PHILADELPHIA — Manny London isn’t playing as much softball as he once did. There was a time when he was a member of three different leagues — one in Montgomery County, one in Bucks County, one that had him traveling on weekends to tournaments as far away as Las Vegas and Utah. The double knee replacement he had in 2012 slowed him some, sure, and left him with scars and slashes across his legs, like an angry mountain lion got to him. But he’d pitch at least two games a week even as recently as last year, when he was just 90.
Time always wins, though. London turned 91 in April, and it’s a little harder for him to move around than it used to be. “I came up with a couple of ailments,” he said, and his physical-therapy sessions can treat only so many and only so much. He could still pass for 71 — white beard trimmed perfectly, sky blue uniform tucked in tight like a pro. But when the Montgomery County Senior Softball League has its games here at the aptly named Old School Park in Hatfield, its eldest player does what he did Monday morning. He manages. He cheers. He fills in at catcher when he can. He even gave up his responsibilities as the league’s social chairman after 13 years. No more picnics and holiday parties to plan. It’s enough to be at the games and leave the playing to the younger, sprier guys, like 77-year-old shortstop Ken Mayer, who went hard to his right to field a sharp grounder on one hop, then tossed the ball to 80-year-old second baseman Mark Norton for a force out.
Those moments, like a 7-iron two feet from the pin in an otherwise frustrating round, keep the league’s 13 teams and 184 players, all of them 60 or older, coming back every morning, Monday through Thursday, from mid-April until early October. Like London, they have their ailments and their ointments and their appointments that they have to reschedule because they wouldn’t dare miss a game, because maintaining the league, its traditions, and the friendships it has fostered means so much to them.
“You’ll see there’s a lot of dropped balls,” London said. “We don’t care. Here’s the motto: ‘If you have fun, you won.’ We have no statistics. We don’t have playoffs. But what we do have is many things besides softball.”
Founded in 1999, when a Philly-born softball aficionado named Vic Zoldy gathered some friends in the food court of the Montgomery Mall and pitched them the idea, the league is in its 25th season. It has a website, a Hall of Fame, and a book that traces its history and that one player, George Schreader, takes care to update. To minimize injuries, it has a particular set of tweaks to the rules. There are two first bases. Chalk lines are drawn around second base, third base, and home plate to give base runners and fielders a wider berth, to make sure nobody collides with anyone else. Games might be 11-on-11 or 12-on-12, just so everyone gets in. “Like tee-ballers,” Schreader said.
A season’s membership is $100 and, to the players and their spouses, a bargain. When the COVID-19 pandemic struck in March 2020, for instance, they put the league on hold, but for just five months. Come August, they were back out there again, wearing masks on the field, practicing social distancing, no longer congregating in the dugout. It wasn’t just that they wanted to keep playing. They needed to.
“It’s a godsend,” said Tom Levins, who is a native of the Logan section of the city, who is the league’s commissioner, and who is, at 68, one of its young’uns. “Being older, what do they say? Loneliness is a really bad thing. To have this closeness, the social interaction, is very important.”
Ray Forlano, the last original member who’s still around and involved, is 85.
“It’s not really a league. It’s a senior therapy group,” Forlano said. “If I wasn’t doing this, what else would I be doing, and where would I have the opportunity to do it? There’s no place else except here. It’s kept me healthier.”
The -ier there is necessary. “Nobody out here is really healthy,” Forlano said. He and Schreader, for instance, were both sidelined Monday, each having recently undergone hip-replacement surgery. But on the field, they can always commiserate with someone dealing with the same aches, pains, and realities of aging.
“I look at it as a free consulting firm,” said Schreader, 74, a thin blade of a man who was an Air Force combat pilot in Vietnam and wore a gray “VIETNAM CLASS OF 1972″ T-shirt Monday. “I’m serious. You look at all the guys out there and the professions. We’ve got a doctor. We’ve got lawyers. We’ve got tradespeople. Any information you need, somebody’s here, and you get it for free.”
Before spending his working life as a design engineer, London grew up in Strawberry Mansion. Every Sunday, he and his father would dress in shirts and ties, pack a couple of sandwiches, and walk 13 blocks to Shibe Park to see either a Phillies or A’s game. There’s a lot of that kind of conversation here, memories of Connie Mack Stadium and Steve Van Buren and the 1960 NFL championship game and the days before analytics took over baseball. Now, London’s wife, Jean, who is 74, drives him to the games from their home in North Wales, just a couple of miles away, for the sake of the camaraderie and the lingering competitiveness they all share.
“I have to tell you,” London said, learning in close, “my team is the team on the field, and we’re 12-1.”
He smiled a knowing smile. Aw, Manny. You rascal. So much for If you have fun, you won. When the inning ended, the players shuffled off the field and back to the bench, chattering among each other, complaining about an umpire’s missed call here or a grounder no one could reach there. It was the most invigorating sight you could imagine.
