South Jersey Modified League:
Keeping the Game Alive

Friday, June 11, 1998

By Nick Straguzzi
SJSports SJML Correspondent

What pops into your head when someone mentions "men's softball"? Huge guys taking massive swings at lob balls? Final scores that resemble football games? A keg of beer on each bench? And if that someone then says, "no, fastpitch softball", do you think of high school girls in ponytails?

If you were in the vicinity of Laurel Springs Park on Saturday June 13th, you'd best keep those thoughts to yourself. The top men's fastpitch players of the area took the field around 7:30 PM for the 20th annual All-Star Game of the South Jersey Modified Fastpitch League (SJML). It's the culmination of an evening's worth of events that honors not only a league, but a tradition.

"We've got a lot planned," says Dave 'Mook' Micha, chairman of the SJML All-Star Game Committee. "It all starts at 3:30 with a team skills competition. There's a Fastest Man race around the bases, a throwing contest, a pitching competition, and the annual home run derby. Then comes a brief awards ceremony for the eleven players who've played in the league for at least fifteen seasons. After that is our first Old-Timers Game, and then the All-Star Game itself. Through it all we'll have a barbecue dinner going, plus we're selling t-shirts commemorating the league's first twenty seasons."

The thriving nine-team circuit expects a huge crowd on hand, and the public is invited. All this is especially striking when you consider that, on more than one occasion over the past two decades, the SJML came perilously close to folding. The story of the SJML is mainly one of adaptation, dedication, and the fine art of survival.

Although this is technically the SJML's 20th season, it traces its roots back more than half a century to the legendary RCA-Victor Fastpitch League. Beginning in the years following World War II, and continuing for two decades, fastpitch softball reigned throughout the cities and farming communities of South Jersey. Most towns fielded a local team in one of a dozen competitive leagues. Games pitting top squads would draw upwards of four hundred spectators on warm summer evenings, be it on a sandlot in Pennsauken or by a tomato field in the heart of Gloucester County.

Throughout this Golden Age of fastpitch, the RCA League enjoyed the reputation of being the area's premier place to play, and it attracted the best talent. It was said that for windmill pitchers especially, a secure salaried job at RCA was only a good fastball away.

But the popularity of men's fastpitch softball waned in the 60's, fueled by two factors. First was the steadily dwindling supply of effective pitchers. The advent of Little League and high school programs drew youngsters into baseball rather than softball. Fewer boys learned the difficult-to-master windmill motion as kids, leading in turn to fewer men available to the pitcher-dominated adult leagues.

Second and perhaps more damaging was the rise of slowpitch softball, or "high-arc". Its batter-friendly rules offered more hits, more runs, and more overall action than the fastpitch game. Given the choice between hitting .210 against blazing fastballs or .680 against gentle lobs, most casual ballplayers chose the latter. The explosive popularity of slowpitch wasn't limited to South Jersey either. Today, it accounts for over 85% of men's softball leagues nationwide.

The RCA-Victor League survived into the 1970's, but with fewer and fewer teams every year. Finally, after the 1977 season, it closed its doors forever. A few scattered fastpitch leagues hung on until early this decade, but all eventually succumbed to the slowpitch tide. Barely a generation removed from its preeminent popularity, there are currently no men's regulation fastpitch leagues in the tri-county area.

So is fastpitch dead? Hardly. As Darwin said, you either adapt to changes in your environment, or you die. Fastpitch chose the evolution route.

In 1979, several workers at RCA's Camden facility decided to have another go at running a fastpitch league. This time around, they adopted the new modified pitch rules of the Amateur Softball Association. Devised in the mid-70's, "modified" (as it's colloquially known) seeks to eliminate the dominance of pitchers over hitters in traditional fastpitch. It does so by barring the most effective velocity-generating deliveries, chief among them the windmill, the rocker, and the slingshot. Whereas a top windmill pitcher will crack 90 MPH on the radar gun, a good modified pitcher generally tops out at 60.

The basic modified pitching motion is easy to learn. Furthermore, because the pitches are slower, there's more offense. A typical final score is 7-5, which is a far cry from the soccer-like 1-0 and 2-1 results of fastpitch. But unlike slowpitch, modified offers all of the trappings of regular baseball, including bunts, stolen bases, wild pitches, and hit-and-runs. In fact, the balance between pitching and hitting is so complete in modified that it's usually fielding that separates the top teams from the also-rans.

