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City’s Veteran Players Still Live For Their Day In The Park

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He had just spent the day teaching physical education and then throwing 300 batting practice pitches to his Holliston High School team that was two days away from winning its state Division 2 championship game. He arrived at Casey Town Field in Dorchester from Framingham just a few minutes before Mass. Envelope was to play the Larkin Club in the Boston Park League.

So the best that tired, 43-year-old Harvey Krupnick could do in a game against Larkin recently was to single, triple, homer, lay down a crucial sacrifice bunt and knock in three runs in his team’s 5-4 victory.

“They used to tell me I was a bit too slow when I was younger,” laughed the wiry Krupnick, who runs a batting school in his backyard. “Now they tell me, ‘hey, you’re pretty fast for an old guy.’ ”

Krupnick who started in the Park League in 1968, was carrying a lifetime .370 average with 551 hits in 1,497 at-bats through the month of June. But he’s obviously getting better with age, because this season he was off to a 30 for 56 start (.535 for 16 games) at the plate and playing a smooth first base as well.

But Krupnick isn’t the oldest active player in the 10-team Park League — that distinction belongs to television station owner, political analyst and talk show host Avi Nelson, who says that at age 45, “you learn to make some changes in the way you bat and throw to compensate for the loss of quickness.” Read more

We Could Have Survived

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It was Thursday night, and in New York, Marvin Miller and Ray Grebey were going to the mat once more in what seemed to be a hopeless effort to settle the baseball dispute. But at Town Field on Dorchester avenue in Boston, nobody gave a damn about Miller or Grebey or, for that matter, major league baseball.

This doesn’t mean a whole raft of folks cared much about what was going on at Town Field either, where the Craven Club was playing the Boston Typos in a Park League game.

There were 44 people in the stands when the game began, with perhaps another two dozen clustered around the backstop, where they could watch the pitcher’s breaking stuff, if he had any.

“I can remember games here,” said Dick Holmquist, manager of The Craven Club, “when there were so many fans we had to rope off the crowd. That was a long time ago, of course.” Read more