It Takes a Neighborhood

How Strawberry Mansion baseball kept kids safe this summer.

by Brian Hickey

— 1 —

The view from 32nd and Diamond, where a man was shot three times. The FBI's softball team was playing less than two blocks away. Photo By: Mark Stehle (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

His real name was Warren L. Wiggins, but everybody up in Strawberry Mansion knew him as "Pop the Cop." He was a beat cop when the job didn't end at serving and protecting. They taught the kids that there's more to life than the drug-addled streets of North Philly, and teaching them what it really means to be a man.

Pop died of natural causes 18 years ago, but his memory is what has Rick Ford unsuccessfully fighting back tears as he sits on the bleachers at what was once a long-neglected baseball field at 33rd and Diamond streets. His eyes are scanning the kids as they prepare for the biggest game of their nascent athletic careers.

"My father was never really in my life," says Rick, a middle-aged barrel of a man who has an "I'm a Miracle" bumper sticker on his truck, "and here's this guy who was showing us a lot of love. He was just out there being a father figure, teaching us how to read a menu, starting a basketball league, taking us places we'd never been. When Pop bought a new Cadillac, I'd be the first to drive it. I was always around him to the point that people would just be saying, 'Oh, you're in love with Pop the Cop.' I'll tell you this, though: He left me with a vision of hope for the community."

That vision of hope would step aside for the inevitability of street-life peer pressure that led Rick astray as he got older and bolder.

"Hopelessness, helplessness, dereliction," explains Rick of his 20s, when he became just another guy slinging crack and packing a gun he was willing to use around 32nd and Fontain streets. "Looking back, I was an animal, and it's crazy because I wasn't that guy."

Not the guy who'd accompany his dealer's elderly father to a Chinese restaurant where they'd order cups of tea that actually held the ounces of coke that Rick would go sell to any interested party.

Not the guy who, released quickly after yet another drug bust, tracked down a woman named Joyce because she had the rest of his stash. Upon learning that she'd smoked it up — she figured that her man would be locked up for a while — Rick Ford slapped her square in the face.

And not the guy who shot at somebody just because he could.

But he was that guy through Oct. 1, 1990, when he headed to Center City to meet a friend of his who'd become a lawyer. Rick wanted money. "Oh, I was going to smoke it right up," he recalls. But the friend wouldn't give any up. Rock bottom got hit hard with Pop's lessons lost along the way.

"In recovery, they always say that when you surrender, it's a quiet, quiet moment," Rick says, regaining his composure. "And that was the quietest moment of my life. I swear, the quietest. All I could hear were two voices. One kept saying that 'It's all over.' But the other voice told me, 'Keep fighting.'"

The long-neglected fieldturned baseball oasis. Photo By: Michael T. Regan (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

It's early May, and City Councilman Darrell Clarke is at the Cornerstone Baptist Church on North 33rd Street to talk about the pros and cons of the city's controversial video-surveillance crime-fighting initiative. Rick, now with a human-services master's degree, works as a liaison for a quasi-government agency that links the uninsured with drug and alcohol counseling. It's a heated issue, so he wanted to hear what Clarke had to say.

"Somebody in the crowd wanted to know what they were going to do for the youth in the community, and Clarke said, 'Those fields right across the street, when we were younger, kids would be out there playing all the time, playing baseball. But not anymore,'" recalls Rick. "People are using it to park for regattas, or to play soccer, or rugby.

"Before then, baseball wasn't even in the picture but when I got home, I couldn't even sleep. I was growing tired of the rallies, the vigils, the marches. Teddy bears and T-shirts? I knew what we needed to do to take the community back."

Through organized athletics, he realized, modern-day Mansion men could take Pop's lessons and apply them. They could use baseball to teach 8- to 16-year-olds about values, the need for a good education, and discipline. Living examples of rising above it all.

"Now, what do you need to pull it off?" Rick thought. "That's going to be the biggest struggle. We're going to need people with passion and vision."

The next morning, he met up with a couple of old friends for breakfast at a Ridge Avenue dinette. Also at Rick's table was David Lisby, a baseball fanatic that everybody up in Strawberry Mansion knows as "Itchy" and another longtime friend who was good with helping troubled kids. By day's end, Itchy, a night-shift SEPTA maintenance man, was trolling for volunteer coaches while Rick was distributing some 200 fliers door to door.

The Strawberry Mansion All-Star Baseball League had been born.

"May 4 came around and we had 84 kids out on the first day," says Rick. "Now, we have 157 kids, and they're still coming in from all different areas. They all wanted to play; there was a need for something like this." He'd used his wide array of connections to get some TV publicity and donations from many. The Phillies donated equipment, uniforms and money and put up banners for Major League Baseball's RBI (Reviving Baseball in Inner Cities) program. Then came the Fairmount Park Commission, which helped return a rocky swath of dirt and overgrown weeds into a baseball diamond.

