Two-Run Triple Tony Tedeschi

Two-Run Triple

I called it a “Nicky Hit,” he said, “a late-swing, opposite-field, extra-base hit. Whenever one of my players got one of those, I called it a Nicky Hit. When they looked at me confused, it just gave me the opportunity to talk about that game.

By Tony Tedeschi

Beginning in my early teens, I started scribbling stories in a speckled notebook I kept in my school bag. I brought it out whenever I had free time during breaks, in my classes and after, writing down my observations on just about anything. Becoming a protagonist in my own story, however, was not something I’d experienced until the story I was about to share with Billy Boylan. Our paths converged in late August of 1955, on a baseball diamond across the street from my home in the Astoria section of New York City’s Borough of Queens.

Billy Boylan was one of those kids whose path in life was planned out for him by an over-controlling father. Oft-told tale, I know, but each of these stories has its own plotline and, in this one, Billy’s father couldn’t keep from trying to write his son’s story.

Bill senior was a New York City cop, who took pride in his nickname, “Basher Bill Boylan,” although he was universally despised by both the members of the community he patrolled and his colleagues on the force. Basher Bill had boxed in the Golden Gloves one year, where he took out his first two opponents in the first round with his bashing right hand to the head. But Bill fell in the third match to a fighter who had a full repertoire of punches, could defend against a roundhouse right, then dance around his opponent with well-choreographed footwork. Bill’s air swings were so tiring, his opponent had barely to tap him on the chest in the fifth round to send him to the canvas. It was the end of Basher Bill’s brief boxing career.

Billy junior had no interest in boxing, but he could throw a baseball. By the time Billy had reached his early teens, he had grown into a hulk of a kid. He plied his paternal DNA to terrorize fellow students in the schoolyards and hallways of his schools. He was toughened further by his father, with grueling workouts at a gym near his home. He spent hours hurling a baseball at different mockups to simulate batters, which his father created in the backyard of their house in St. Albans, Queens. His father’s objective for Billy was to turn his son into a star pitcher for the Brooklyn Dodgers, the dominant National League team in the 1950s. Billy seemed to have all the natural skills to make his father’s objective his own. He was a dominant pitcher on little league teams from the youngest age children were accepted. He blew away batters who faced him at all age levels. Most of his opponents were terrified he’d hit them with a fastball he couldn’t control.

Billy and I were each fourteen and headed for high school at the end of the summer of 1955. By then, we were both playing in New York’s Police Athletic League, I in the 114th Precinct in North Queens, Billy in the 113th in South Queens. But while I was delusional about one day replacing Moose Skowron at first base and batting fifth for the Yankees, I had at least a very strong suspicion that would never happen. Billy, on the other hand, was captive to his father’s grand plan of getting him on the Dodgers. Bryant High School, the local high school within the neighborhood of my 114th precinct, had produced Billy Loes, one of the top pitchers on the Dodgers during this time period. That Bryant High could do it once only fed Bill senior’s plan for his son. He could see a path forward by using the address of his sister, Billy’s aunt, as the home address for his son, thereby getting Billy enrolled at Bryant where he would train under the baseball coach who had nurtured a bona fide pitcher for the Dodgers. At the same time, Bill senior somehow managed to provide Billy junior with a kind of dual residency by keeping the home in St. Albans for the purposes of the PAL, so his son could pitch on what he considered the superior precinct, and thereby add New York City Champion to his baseball resume. I guess you really had to hand it to the guy. Irony of course was, if Billy’s father’s tortured maneuverings had only

used the aunt’s Astoria address as a residence, Billy and I would have been teammates and our facing each other would have been in a dugout not on the pitcher’s mound versus the batter’s box.

But I digress.

Every year, New York’s five boroughs would each field its best PAL precinct team in a tournament, playing teams representing the other four boroughs, eventually crowning the winner of the PAL City Championship. Each precinct team was made up of the best players from the teams in the various age divisions within their precinct’s summer baseball programs. I was our team’s first baseman, an unlikely position for a singles-hitting righthander, whose right-handedness was an inherent disadvantage because my glove hand was on the foul line side of my body, just like Moose Skowron, however. I’d made the team as the second-string first baseman behind a heftier lefty, who despite his dexterous advantage was a lousy fielder, but he hit a lot harder than I did. I replaced him as the starter, when his family moved away just as the playoffs were beginning. My better glove work saved a few runs during games leading up to the Queens Championship and my singles and doubles had been in the middle of some key rallies. Winning Queens was a big deal, since our borough had gone on to the City Championship nine of the last ten seasons.

