Aging baby boomers flocking to play softball

Friday, July 8th 2005, 12:21 pm

By: News On 6

ELGIN, Ill. (AP) _ When pitcher Dave Shortz sticks his glove out and knocks a high chopper into the air, all second baseman Paul Dobkowski can do is wait for it to come down. When it finally does, it lands right in his brand new glove. And, luckily, the guy who hit it looks like he's running in sand.

One out.

Dobkowski, 50, who resumed playing softball this year after taking 15 years off, is part of a growing and graying group of men _ and a few women _ playing at an age when their fathers and grandfathers had long since put their mitts away.

``It's like riding a bike, I'm telling you,'' said Dobkowski, a salesman who appeared to fall off that bike a few minutes later when another grounder left him sitting in a cloud of infield dust.

Senior Softball-USA estimates that, in the last eight years, the number of players around the country 50 and older nearly has doubled to 2.8 million. And the number of highly organized teams that travel hundreds and sometimes thousands of miles to play in tournaments has doubled from 500 to about 1,000 in the last five years, said R.B. Thomas, the executive director of the International Senior Softball Association, one of 10 national senior softball groups.

``We have some 80-and-older teams now in the country,'' he said. ``Older people are staying more active, and senior softball fits into a lifestyle for seniors.''

With more and more baby boomers pushing their way past 50, senior softball enthusiasts expect the game to keep growing.

Senior softball is so popular that it has done the seemingly impossible: prompted grown men to lie about being older than they really are.

``We had a little scandal where one team out in California had three players on their team that weren't 50,'' Thomas said. ``They got banned for a considerable period of time.''

The play can be so competitive that some players have been known to pull stunts one wouldn't expect of grandfathers _ such as a Virginia man who wanted to play in Florida so much that he bought a house there to sidestep a residency rule.

``He was still working in Virginia, and he was a cop,'' said Sam Sapienza, 65, himself a retired New York City cop who now plays on one of the country's top teams.

Then there are the bats. Sammy Sosa may be the most famous baseball player to get caught using a corked bat, but in senior softball teams are on the lookout for high-tech bats that have been banned because they send balls flying a lot farther and a lot faster than other bats.

``Guys do try to sneak illegal bats in,'' said Bob Kolvitz, who plays and helps manage the Chicago Classics, one of the top senior teams in the country and winner of a recent national championship tournament in Manassas, Va.

Some players buy illegal bats that are painted to look like legal ones. Others are altering legal bats to make them more powerful.

Or they pay someone to do it.

``There are a lot of people who are bat doctors and they advertise (on the Internet) that they juice bats,'' said Terry Hennessy, Senior Softball-USA's CEO. ``It's amazing how widespread it is.''

The use of illegal bats isn't confined to senior players, of course. But there is a concern that they pose a particular danger for older men and women who can't react to line drives the way they once could.

``This year, there was a tournament that allowed these 'hotter' bats and a second baseman took one in the eye and lost an eye,'' Thomas said.

Still, he said, ``The majority of these seniors want the bat. It's 'Damn the pitcher, we don't care if he gets killed, we want to hit a home run.``'

That's a long way, though, from the gentler version of senior softball played in Elgin. Here, there's no doubt the bats are legal. And the ball isn't quite as hard as those used in tournaments, meaning it doesn't travel as fast.

The players don't travel as fast either.

``Some guys are pretty well crippled up,'' said Bud Wilson, who at 75 is the oldest player in the Elgin Masters Softball league he started 21 years ago and still runs. ``We've had guys get thrown out at first from center field.''

But these men routinely hit line drives, and if a ball is hit near them, they usually catch it. They obviously know the game and rarely make mistakes such as throwing to the wrong base or getting tagged out trying to stretch a single into a double.

There are obvious differences, starting with the way the game has been tweaked a bit to cut down on injuries.

Like other senior softball leagues around the country, first base is wider to prevent collisions between the first baseman and the batter. There's a second home plate _ one for the catcher and one for the baserunner _ for the same reason.

In Elgin, there are a few other ways players are reminded not to take things so seriously. For example, while in some leagues a team's fastest player can pinch run again and again during a game, in Elgin a player can pinch run just once a game.

Then there's the rule that discourages players from swinging for the fences, and maybe the temptation to use an illegal bat to help them do so.

``If you hit a home run, any subsequent home runs are singles until the other team has one,'' Wilson said.

The biggest difference, though, is the attitude of the players. Bats aren't slammed to the ground after pop ups with the bases loaded. And about the closest thing to arguing with the umpire is the occasional question about whether a pitched ball had the minimum 6-foot arc.

``It's not our job, `` Jim Robinson, 54, said of the game. ``We're just guys who like to have fun after work.''

They also are guys who recognize their best games are long in the past, said 67-year-old pitcher Ken Sunderman, a retired American Airlines pilot. ``Most of the guys are old enough to where their egos are history,'' he said.

Besides, he joked, players understand why they're still playing softball.

``What we all have in common,'' he said, ``is our wives love to get us out of the house.''