‘Broomsticks’ reign supreme in Brooklyn

Borough’s Stickball Day Celebrated at Coney Island’s MCU Park

July 12, 2016 By John Torenli, Sports Editor Brooklyn Daily Eagle

Park Slope native and documentary film maker Jay Cusato helped bring stickball back to Brooklyn Sunday as the Cyclones hosted Borough Hall’s Stickball Day in Brooklyn, U.S.A. at Coney Island’s MCU Park. Eagle photos by John Torenli

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Last Sunday was officially declared Stickball Day in Brooklyn, U.S.A. by Brooklyn Borough Hall.

The only problem was, on my way to Coney Island’s MCU Park, home of the Brooklyn Cyclones, I didn’t see a single kid on any block wielding a broomstick or a “spaldeen,” nor did I witness a game of wiffle ball or hopscotch or box ball or stoop ball or off-the-wall, or any of the various games my friends and I would play from early morning to dusk on various blocks in and around Bay Ridge during the long, hot summers of my youth.

“You don’t see it. It’s very disheartening,” admitted Jay Cusato, a Park Slope native, whose 2001 documentary film, “When Broomsticks Were King,” sparked the Cyclones’ hosting of Sunday’s stickball demonstration, as well as a screening of the award-winning film on the left-center field scoreboard.

“You’d go down the block [when I was growing up] and some kids were playing stickball, some kids were playing football, some kids were playing softball,” recalled Cusato, who captained the Brooklyn Stickball Team against the Harlem Stickball squad, which consisted of several Hall of Famers.

Yes, there is actually an official Stickball Hall of Fame on 125th Street in Harlem.

“There used to be a pride in playing kids from other neighborhoods,” added Cusato, whose 26-minute flick has captured Best Documentary or honorable mention at 17 different film festivals around the nation since its release.

Well, for at least one day, rival stickball teams clashed again atop the sun-soaked field turf along Surf Avenue, taking the diamond in front of what turned to be a crowd of 5,535, who stuck around to see the Cyclones rally for a 4-3 victory over the Hudson Valley Renegades later that afternoon.

But before the prospective big leaguers did their thing, Cusato’s crew and Hall of Famer Carlos Diaz’s uptown squad put on quite an exhibition, launching spaldeens up into the stratosphere and rounding the bases laid out within the confines of the Brooklyn infield.

“I think this is great, coming into a new borough to play,” Diaz gushed. “Brooklyn is the right place to come to, we had a lot of guys from Brooklyn in the good old days.

“In order to keep this game going you have to encourage the young kids. Playing in the stadium, I’m very enthusiastic about it.”

Players of all ages competed, and the outfield was littered with generations of stickballers who certainly enjoyed their day in the sun.

But even Diaz, who at 66 was still 13 years younger than the oldest competitor on the Harlem team Sunday, took time to lament the passing of street games in general, as well as his beloved stickball.

“What basically happened is kids picked up computers,” he noted. “But there’s nothing like New York City games. You don’t need money to play, you can pick up a rubber ball and play against the wall, instead kids want a computer that costs $5,000.

“When I was 16 years of age, we didn’t have anything but street games,” Diaz added. “We had to steal a broomstick from somebody’s fire escape. But we were able to survive. My job is to pass the torch so kids can learn the game that’s been around for 60, 70 years.”

Though no official score of the contest was kept, the Harlem squad appeared to hold an advantage as many of its players were still spry enough to launch spaldeens deep into the Brooklyn outfield and circle the bases as fielders tried in vain to track the bouncy ball and fire it back in.

Stickball is normally played on city blocks, with fielders manning sewer caps as bases and apartment building stoops serving as makeshift foul lines.

And hitting one on the roof of a private house or building meant it was time to ring a doorbell and meekly ask for it back, or run up to Third Avenue and simply buy another spaldeen, if there were any left.

At least that’s how it was when we played on 94th Street in the late 1970s.

“It all depends on what neighborhood you go to,” Cusato said of the different genres of the game he has enjoyed since childhood, pointing out that Sunday’s showdown was of the one-hop, self-hit variety.

“We want to keep the sport going,” he added. “It’s definitely an authentic Brooklyn sport. Not as much as it obviously used to be, but it’s definitely still there. There’s old-school people that will get together annually to play their stickball games. It’s still alive. Is it what it used to be? No.”

Not much is these days, but Cusato’s film and ongoing hope for the game’s revival helped bring stickball back to Brooklyn, even if it was a for a single day.

“There’s something about the character of Brooklyn back then, combined with the accents of the actual people talking about their love of the game, that strikes a chord with broomstick enthusiasts and people who never heard of the game almost equally,” Cusato noted.

“A lot of people I don’t know tell me at screenings how the film makes them happy. It might be nostalgia, but it’s a happy nostalgia.”