real hard and I realize right away that a lot of people are looking at us,” Mankey said. “All of a sudden me and this guy are the best show in the casino. It maybe helped my knee a little bit. But it sure saved me a lot of money.”

Money that Mankey would have spent at a doctor’s or a chiropractor’s office?

“No,” Mankey said. “Gambling money. While this guy is wrestling me around the blackjack table, I’m not playing cards. I figure he saved me a bundle.”

There are other distinctive features about this league. The rules, for example. One is that there will be no contact at home plate between a catcher and a baserunner. So a scoring line is drawn just in front of the plate, and a runner only has to cross it to complete the play. And no tag is required. Everything, in essence, is a force play. If a baserunner touches home plate, he is out.

“I also coach third base,” Manager Burton said, “and you can’t imagine the problems my guys have had with this rule. Every time I send a runner home I scream at him as he rounds third base, ‘Don’t touch the plate, don’t touch the plate!’ And then they forget and go sliding into home plate with this big cloud of dust. And the catcher doesn’t even have the ball yet but the umpire looks down at my guy and screams, ‘You’re out!’

“They just forget. They are getting to the age where their mind wanders a bit, I think.”

“Seniors softball is great,” said Mankey. “It creates an interest in us older guys to keep fit. You can’t just sit around and vegetate when you get to be a little older.

“Come to think of it, why can’t you? What’s wrong with sitting around and vegetating? Come to think of it, I sort of like that idea.”