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Joe Fusco Jr. ‘Carries’ Bad Baseball Memories

VaselineJuly 19, 2024

0 3 minutes read

Joe Fusco Jr. ‘Carries’ Bad Baseball Memories

Joe Fusco Jr.
| Specially for Worcester Magazine

My first memory of baseball is very traumatic. As a young boy, I threw a rubber ball against the concrete side of the garage behind the three-decker bus where our family lived.

Sometimes a throw would go wrong and fly over my glove, over the metal fence that separated our backyard from our elderly neighbor, Mrs. Renda.

Mrs. Renda always had a fire burning in the garbage can next to her garden. When she was tending her vegetables and my wrong throw landed, she would smile kindly at me, struggle to pick up my ball, and then throw it into the fire.

“You better need the catch, Joey,” she advised me in her Italian accent.

In a neighborhood full of boys my age playing streetball, I didn’t play organized hardball until I was 11. Frank’s Paint sponsored our Little League team, which won four out of 20 games. That was my first taste of what it was like to consistently lose.

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My father rarely came to my games because of his so-called business commitments, but he was there when I hit the game-tying hit against Kresge’s Five & Dime and the best pitcher in all of Little League, Bobby Williams.

“I didn’t think you could do that,” Dad admitted as he drove the family to Chick’s for the specialty soft-shell crabmeat.

At St. John’s Parochial School, I was the only sixth-grader in the high school starting lineup. Coach Martin was an ex-marine who demanded 100 percent effort, 100 percent of the time. I was his little second baseman.

One game, the batter hit a flare into no man’s land behind me and in front of our brutish eighth-grade center fielder, Frank Cusano. Our heads cracked together as the ball nestled in my glove. Frank stood up and dusted off his uniform. I was knocked out.

“Good thing you held onto the pill, Joey,” Coach Martin barked after administering the smelling salts.

“Thanks, coach,” I muttered to all three of them.

I focused on basketball and football during my high school years at Notre Dame in West Haven, Connecticut, and played baseball in the summers for fun. It was the sport I was most interested in, but the one I was least interested in.

That changed when I was asked to audition for Connecticut’s version of the Cape Cod League the summer after my freshman year of college. It was 1973, and the team was a motley crew of long-haired, fun-loving, talented hippies who traveled the East Coast to kick the asses of more conventional baseball clubs.

When we went to Maine, Massachusetts or Rhode Island for tournaments, we were given $15 a day for food, but we quickly spent that money on booze and/or drugs.

During an early morning game in Maine, Tommy Glossa, who had partied with me until 4 a.m., lined a ball into the gap, fell halfway to first base, and was thrown out by the center fielder. Not to be outdone, I followed him with a one-and-two hop to the right-field fence and then collapsed in the batter’s box.

“You boys, you don’t seem to be in shape today,” our friendly coach Beamon rightly observed, after which he benched us for the rest of the game.

After I graduated, I stayed in Boston as an advertising copywriter and played softball in a beer league for a year. It was too easy, honestly, after all those years of hardball, and I had to create competitive challenges for myself, like trying to hit slow-pitch pitchers in the head with line drives to keep my interest.

I played competitive basketball until I tore my knee at age 56. After that one boring year of softball, I stopped playing our national sport.

Sometimes I would go with my son JoJo to the batting cages when he played, but I quickly realized that hitting a baseball is not like riding a bike. You lose it if you don’t use it!

I still play with my grandson Logan in our backyard every now and then. I throw him a few wild

es, and then complain when he doesn’t make a miraculous catch:

“You better need the catch, Logan,” I yell, then go in to Bengay the old appendage.

Joe Fusco Jr. is a poet and humorist living in Worcester. He hosts the Poetry Extravaganza at Redemption Rock Brewing in Worcester.

VaselineJuly 19, 2024

0 3 minutes read

Vaseline

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