For Some Players, Age Is No Reason to Turn Softball Diamonds Over to the Young

At dusk on Thursdays, the Mall becomes the world's biggest ball field. From just east of the Capitol to the Potomac River, scores of softball games spring to life on the park's 300 acres and on satellite fields beyond.

The contests are mostly the province of 20- and 30-somethings, congressional staffers and government workers who change into their uniforms and spill out onto nearly every flat patch of green, coolers in tow.

But not everyone fits that description. On a recent Thursday, as DGS is pummeling the UN Do's in an early-season House Softball League game in West Potomac Park, 62-year-old Ron Scotka is on the mound, right where he has been for the past 11 years.

Scotka's back bothers him. Getting into softball shape "is harder than ever this year," he concedes. "I just don't press hard in the beginning." The former Army helicopter and airplane pilot, who now works for Science Applications International Corp. in Alexandria, regularly grumbles about retiring from the game he loves.

His teammates know better. "Ron's been playing with retirement for at least the last three or four years that I can think of," says Anthony Reed, manager of DGS, which was known as Denny's Grand Slamwhen staffers of former Speaker Dennis Hastert started the team.

"I've stopped listening to him," Reed says. "He's a good pitcher. He can still swing the bat. He certainly doesn't run as fast as he used to."

The House league includes 119 coed teams that play all summer for a spot in the league's 48-team September tournament. The winner then plays the champion of the 80-team Senate Softball League for the title of "King of the Hill." There is also a Congressional Softball League, which crowns its own champion.

The sport can be a deadly serious athletic endeavor. Olympian Jennie Finch's fastball has been clocked at 70 mph. The late barnstormer Eddie "The King" Feigner, who played with just three men in the field behind him, embarrassed fearsome local all-star teams for decades. In a 1967 exhibition game against major leaguers, Feigner struck out Willie Mays, Roberto Clemente, Brooks Robinson, Willie McCovey, Maury Wills and Harmon Killebrew consecutively. All but Wills ended up in baseball's Hall of Fame.

But for most of us, softball is the slow-pitch stuff of muggy spring evenings and bright summer Sundays. It is part recreation, part social occasion; a bit of a competitive workout, but only if the players want it that way.

It is a pastime we hang on to long after the pounding of basketball and football and the aerobic demands of soccer have put those sports in our past.

"It's one of the few sports where you can continue to play, because of the nature of the sport," says Terry Hennessy, chief executive of Sacramento-based Senior Softball-USA, which estimates that 2 million people age 50 and older play the game recreationally across the United States. He added that senior leagues minimize the chance of collision by playing with dual home plates and first bases (one for the fielder, the other for the runner), limiting the danger of serious injury to the occasional thrown ball.

Even players in the most mellow of beer leagues need to stay in shape as they get older, says Brandon Marcello, director of sports performance at Stanford University, who helped train the U.S. Olympic women's softball team. Otherwise, softball, with its fast starts and stops, short bursts of flat-out sprinting and frequent lateral movements, is a pulled hamstring or turned ankle waiting to happen, especially at the start of the season.