Lower Manhattan Softball League

No one knows how long the Lower Manhattan Softball League has been around. The commissioner was asked for a list of champions going back to the beginning. “Before 1984 I don’t know” was part of the answer, and if anyone reading this *does* know when and how the league began, please drop a note in the comments.

The home field was once the J.J. Walker, a bandbox of a park occupying most of a city block at Clarkson & Hudson streets in the West Village. An LMSL fall league still plays co-ed arc ball there, and if a man hits it over the fence it counts as two outs. The original teams were mostly sponsored by bars and restaurants in the vicinity of the J.J. Walker. The 1984-1994 era was dominated by the now defunct Riviera Cafe (“food not the best but edible”).

There is a book, “Professor Baseball,” about the middle period of the LMSL. Author Eddy Amenta is a sociologist well-known enough to have his own Wikipedia page. He played for the original Machine team in 2002 and 2003, by which time the league had moved to its current home, Heckscher #1 in Central Park. The Machine existed for many years under the names of different sponsors, and along with Riff Raff and the Hit Men, were the top teams of the 1995-2004 era. In 2003 they came up just short, losing a 5-game championship series to the Hit Men. Three of the games, including the decisive Game 5, went to extra innings.

As Lou Reed once sang, “We all love women,” and beginning in 2005 the LMSL was no longer a softball sausage party. Since then, teams bat and field a minimum of three women. If a team’s female players are slick fielders and strong batters who don’t take vacation in August, there’s a good chance you’ll see them on the list of champions.