So, there we were, the 114th battling the 113th in a one-game playoff to represent Queens. Both teams had finished with the same won-lost record during the regular season facing other precincts in our borough. We had won a coin toss giving us home field advantage on the diamond in Astoria Park, and we were feeling good about playing on our home field, but watching Billy warm up before the start of the game was stressful. While most of us in our fourteen-year-old age group seemed to be growing by inches, as we slept an inordinate number of hours during growth spurts, Billy, on the other hand, must have had a growth cascade.

“That guy’s gotta be a ringer,” our coach, Bob Grant said, watching the warmup and shaking his head. “Am I out of line to ask to see his birth certificate?” It was just Mr. Grant grousing, and clearly no birth certificate was going to happen. Not surprisingly, Billy’s warmups were nothing but fast balls – fastfastballs and Mr. Grant spent a good deal of time shaking his head and mumbling over and over, “that guy’s gotta be a ringer.”

“Get ready to be blown away,” Billy’s father yelled from the stands. “Go get ‘em, Billy!”

Once the game began, Billy throwing strikes was almost impossible to hit. Mickey Jordan, our pitcher, threw “stuff.” He had a curveball that actually curved and, when combined with his respectable fastball, he could be very effective. Mickey was effective until the fifth inning, when his curves decided not to curve, and we ended the inning down 2-0. In the bottom of the sixth, Billy Boylan lost his rhythm and had trouble finding the plate. We worked him for two walks and a couple of weak singles to push in two runs of our own. It gave us the sense that he was tiring and we could start facing a pitcher who was perhaps human. Alas, the loss of rhythm had been a temporary

issue and Billy was back blowing us away in the seventh and eighth. In the top of the ninth, the 113th hitters put together a walk, a single and an error by our shortstop to score a run, pushing us to the edge of elimination with one chance left in the bottom of the inning.

Up to that point, I’d had two strikeouts and a walk against Billy. I sat in the dugout, despondent because, as the third hitter up in the inning, I could be the final out, eliminating us from the PAL championship round. But our leadoff hitter managed to just get a piece of a pitch and blooped it over second for a single. Trying to overcompensate for allowing that lame hit, Billy threw one too close to our second hitter that struck him on the left elbow. Suddenly, we had runners on first and second. As I walked, tentatively, to the batter’s box, I was wrestling with anxieties of killing a last ditch rally as a fate even worse than making the last out in the elimination game. Since Billy had made me look lame with strikeouts during my last two at bats, I was sure he viewed me as the first of the three strikeouts he needed to put the game away.

The first pitch I faced was a ball, inside, and close enough to force me to back off the plate. I viewed it as intimidation and held my position, only briefly questioning my sanity for remaining that close to the plate. The second pitch was a strike, way too fast for me to get around on. I stepped out of the batter’s box to compose my thoughts. Even as a fourteen year old, I was marveling at how much Billy had left to be throwing that hard in the ninth inning of a game. Seemingly determined to put me away, his next two pitches were hard and fast and considerably off the plate. With a three-andone count in my favor, conventional wisdom would dictate I take the next pitch, hope for a walk and leave the up-or-down theatrics to the next hitters. As I settled in, however, I was convinced he would not want to walk the bases loaded and would ease up on his delivery to throw me a strike. So, I was ready. I began my swing as soon as the pitch had left his hand, made solid contact, launching the longest drive I had ever hit down the left field line. . . foul.

The 113th coach, with a facial expression like he had just seen the Wolfman or Frankenstein, asked for time and made a trip to the mound to talk to his pitcher. On the way, he motioned his outfielders to move a bit toward left in anticipation that if I could pull another pitch, it would create a real problem for them with the two men on base in front of me. As I stood at home plate and watched this, I was betting the conversation on the mound was something about his pitcher showing signs of tiring, when a singles hitter like me pulls a ball that far. Their manager left the conference on the mound, waving his outfielders even further toward left field. Billy had been fiddling with the rosin bag the whole time during this conference, so it was clear to me that he didn’t like what was being said about how he was fading. Hell, he’d been in there all nine innings throwing his signature fastballs, fast, fastballs.