The new RCA Men's Modified Pitch League, open only to company employees, started slowly but picked up steam. The dominant team in the early years were the M-80's out of Camden. (They were named after their union group, not the firecrackers.) Beginning in 1980, they won five championships in seven years. In '83 and '85, however, they were beaten out by another Camden squad known as Section 31.

"We had a terrific rivalry," recalls Stan Misiak, the ace pitcher for Section 31 who resurrected his career in the 90's with the Believers. "Our team was built around pitching and defense, theirs was built around offense though they had some good pitching too. And those games were wars, especially in the playoffs!

"I remember once we played at the little field behind the Deptford facility off Rt. 42 (now owned by Thomson Electronics). There were sixty people on the M-80's side of the field and all of them - the players, the coaches, the fans, I mean everyone - were screaming stuff at me, trying to get me rattled. And it worked! Next time we played them, I stuffed earplugs in my ears and beat them 6-3. So for our next game, you know what they brought out? Bullhorns! But we won anyway."

Curiously, the M-80's and Section 31 never faced each other in the league finals. They usually squared off in the semifinals and the survivor would go on to win the championship. The final-round victim in four of those seasons was a team of engineers based jointly in Camden and Moorestown known as Nipper's Nuts. Remarkably, the Nuts are still going strong, though a bit grayer, in 1998. Founded in 1980, they are by far the SJML's longest continually-operating ballclub.

"Those days it was the white-collar guys vs. the blue-collar guys in the finals," laughs Micha, a longtime Nuts' player, "and the blue-collar guys always won." Still, the Nuts enjoyed a few moral victories in that stretch. In one season (no one is sure which; records from the first five years are hard to come by), the M-80's rolled into the best-of-five finals undefeated and untied, only to drop a game to the Nuts.

Spend a few hours with Micha and some of the other Nuts' veterans and they will entertain you with stories about the league that will have you wiping tears of laughter from your eyes. Here's just one:

"I joined the Nuts in 1982," says catcher Tom Tusevicus. "I was right out of school and didn't really know anyone when I showed up at one of their practices. The manager asked me what position I played. I looked around the diamond and saw a skinny little guy behind the plate that I knew I could beat out. So I said 'um, I'm a catcher'. The manager said 'Fine, here's a mask, let's see what you can do.' Then he calls to the catcher, 'Hey Ronnie, go pitch for a while, this guy says he can catch.'

"Well, the skinny guy isn't too happy that this new guy is going after his position. So he walks out to the mound muttering and he throws his first pitch to me. It bounces off the front of the plate and right into my crotch - and I wasn't wearing a cup! I went down in a heap and I thought not only might my career with the Nuts be over before it started, but I might never walk upright again."

That, as it happened, was a pretty lousy prediction. Tusevicus wound up winning the catcher's job that spring and has held it ever since. In seventeen seasons, 'Tooz' has missed only five Nuts' games behind the dish - playoffs and regular season combined. Micha calculates that he's caught well over 400 games. Meanwhile, the skinny catcher whose position he stole turned into the winningest pitcher in SJML history. Ron Paraggio, who's been with the SJML every year since its re-inception in 1979, has over 200 career victories and still counting.

Modified fastpitch proved to be a hit with RCA employees. The league grew steadily through the mid-80's, topping out in 1987 with a record 15 teams. But as with the original RCA-Victor league, trouble proved to be just around the corner. This time however, the threat came from within.

Late in 1986, General Electric and RCA unexpectedly announced plans to merge into the largest electronics corporation in the world. Therein began a five-year bloodbath in which GE carved up RCA and sold it, piece by piece, to corporate buyers. (Today, the only former division of RCA still held by General Electric is the NBC-TV network.) Layoffs, plant closings, transfers and sales decimated RCA's regional employment base. Nowhere were the effects of this downsizing more apparent than in the newly-christened GE Modified Fastpitch Softball League:

In 1987, the year the merger was approved, the league had 15 teams.
In 1988, it shrunk to twelve.
In 1989, just eight remained.
In 1990, the league bottomed out at seven teams, one of whom announced at the end of the season that they would not be back for 1991.

Despite the funeral atmosphere through these years, the league remained competitive. In 1986, Nipper's Nuts were stunned in the league semifinals by the up-and-coming Trojans, thus clearing the way for the M-80's to win their fifth and final championship. In 1987, their torch was finally passed to the Nuts as they bested Lena's Café, who had earlier upset the M-80's in the semis, to win their first crown. Many more would follow.

