VIEWPOINT: At 75 Years, Still Starstruck and Keeping Score

By Dan Pulick

The first time I played in the Artists & Writers Charity Softball Game was in 2018. I remember walking in from the parking lot out beyond center field with a fellow rookie, a young woman I didn’t know who spent the whole walk telling me about her total lack of interest in athletics.

She then asked me if she should be nervous, and I told her I was, a bit — smart to be any time you have to participate in something where they’re keeping score.

She laughed and assumed I was making a joke.

I was being brought to the game by a lifelong buddy from grade school who had become an art dealer and curator. He had a gallery on the West Side in the city and a satellite space in the industrial area off Route 114 as you enter East Hampton. He had the connections to the game, so he was going to “walk me in” to the two captains of the Writers team, Ken Auletta and Mike Lupica.

Now, you have to understand that for a writer my age, Ken Auletta and Mike Lupica are not just icons — they’re the standard in their respective areas of focus. I mean, if you were aspiring to write serious long-form journalism, Auletta was the North Star. The pragmatic and yet seductive way he slides into a story … it’s an easy charisma that lives somewhere just outside the stylistic rhythms of the New Journalism school that grew up around him in his early years.

And when it comes to sports columnists? There is no one who was more of a must-read during my lifetime than Lupica in the Daily News. Not one of his contemporaries had as distinct a voice — that perpetual, conjunctive cadence, the sudden interjection and redirectives in the “one last thought,” all of which vibrates between conversation and prose and the stream of consciousness in the reader’s own mind.

The Post always had the strongest sports section in the city in those days, but the Daily News had Lupica. It was like the way lesser teams have their one Hall of Famer, those Phillies teams with Steve Carlton or the Bears when they had Dick Butkus and Gale Sayers, the Padres teams with Tony Gwynn.

They are writers from a generation for whom journalism was still a predominantly blue collar profession, and I’ve always felt an affinity for the scrap and intensity that I suspect was prerequisite to becoming who they are. It made me all the more nervous to meet them.

My art-dealer-friend James walked me over to Mr. Lupica near the backstop, where he was crouched down, fumbling around in his bat-bag. “Mike, this is my buddy Dan. He’s a screenwriter.” No response, still intensely searching his gear.

James elbowed me, so I started to give my writing resume (“… legit credits for both film and TV … blah, blah, blah …”). Half a glance — still from that crouched position — but we weren’t totally sure anything had landed.

James shrugged at me, and then I threw out as an afterthought, “I played college baseball” — and, suddenly, Mike was up on his feet, guiding me toward his co-captain: “You gotta talk to Kenny so we can get you a shirt and hat and get you some BP.”

There, now, was “Kenny,” forever with his clipboard, struggling to figure out his lineup, when Mike gave the one-line intro in 10 words or less like you’re supposed to: “Kenny, Danny’s a writer, he played baseball in college.” There it was, the logline-of-me. Ken sized me up and said, “That true?” I told him it was only D-III, but yeah. He shook my hand, wrote my name down on his clipboard and pointed me to the table where I could get my shirt and hat.

That first game, I was substituted at catcher after an inning for Carl Bernstein. There was a short foul popup under the backstop behind me that I was able to snare, and I went 3-for-4 or something, but definitely did some RBI damage at the plate, and we won.

I remember Mr. Bernstein sidling over to me in the dugout: “So, who are you? I like to know my replacements.”

And now I had a story for my older brothers later that night, bigger blue collar cineastes than even me: “I talked to Carl Bernstein today.” Silence on the other end of the phone, and then one of them yawped, “The guy Hoffman plays in … ‘President’s Men’!”

•

A few years back, criticism percolated that the event had lost its way, dominated by aging men who care too much about the score and who don’t get everyone into the game. That the level of celebrity-participant had fallen off, and that the teams were loaded with ringers who could lay claim to only a thin reed of connectivity to the arts. But, most of all, that it’s just an exhibition whose energy and intensity should resemble something more akin to a high school gym class.

Some of those criticisms were fair. And the captains and veterans of the game have made adjustments to ensure that everyone who is kind enough to show up for the cause participates in the game. They’ve just this year made a point of verifying every player’s professional bona fides before locking the rosters.

But I, for one, appreciate the historical stakes of the game. And the intensity of the effort.

It’s how artists and writers have to go at everything in their lives. To break in, to stay afloat, to fully realize the buried truth of our creative impulses. To get the job done, which, on this day each August, is trying to win a softball game and not let past teams down.