“Do your thing, Billy,” his father yelled. “That scrawny kid won’t hit anything this time.”

As I stood there watching their manager take his seat in the dugout, Mr. Grant was yelling, “Good eye, Nicky. Make him throw a strike. Look it over.” Clearly, with a three-two count on me, Coach Grant was hoping I’d just keep the bat on my shoulder and watch the next pitch, hoping it was a ball. He was willing to sacrifice me with hopes the better two hitters who followed would bring in at least one run to tie the game, especially if we got lucky and Billy missed with the next pitch.

I had other plans, however.

As I settled into the batter’s box, the words of baseball’s great guru, Yogi Berra, were settling over me, like some metaphysical passage from the great yogi’s book of inspirational sayings: “You can’t think and hit at the same time.” Just swing, I thought. What’s the worst that can happen, you strike out? Your coach is already willing to accept that. You’ve done it twice already today. Don’t take, I thought, just swing.

Well, Billy must have taken all that had transpired during the conference on the mound as a deeply personal afront. The next pitch I saw from him was the hardest he had thrown all game. But my swing was only a shade slower than the home-bound journey of the ball and I struck it just before it would have thumped into the catcher’s mitt, launching a high fly to right field, almost precisely toward the position where their coach had motioned his right fielder to move out of while he was walking from the mound. It would have been a long, but easy out had he not repositioned his outfielders.

As I rounded second and headed for third, the second of my two teammates crossed home plate and the game was over. The umpire waived me on to third and declared the hit a triple. The right fielder had not even retrieved the ball yet.

“Hell, ump,” I said. “I could walk home.”

“As soon as your second teammate crossed the plate, the game was over,” he replied with that voice of authority they must train umpires to deliver. “You weren’t even on third yet. I could have ruled it a double.”

I quit while I was ahead.

Only then was I fully aware of all the celebrating going on among my teammates: jumping up and down, pumping fists in the air, slapping each other on the back and, finally, rushing toward me and lifting me into the air. It was definitely the high point of my life thus far. Way past the history medal in elementary school.

Oddly, even as my teammates were parading me around the diamond on their shoulders, my attention was drawn to Billy Boylan, who was still on the mound, his right arm hanging loosely by his side, like the sleeve in an empty jeans jacket.

His father was yelling at him from the sidelines: “That scrawny kid? You let him beat you? He can hardly lift that thirty-two-inch bat, let alone swing it.”

Billy just stood there, staring at the ground.

“You’re a loser, Billy. A loser.” His father turned and walked toward the parking lot, under the Triboro Bridge, beyond right field.

All I could think of was Billy having to hitch a ride home. Would he even be welcome at home?

The late August, late afternoon shadows began to lengthen, darkening the infield as my teammates and I collected our gear to head home. Those whose parents could make the weekday game began streaming toward the parking lot with their sons, others dispersing for homes in walking distance from the baseball field. When all were gone, I hoisted my backpack, containing my Moose Skowron first-baseman’s mitt and my spikes, hefted my forever-venerated, thirty-two-ounce bat, and stood at home plate for a few moments, reliving my moment of glory. Although it was still fresh in my memory, of course, I was nonetheless a bit surprised at how I could remember each pitch and what I was thinking – or to quote Yogin Berra again, notthinking – as I swung at that fateful pitch. Somehow I knew, then and there, that no matter what life had yet in store for me, the memory on the baseball field was the part that would live on forever.

The edge of the creeping shadows swallowed home plate at my feet as I turned for the short walk home, skipping down the grassy hillock to Hoyt Avenue and my home across the street. My parents would both be on the way home from their jobs by now and would be thrilled with the story I had for them. As I came through the front door, my grandmother was preparing dinner, as she did every night for as long as I could remember.

“How was the game?” she asked.

“We won,” I answered.

“Good, Nee-key,” she replied with that beautiful Italian inflection that defined the comfort of home for me.

“I drove in the winning run, Grandma,” I said.