By now, winning the league meant more than just a few hundred dollars in prize money and bragging rights around the plant. Then-commissioner Ken Paris purchased a pewter cup to be awarded every year to the champions. Their complete roster was engraved around the base, Stanley Cup-like, beginning with Section 31 in 1985. In 1994, Chicago's Harry Williams took it to a trophy-making relative who added tall columns and several decorative insignias, giving The Cup its present-day appearance.

The Nuts repeated as champs in 1988, this time beating a Paris-led team called the Force in the final round. The following year the Nuts looked to be well on their way to a threepeat. They led Lena's Trojans two games to none in the best-of-five finals, and they took a 4-3 lead into the top of the seventh inning of Game Three. But the Trojans rallied for three runs to stay alive, won Game Four, and then held off a furious Nuts rally in the deciding contest to win 8-6 and earn their first and only league title.

The Trojans' pitcher in those days was a tall, lanky fellow named Doug Wilhelm. He had a smooth delivery and a rise ball that was nothing short of deadly. In Game Two of the 1990 finals, Wilhelm held the Nuts to just one bunt single over seven innings to earn a 1-0 victory - arguably the finest pitching performance in an SJML championship series. But then came Game Five...

Mark McGinnis, a 17-year league veteran and the Nuts' third baseman that night, calls it flatly the best game in league history. "Ronnie [Paraggio] and Doug were locked up in a double shutout through seven. In the top of the eighth the Trojans push across a pair of runs and go up 2-0. 'It's over', I thought to myself.

"Bottom of the eighth. Tom Kershner singles and Jim Stefano reaches on an error. I bunt them to second and third. Tom Tusevicus comes through with a single to make the score 2-1. He gets to second with two outs and now we need a hit to win. The next batter, Tom Casne, singles hard to left - too hard. Stefano scores to tie the game, but the third base coach has to give Tooz the stop sign. But the left fielder doesn't see it and unloads a desperate, adrenaline-pumped throw to the plate....and it sails clear over the backstop!"

The frantic finish allowed Nipper's Nuts to regain the Cup, becoming the first team to win the league after having lost in the finals the previous year Still, the post-game awards ceremony was a bittersweet affair. Many observers had to be wondering: was this the end of the line? The sacking of RCA was all but complete, and there clearly was not enough talent or interest left within General Electric to sustain a viable fastpitch softball league.

It was time for another evolution, and this one would be even more dramatic than the switch to modified pitching in the late 70's. For the first time in over four decades, the league would have to go public.

So went the community announcement on the Courier-Post sports page in the spring of 1992. A similar flyer was posted in batting cages across the region. The "established team" was ATL, and the ad brought almost two dozen replies. One respondent in particular would have a major effect on the league's future....

Actually, 1992 was the second season in which players from outside General Electric were welcomed. In 1991, under a one-year joint venture with Third Base Sporting Goods of Cherry Hill, the league comprised six teams sponsored by GE (Nipper's Nuts, Lena's Trojans, ATL, Boomers, Comsec, Fireballs), plus two 'outside' clubs: Derby's Pub and Freddy's Bar. By all accounts, 1991 was a rocky year. Part of the problems were due to the transition to an open league, part to rainy weather and new umpires, and part to Derby's themselves. An excitable, argumentative collection of rowdies, they somehow managed to reach the league finals against the Nuts. Whereupon they triggered a brawl in Game One that caused them to forfeit the game and the series, plus earned them some action in Burlington County Courthouse. Not exactly the baptism that the brand-new SJML was hoping for.

The following year, with original GE league commissioner Steve Haworth and Co. back in control, the SJML welcomed The Ferrangi and Koen Books into the fold. Several of the old guard teams began accepting non-GE employees on their roster in order to remain competitive. One player who answered ATL's newspaper ad was a fiery, 32-year-old windmill pitcher named Brian MacDonald. With a lifetime of experience organizing fastpitch leagues in his native Canada, MacDonald would soon turn into the driving force behind the SJML's explosive growth through the 1990's.

Thanks to a summer mercifully devoid of brawls and bad weather, the league organizers finally became convinced that an open league would be workable. Nipper's Nuts won their third straight title in 1992, and fifth overall, surviving a semifinals scare from the Ferrangi before downing the Irish Pub (nee Freddy's Bar) in four games in the Finals.

The 1993 playoffs were highlighted by a pair of outstanding comebacks. In the quarterfinals, trailing 13-3 in the fifth inning of the final game, ATL staged a wild late inning rally to earn an 18-16 victory over Jay's Marlins. It remains both the highest scoring game and the biggest come-from-behind margin in SJML playoff history.

