In the days before Michael Jordan, the kids around Cabrini-Green played a lot more baseball. Lou Carter, who grew up there in the 70s, was one of those kids. “I didn’t play basketball until the seventh grade,” he says. “Believe it or not, baseball was king.” Then baseball got pushed aside, and basketball became the year-round rage.
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But Carter’s favorite sport by far was baseball. “I think it was just around more back then, what with the Cubs being the only thing on TV,” he says. “Actually my grandmother turned me on to baseball–she watched it every day she could. Once I was into it I was into it big-time. Like all the kids. We played baseball from sunup to sundown. We played ‘strike ’em out.’ That’s how we learned to pitch and hit. Today kids call it ‘fast pitch.’ All you need is a batter, a pitcher, a rubber ball, and a bat. You just paint a strike zone on the wall and play.”
Finding a wall wasn’t difficult, he says. “We couldn’t afford to be particular, now–any wall would do. There was this little old lot, couldn’t be bigger than 40 feet long. It was a pit near the row houses off of Chicago Avenue and Cambridge. There was a wall there, and that’s where we played strike ’em out. Of course, every now and then someone broke a window. Man, we’d run like crazy, but it didn’t do us no good. All the mothers knew where we stayed. They’d track us down and say, ‘Boy, didn’t I tell you about throwing that ball? You’re gonna pay for that window.’”
According to Carter, the Pirates came within a game of winning a regional championship and playing a south-side team at Comiskey Park. But a ball took a fluke hop over Goodwin’s mitt, allowing the winning run to score in the bottom of the ninth. “That hurt, man,” he says. “Matter of fact, it still hurts.”
Fortunately the New City Y is giving local kids, including girls’ and boys’ softball teams, a permanent place to play. Financed largely with money donated by the Cubs, the new field should be completed by August.
“With all the development around here it was bound to happen,” says Carter. “We had a father come up to us. He said he’d just moved into one of the town houses, and his son had been watching us play, and he loved baseball and all, and, well, can he play? I said, ‘Of course.’”