“Nice, Nee-key,” she replied. “Wash up for dinner. Your mama and papa will be home soon.”

I headed up to my bedroom to drop off my gear and wash up for dinner, the end of another day in the midst of another summer vacation for a fourteen year old.

We cruised to the City Championship in 1955 with easy victories against each of the other boroughs.

In 1974, I read about Dodger pitcher, Tommy John, undergoing special surgery to repair a tear to his ulnar collateral ligament. The operation allowed John to continue a career, which would certainly have ended otherwise, winning a total of 288 games. The operation was so successful that pitcher after pitcher, over many decades, had what came to be known as “Tommy John surgery.” Many surveys determined that overuse of the pitching motion, especially in boys nine to fourteen, was a major cause of the injury to the ligament.

Billy had to have thrown more than 100 pitches during that playoff game in Astoria Park. Given the velocity of the pitch that I hit, and the way Billy’s

arm hung limp as my teammates were parading me around the bases, it would not be much of a stretch to conclude that Billy had suffered the torn ligament, especially if you considered how much his father overworked his arm with his pitching drills. The irony was that the surgery, which extended Tommy John’s career as a Dodger, was more than nineteen years too late to repair Billy Boylan’s dream of becoming a Dodger.

As the baseball season began again in the spring of 1956, I was finishing up my freshman year at prep school in Brooklyn. Given a commute that involved a bus and subway, and classes that sometimes ended at 5 p.m., there was no way I could participate in the PAL baseball season, which began near the outset of spring. My chance of replacing Moose Skowron at first base with the Yankees was effectively over. I read the sports section of our local weekly in Astoria religiously looking for Billy’s name in the writeups about Bryant High, but it was never there. Eventually, I’d heard he hadn’t moved in with his aunt and that he wasn’t even pitching in the fifteen-year-old division at the 113th. By the end of summer my interests had turned away from baseball as I took on the tough later-term programs in prep school, then eventually the pressure of driving my grade point up and studying for the admission tests for MIT. Thoughts of Billy, and even my famous two-runtriple, faded into memory . . . until I read about the murder of Billy’s father in the New YorkDaily News: “New York Cop Executed by Crack Dealer.”

“William Boylan, a member of the NYPD for 28 years, was gunned down last night in what police investigators are calling a ‘brazen ambush by a crack dealer with multiple convictions.’ It appeared that Officer Boylan was lured down an alley in South Jamaica, Queens and executed in a shower of bullets from an illegal handgun. The killer, Jesus Colon, was cornered in the alley by backup officers from the 113th Precinct in South Jamaica and died in an exchange of gunfire with police . . .”

The New YorkTimespicked up the thread, two days later, with a more in-depth article.

“. . . . Jesus Colon and his brother, Joachim, were known to 113th Precinct, and Officer Boylan in particular, as neighborhood crack cocaine dealers. Each had been arrested multiple times by Officer Boylan but had spent little time in custody. Known in the neighborhood as “Basher Bill Boylan,” Officer Boylan was described by witnesses as harassing Mr. Colon’s autistic brother, José, two days before the murder. Witnesses said José had been sitting on a crate by the Tejada Deli at the entrance to the alley, a regular location for drug dealing. When the young man failed to

respond to Officer Boylan’s questions expeditiously, Officer Boylan lifted José Colon up off his seat and hurled him to the sidewalk, his head striking the pavement, blood trickling from the corners of his mouth and his eyes rolling back in his head. He was rushed to Jamaica Hospital with serious brain trauma. He remains in the ICU at the hospital. Neighborhood residents said the injury José Colon suffered at the hands of Officer Boylan had set off his older brother, Jesus, who despised the officer and became obsessed with revenge. Police were scouring the neighborhood for Joachim Colon, but fear he may have fled to the Dominican Republic . . .”

Eventually these stories slowly faded into the forgotten history of stories like them. Over the following years, as search engines and social media became more ubiquitous, I developed the universally addictive habit of searching friends, long-lost relatives and former sweethearts on the Internet. A dozen years after the notoriety around the death of Billy Boylan’s father, another shootout between drug dealers and the police triggered a search of Billy’s name. I found various reports of his battles with drug addiction, which would have gone unnoticed as just one of so many similar stories, except for its ties to the details of his father’s notorious end. So, there it was again, the game. This time, I couldn’t just put aside an incipient and growing obsession with placing the baseball encounter into its context in the history of the Boylans. More and more it seemed that it was a pivotal driver of what became the rest of their lives . . . and mine.

