10 Pitching With a Disabled(?) Finger. Song: American Music. Photo: My Team.

I loved baseball (see photo of my little league team above), and by age seven, I got to start practicing on my dad’s little league team. Our team was the Rye Town Chiefs, and we won the league championship title four years in a row. Because I hadn’t turned eight yet, I could only practice with the team, and not play in officially sanctioned games, but I was good enough to play, and did from age eight on. I loved pitching, and playing catch with my two year older brother. To get more accurate when our team first started, we threw into garbage cans which was really fun (see photo below right), and we eventually

threw baseballs between clothesline rope strike zones which my dad set up. That helped enormously in getting my pitching accurate especially because some of my pitches went extremely wild ever since the end of my finger had to be sewn back on from when it was smashed by a one axle trailer at age three. Then, my throwing ring-finger nail grew in extra rounded curled like a scoop so that my three fingered fast ball slid really well, but sometimes it caught the ball to make it go high, or low according to which ever way my fingernail happened to catch the ball at release. And, I had a good two fingered curve ball. I threw it as hard as I could sidearm, and as long as I could get them in the strike zone often enough during hours and hours of practicing with our “rope zone”, when I turned eight, my dad started letting me pitch in some of the games. My dad even told me that I was referred to as the “terror of the league” because, although I never intentionally hit anyone, when some of my pitches went wild because of how my ring-finger nail grabbed the ball, it was frightening to all of the players, and their parents, too! Thanks to hard work, and a lot of practice, I learned to become a decent pitcher, shortstop, second baseman, and hitter. I even threw a no-hitter (16 out of eighteen strike outs), and still have the ball (shown in the above photo) signed by some of the players.

… And then, before we moved to Rye NY, our family added a new addition… my little sister Debbie