Musings: Where are the kids of summer?

On a recent bicycle ride through Seaford and Wantagh, I passed a few schoolyard baseball fields. They were carpeted with synthetic turf, bold stripes forming the foul lines, and painted white squares serving as the bases. Sadly, these diamonds were empty. There were no echoes of a bat clobbering a juicy pitch and no screams of joy as children captured soft fly balls.

I thought back. When I was a boy growing up in Bethpage, neighborhood baseball was a daylong event in the summer. Our fields were lumpy and crawling with weeds. Our bases were folded strips of brown cardboard or old cloth potato sacks. We didn’t have chain link fences rimmed with yellow piping. Instead, we parked our Schwinns in the thin grass, arranging them in a semicircle to pose as the outfield wall.

We played three-on-three if we were short of players, using a scuffed ball that we sometimes had to tape together, and we choked up on bats made of wood. We broke for lunch and played until the sunlight faded or we were called home for dinner. At night, we gathered in the streets — crowds of us — to play ring-a-levio or freeze tag. The streets are empty on summer evenings now, too.

I know that times change. Video games replace battles of Monopoly. Structured leagues with color uniforms are swapped in place of pickup games played in dungarees and sneakers. Organized play dates are substituted for a surprise knock on the door, hoping that the boy or girl down the block can come over.

It all made me a little sad. The empty fields. The silent streets. The quiet. I began to think, as Cat Stevens once sang, “Where do the children play?”

— Patrick Calabria, Seaford

The writer was a Newsday sports reporter for 20 years.