I remembered I had written notes of the events of that day in one of the notebooks I’d kept in my backpack. It took several days to find the notebook, in one of those cardboard filing boxes we consign to basements. After I’d finally found it, and began reading through it, it had that almost narcotic effect of returning my thoughts to my room that night, after the game. I’d scribbled notes, which I marvel at now, years later; words that were precursors of my career as a writer. I’d written, that night, how my triumph would not have been possible without dealing a blow to another boy’s dream. Although I couldn’t fully relate to something that consequential as a fourteenyear-old, nonetheless the inference in my notes seemed to recognize it: “My win had been at the expense of Billy Boylan’s loss.” I’d read another line that stuns me to this day: “How can you have a winner without having a loser?” But, at the time, I had been incapable of scribbling down my answer to that question.

That reflection, from the hindsight of so many years, still moves me with the simplicity of the notion that someone must lose for someone else to win. In many ways, that day on the baseball field in Astoria Park solidified what became my starkly negative feelings about our need for the competition we find necessary to evaluate us, to measure our performance against others, instead of understanding the only competition that should matter is the one we each wage against ourselves. My singular moment of success was forever

tied to Billy Boylan’s far more significant failure. Baseball was never going to be my life. Baseball was to be all he had to distinguish himself.

In 1975, I got an email from Jimmy Procida, centerfielder on the 1955 team. Vic Rappelone, our third baseman, had been killed in a car crash. Vic had spent his entire life in Astoria and the wake and funeral were both being held not far from where I grew up. Jimmy had written that he expected maybe a half-dozen of the players to be there and we could have a kind of reunion to perhaps brighten things a bit for Vic’s wife and children, with stories about that championship season. He ended with, “Coach Grant RSVPed.”

When I finally got a chance to talk with Mr. Grant, sipping from paper cups by the water cooler at Vic’s wake, he said, with a smile, “Nicky Melfitano, good to see you.”

“You as well, Mr. Grant.”

“I think you’re old enough now to call me ‘Bob.’”

“OK,” I replied with a note of hesitation in my voice, “. . . Bob.”

“You know, I christened it a ‘Nicky Hit,’” he said.

“Excuse me?” I questioned.

“A late-swing, opposite-field, extra-base hit. Whenever one of my players got one of those, I called it a Nicky hit. When they looked at me confused, it just gave me the opportunity to talk about that game.”

I shook my head and let out a laugh. “But you wanted me to take,” I said, smiling.

He smiled in return. “I knew if you walked, having the bases loaded with none out, we were all but certain to tie the game and most likely to win it.”

I said nothing, just continued to smile.

“I knewyou were going to swing, Nick,” he continued. “I knew it. I could see by the death grip you held on your bat. You were always the smartest player on our team and, in the instant before Billy let go of the pitch, you were certain about what you had to do.”

“It worked, didn’t it?”

We both had a good laugh. But mine faded into introspection, which had become the coda for that day whenever it crept back into my thoughts. “Then again look at what became of Billy Boylan,” I said, but let the words trail off, as the pall bearers took Vic’s coffin to the hearse, while Coach Grant and I headed for our cars in the lot behind the funeral home.

“Nick,” he said, “you didn’t end that boy’s dream. It was over before his arm hung by his side, as we celebrated our victory. The result for Billy Boylan would have been the same if he had struck you out.”

We both stopped for a final moment by my car before separating for him to head for his, a bit further along in the parking area.

“Your victory and his defeat were separate issues,” he said. “Enjoy it, Nick. All the rest of us certainly did. To this day, I still remember it as the most thrilling victory I’d ever coached.”

“Thank you, B . . . ” I started with a warm smile, then, “Thank you, Mr. Grant.”

He nodded and smiled in return, then continued toward his car.

I got in, started the engine and joined the procession heading for the cemetery.

Boardwalk, Long Beach, New York Photo by Karen Dinan