Hello from the Stat Man
My name is Marvin Deltoro. I am 75 years old, I play second base for the Del Rio Bakery Bakers, and for the last eight years I have kept the statistics for this league in a green ledger book with a pencil. This year my grandson Sean went up to Gainesville for college and left me his old computer, and before he went he sat me down and showed me how to make this page. So now the statistics are in the ledger AND on the World Wide Web. Sean says the ledger is the backup. I say the computer is the backup. We will see who is right.

A little about me so you know who you are dealing with. I was born in Ybor City in 1924. My father rolled cigars at a factory on Seventh Avenue for forty years. When I was a small boy my mother would send me down with his lunch, and I would stand by the door and listen to the lector up on his platform reading the newspaper and the novels out loud to the rollers, in Spanish, while a hundred men worked the tobacco without making a sound. The owners got rid of the lectors in 1931. My father never forgave them. I learned to play ball in the streets and the vacant lots of Ybor with a taped-up ball and a broomstick, like everybody.

In 1944 I was in Italy with the Army, mostly walking north. When I came home I went to work at the shipyard and stayed 35 years, pipefitter and then foreman, and retired in 1986. My wife Ruth (she was a Vera, from West Tampa) and I have been married 52 years. She comes to the games on Thursdays and keeps score in her own book to check mine. Hers has never been wrong. Mine has, twice.

It's slow-pitch softball. But it's slow-pitch softball for people with new hips, so we have a few rules of our own. The full rule sheet is in the box on Ned's tailgate. The ones newcomers ask about:

1. You must be 65 years old by the end of the year you play. We will ask for your driver's license. Some of you look young. Congratulations.
2. The commitment line. There's a chalk line across the base path halfway between third base and home. Once a runner's foot crosses it, he's going home. No stopping, no turning back to third. This keeps runners from getting caught in a rundown, which at our age is how hamstrings go.
3. The second home plate. Eight feet to the right of the real home plate, in foul ground, there's a white rubber mat. A runner coming home touches the mat, not the plate. The catcher stays on the real plate. Every play at home is a force play: if the catcher has the ball and his foot on the plate before the runner touches the mat, the runner is out. Nobody tags anybody, and nobody runs into anybody. We started this in 1993, after Elmer Hayworth broke his wrist in a collision at the plate. Elmer, God rest him, said it was the best rule we ever made.
4. No sliding. Not into second, not into third, not anywhere. A runner who slides is out. You can't slide at 75, you can only fall down on purpose.
5. Courtesy runners. Any batter who gets on base may have a courtesy runner. The runner is the player who made the last out. Nobody has to explain why they want one.
6. Eleven on the field. Four outfielders and a short fielder, so there's more glove out there and less running for everybody.
7. The pitch must arc between 6 and 12 feet. Pitchers may wear a mask, and we encourage it. Ned wears his. Charles Nix says he doesn't need one, because at 83 his reflexes are as good as they ever were, which is not saying much, Charles.
8. Two over-the-fence home runs per team per game. After that, over the fence is an out.
9. The heat rule. Water break after the fourth inning, no matter what. If you feel dizzy, sick or short of breath, sit down in the shade and tell somebody. Nobody in this league has ever been fined for sitting down. Curtis Vierra, our umpire-in-chief, can call a game for heat any time he wants, and his word is final.

Every November the cars with Ohio and Michigan and Ontario plates start showing up in the lot, and by Thanksgiving we have twice as many players as we can use. The snowbirds are good people and some of them are very good ballplayers, and every year a few of them ask if they can just join the team they played on last winter. The answer is no. That's what the draft is for.

Snowbird sign-up is at the field, Tuesday and Thursday mornings, from November 2 through November 18. Bring your license and your $15 for the winter season. Donald Winget is running the sign-up table this year. He's the one in the Tigers cap, because he used to be one of you.

The Draft is Tuesday, November 23, right after the morning games, at the picnic pavilion. The six managers draft from the whole sign-up list, year-rounders and snowbirds together, in reverse order of the summer standings, so the Rockets pick first. Donald reads the names. I bring the ledger so nobody drafts a .400 hitter by mistake. If we have enough players we'll add two teams. There's coffee and Cuban bread from Del Rio. The winter season starts Tuesday, November 30 and runs through March.

Arthur was born in 1910, in Ohio, and he will be 89 in December. He played semipro ball up there in the thirties for a factory team, worked thirty-some years for the railroad, and came down to Tampa in 1975 with his late wife Eleanor. He has played in this league every year since 1985, and for the last eleven years he has played shortstop for the Bakers, right next to me.

Arthur doesn't run much anymore. He doesn't need to. He knows where the ball is going before the batter does, he plays the hitters like a chess game, and anything hit within two steps of him is an out. When something gets past him he says "That's what the short fielder is for," and the short fielder says "Yes, Arthur." He hit .517 this summer, mostly singles over the second baseman's head. He takes a courtesy runner and walks back to the bench like a man who has done his job.

People ask him the secret. He says: get up in the morning, eat an orange, and have someplace to be. Tuesday and Thursday he has someplace to be.

When I retired I thought my ballplaying was forty years behind me. A fellow from the shipyard brought me out here in 1987, and I have hardly missed a Tuesday or a Thursday since. I've had a heart operation and two cataracts in that time, and I buried my brother, and through all of it there were these mornings, the wet grass and the coffee and the sound of the bat, and a bunch of old men and women acting like kids. I thank the Lord for it, and I thank our league president Ned Coker, who does the work nobody sees, and every sponsor, and Ruth, who lets me go.

If you're 65 or over and you live in the Tampa Bay area, come out on a Tuesday or Thursday morning and watch a game. Bring a glove. Somebody will have an extra if you don't. You'll be playing by the third inning.