Still, that feat pales to what Nipper's Nuts accomplished in the championship series. Trailing the Irish Pub two-games-to-none and seemingly on the ropes, the Nuts rallied for three straight wins to earn their fourth straight Cup and SJML-record sixth overall. (Moral: do not allow your fans to bring brooms to Game Three when facing a three-time defending champion.)

Around this time, the SJML's pitching regulations were loosened - 'modified' modified, as it were. Windmills and slingshots were still outlawed, but some close cousins such as the 'half-windmill' were now tolerated. The effect on the league was threefold. One, pitching quality improved markedly, although the game remained far more accessible and hitter-friendly than traditional fastpitch. Two, former windmill pitchers like MacDonald and brothers Joe and Rob Peter found it easier to make the transition to modified. Three and by no means least importantly, on-field arguments as to whether a delivery was legal or not all but disappeared. Hitters grumbled, as is their wont, but overall the changes helped simplify the game and made it more accessible to newcomers.

And the new teams kept on coming. The SJML grew to 12 teams in 1994 and 15 in 1995. The Irish Pub, now called Chicago's, finally broke through in '94 to win their first league championship. The runners-up that year were The Lot (formerly the Ferrangi), a perennial .500 team who caught lightning in a bottle and rattled off a stunning 23-1 record before Chicago's put an end to their Cinderella season with a three-game sweep in the finals.

Chicago's made it four straight Finals appearances in 1995, but they were bested for the Cup by the legendary Bridgeton Cardinals. The Cardinals boast a history that stretches back to fastpitch's Golden Era. On the field they were led by fiftysomething ace hurler Fred Confer, a member of the South Jersey Fastpitch Hall of Fame. Symbolically, the team the Cardinals beat in the semifinals was RPF, mostly comprising former Cherry Hill West baseball stars (plus one West softball star, pitcher Kathleen Johnson.) None of the RPF players were over the age of 30.

The success of the venerable Cardinals, plus the rise of young teams like RPF, closed the circle between the old RCA-Victor league and the new SJML. It had taken its lumps along the way, but fastpitch in South Jersey was not dead yet.

Today the SJML consists of nine teams. While that decline may sound ominous, the simple reason says assistant commissioner Brian MacDonald is that the league has not actively sought to replace clubs that dropped out the past two years. "We've had plenty of inquiries, but we haven't been very aggressive in pursuing them. The three guys on the Executive Council are getting older. Two have kids in Little League. We felt that a smaller, strong league was better than a large one in which some of the clubs are on shaky footing."

In fact, the SJML Council has quietly begun looking for successors. "We'll always be there to help out with our experience," says MacDonald, "but it's time to bring in new blood to run the show. If the new guys decide its time to expand again, there's no shortage of talent. We have over two dozen players and several teams on the waiting list. But if they decide to keep it around ten teams, that's fine too, plus it's probably more workable."

The two-time defending champions are Café Lido Silver from South Philadelphia. The Silver beat the Cardinals in 1996 to earn the Cup, then swept Spirits' Jammers (formerly the Trojans) in 1997. The Jammers won their spot in the Finals thanks to a shocking semifinal upset over the Marrone Hair Center Thunder (previously RPF, with a one-year stopover as Sta-Tek - the players don't change often in the SJML, but the sponsors certainly do.) The Thunder took a 20-1 record into that series but the Jammers, behind brilliant pitching by Dan Wood and the inspiration of a lucky decaying cantaloupe - don't ask - prevailed in two straight.

So far in 1998 it's the Thunder and the Silver leading the way again. Probably they'll meet in the Finals this year, but you never know.

"You face a good team every night," says Silver manager John Guarneri. "What happened to the Thunder last year can happen to anyone. If you don't bring out your best squad and come ready to play, you're going to get whipped." To prove the point, the then-undefeated Silver showed up a bit shorthanded to play sub-.500 Jay's Elbow Room in late May and left on the short end of an 8-3 thrashing.

It is in some ways poetic that the nine teams in the SJML span the three eras of the league. Nipper's Nuts, the Jammers, and ATL are the links to the RCA/GE years. The Metal Plex Steelers (Chicago's) and Jay's date to the early days of the public league. And the Thunder, the Bonecrushers, Rexy's and the Silver make up the new guard.

To truly understand the allure of fastpitch, come out to Laurel Springs on the evening of June 13th and see the All-Star Game firsthand. Grab a hot dog and a soda and take a seat in the bleachers. Enjoy the battle between the hitters and the pitchers, cheer the hits and runs and stolen bases, watch the catchers and infielders and third base coaches flash signs. Then close your eyes and picture how softball used to be played everywhere in South Jersey.