| BROADWAY SHOW LEAGUE | ||
Professional baseball left Manhattan when the Mets opened Shea Stadium in 1964 after two years in the Polo Grounds, an odd-shaped ballpark that had an illustrious history as the home of the New York Giants, long ago the city's ritziest team Today, the only bats-and-gloves glamour left in the borough can be found at the Hecksher softball fields in Central Park, where the casts and crews from the city's top theatrical productions pitch, hit and field in the Broadway Show League. The playoffs started on this hot, sweaty, dusty day, with games going on several fields at once. Over here are pinstriped jerseys with "URINETOWN" splashed across the front. Over there is the team from "Blue Man Group," wearing — naturally — blue tops. Shuler Hensley is the center fielder and clean-up hitter for "Oklahoma!" He also happens to be a Tony winner for his portrayal of Jud Fry in "Oklahoma!". The 35-year-old actor's mother is the artistic director of the Georgia Ballet and his father was an All-American football star at Georgia Tech, so he comes by his twin interests honestly. The passion the players bring to the field is similar to what he saw when he pitched for the University of Georgia on a baseball scholarship. "I think out here it's just as intense because I think everyone out here is a frustrated jock," he said, perhaps only half kidding. "They think, 'If I can't make it in the majors, I'll make it in the Broadway League.'" That's the thing. It's more fun to play amateur softball than to actually watch it. The outsize emotions that the games bring out in players — not just in this league — may feel natural to those competing but to an outsider, they make 40-year-old men and women look like 12-year-olds. And not particularly articulate 12-year-olds. But people like to watch celebrities, and stars like Robert Redford, Walter Matthau, Al Pacino and Matthew Broderick have all played in the league, which dates to the mid-1950s. You get up close, too. There are no big crowds to speak of. Just friends, mostly, given that games are during the day on Thursdays.
There's also the charming Ballfields' Cafe right there. Two bucks for a hot dog, six for the vegetarian garden burger. If you positively must get a hardball fix, you can head up the street to the Museum of Natural History, where the Hall of Fame's traveling exhibition, "Baseball as America", has a couple of weeks to go. And there's another destination nearby, on Central Park South: Mickey Mantle's restaurant. He was a center fielder from Oklahoma, too.
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