Last year’s game, and the Writers’ improbable comeback and victory, was well-chronicled in the local papers out here. And it was truly improbable. I’ve been playing and now coaching baseball for 41 of my 49 years. Scoring 17 runs in the bottom of the ninth simply doesn’t happen. What I remember more than even that last inning was the narrative that was slowly mounting on our bench during the middle innings. Historically speaking, the series has been pretty even. And that has held true through the five or six years I’ve participated. I think we traded wins for the first four years I played.

But the Artists beat us pretty badly two years ago, and they had a huge lead by, like, the fourth inning last year. Our biggest bats weren’t producing, and our most recent MVP, a perennial standout for the Writers in recent years, Andy Friedman, had just been taken to Stony Brook Southampton Hospital after laying out going away from home plate for a big fly that resulted in a grand slam.

So here we were, slogging through the rudiments of a second blowout. And Mike Lupica began to finally say it: “We need to revamp this whole thing. It’s over.” Pacing back and forth along the base line: “It’s not working anymore. Kenny, maybe we don’t divide the teams by writers and artists but just pick them even based on talent. But this isn’t working.”

Looking at the crowd, the tents and tables, the radio team announcing the game: “It’s not worth all this trouble if it’s not a competitive game.”

And then the rally began. And what was most definable about our rally was that it came from all shapes and sizes and ages and genders and abilities. In fact, some of the bigger bats in that lineup didn’t carry the day. But it was single after single after double after error — we just kept moving the line long enough for a diminutive rabbi from Brooklyn, Josh Franklin, to get up and blast a bomb grand slam of his own to walk us off, Lupica’s doubts dashed in the celebration at home plate.

•

I am probably one of the few (perhaps only) lifelong locals who plays in the game. I was raised in Westhampton Beach, was a Hurricane through and through, and worked three jobs in the summer, like all of my classmates.

The working was an assumption from birth, a tradition we were all too happy to finally take part in at 12 and 13. With so many wealthy people here in the summer, there was so much money to be made, and most of the jobs placed us suddenly inside the universes of the rich, sometimes the famous, oftentimes the exotic. Working within that cosmopolitan orbit for three months a year was exciting, sure, but still our roles there never allowed us to forget just how different our lives were from theirs.

In those years, the Artists & Writers Game was a much bigger deal. I remember reading about it in the city tabloids as much as in the Hamptons Chronicle or East Hampton Star. About the historical records, about who won last year and how close the game was. Sal Marchiano and Warner Wolf did features on it on the local newscasts, light-heartedly relaying the rivalries the game carried, and then would roll tape, and there would be Paul Simon showing his Corona, Queens, roots taking a turn on a single, or Roy Scheider tracking a fly ball, or Christie Brinkley running out a grounder. All of the buzz clearly made possible because of the continuity of the teams, and because those who played in the game each year gave somewhat of a damn about winning and losing.

I’d catch a glimpse of those news reports while getting cleaned up after landscaping, before heading out to cater a party on Dune Road. By my teens, I knew I wanted a life in the arts, most likely as a writer. For a kid from the other side of the tracks — what we locals refer to as “north of the highway” — it was an aspiration that was truly only a dream, and this charity softball game was an annual touchstone of that professional world, which was otherwise out of reach.

I eventually did become a professional writer, got myself into the Guild (for which I currently picket!), and was able to relocate back to my home village, where I coach the high school baseball team in the springtime and am a volunteer in the fire department, like all of my elders were in the past.

And I still live “north of the highway.” The expression was passed down from the old-timers I knew as a boy. Summer residents always think we’re talking about Sunrise Highway, but the expression was coined back when there was only Montauk Highway running along the South Shore from Babylon to Montauk. The social structure has been in place for that long.

So, yeah, I’m glad that these older writers and artists have made some adjustments to the way we approach the event. I’m glad we’re ensuring a more inclusive spirit to the day.

And, of course, that we’re raising the money we do for East End Hospice, Phoenix House, the Eleanor Whitmore Early Childhood Center and The Retreat.

But I’m also glad that we’re still keeping score.

This year marks the 75th anniversary of the game. And it kills me that I can’t participate due to injury. But I’ll be there next year. And the next, and the next. For as long as they’ll continue to let a guy from north of the highway keep playing.

Go Writers!

Dan Pulick is a Writer — with a capital W — who lives in Westhampton Beach.