Itchy held up his part of the deal, recruiting friends from the neighborhood to join him on the bench. (They're Bernard Savage, Billy Thompson, Mike Griggs, William McQueen, Frank Carter, Lawrence Boston, Coach Blade, Coach Sauce, Coach Speedy, Sabrina Brockington and Aaron, Lee and Karen Washington. Each is a good-hearted person who gave of themselves to an extent that we should all aspire to.)

"I've been in community activism for a while," says Rick, who, an active member of Men United for a Better Philadelphia, and widely known neighborhood "mediator." "I've never seen anything happen this quick."

Nor had he ever much like what happened a couple of weeks into practice.

"A man on a horse shot a pit bull on the edge of Fairmount Park near Strawberry Mansion last night after the dog attacked the horse," read the Daily News brief. It started "when the dog began gnawing on the horse's hoofs. The unidentified man, who apparently had a permit to carry a weapon, jumped off his horse and fired at the dog. Man and horse galloped off. The pit bull was expected to survive."

It all happened about 150 yards away and it brought practice to an abrupt halt as the coaches gathered their kids near the backstop.

"Thirty-eight hollow points," one mother would later tell me she'd surmised. "And the kids saw the whole thing."

"It's all about providing a safe atmosphere in the middle of all this," Rick later explained. "We know that when they leave here, they have to go home to these things."

From there, the rules would be simple: Both boys and girls will play as long as they show up for practice, don't curse or defy their coaches' instructions and put their glove back in the box before they leave.

"When we see a commitment, you can keep them," they were told.

The kids were then divvied up into eight teams they'd name themselves. The 8- to 12-year-olds went with the Bomb Squad, Dominators, Dynasty All-Stars, Tornado Twisters, C. Graham and A Few Good Men; the 13- to 16-year-olds were either Phillies or All-Stars.

"The toughness," Rick said a couple days before the season began, "just disappears when they get out here."

STRIKE FORCE: FBI Special Agent Frank Burton Jr. breaking down pitches with Chester, aka "Poom Poom." Photo By: Michael T. Regan (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

"Come out and help us promote positive solutions in our community!!!!!!!"

The fliers were distributed throughout Mansion to invite everybody to the Opening Day Ceremony at 10 a.m. Saturday, June 2.

And come out they did.

By 9:30 a.m., the sun was already so scorching that kids filled team coolers with individual bottles of Philly Tap. The field, since leveled out, still featured an unused 4-foot mound of dirt out in right field. The base paths were lined, but the bases couldn't be properly hitched to the ground. Aluminum bats and red Nike cleats were still wrapped in plastic, and as 10 a.m. approached, many kids were still waiting for gloves.

"They're learning discipline, initiative, self-confidence and it keeps going on, oh yes it does!" belted an emcee who hooked up a portable sound system to a generator, and his truck. "There are no losers today, no matter what the score is."

As the speakers blasted "Midas Touch" and "No Parkin' on the Dance Floor," one youth in a blue T-shirt obliviously danced solo in the infield, swinging his glove around like a glow stick. But before the inaugural "Batter Up!" call, the field belonged to the organizers.

"We started this one month ago, and they said we couldn't organize everybody up here," said Rick, who was standing next to Police Commissioner Sylvester Johnson, Councilman Darrell Clarke and other officials who didn't seem interested in seeking out attention for being there. "Well, we did it, didn't we?"

Behind the backstop and along the fences, a few feet from the informational tables set up by various city and community anti-violence groups like Mothers in Charge, stood some 200 parents and neighbors. Their pride was as palpable as the wafting scents of grilling burgers and dogs. One child, scanning the crowd, caught a familiar face.

"What are you doing here?" he asked the man.

"I came to watch you play baseball!" what looked to be a proud father responded to a beaming kid.

At 10:57 a.m., a braided girl known for her unexpected pitching prowess named Deijah Smith stepped into the batter's box and took the first at-bat in Mansion All-Star history.

The first pitch bounced in front of the plate for a ball. On the second, she swung and missed. The third was outside. But on both the fourth and fifth, she swung and struck out with a smile.

With the Chestnut Brothers' "Stop the Violence" on loop, the game became exactly what one would expect from kids with less than a month's experience under their uniform belt (if they have uniforms, that is, which some don't, as they didn't, or couldn't, buy the $19 pants).

Catchers dropping pitches. First basemen in jeans reaching down to physically touch the ball to the bag. Center-fielders handing off to left-fielders to throw the ball back in for them. (A move that prompted one fan to turn to the man next to her and say, "That's your little brother. You better start teaching him better!") A kid going to the bench and becoming the third out rather than touching the plate for another run scored.

"He'll remember that when he's 50!" said another fan. "But, this is all about learning lessons."

Throughout the four-game showcase, players were constantly reminded to tuck in their shirts and wear their hats properly. They took to the instructions better than the passer-by who, when told he couldn't smoke around the kids —"C'mon, man, we're trying to set a good example here" — responded with a dirty look and a placating "OK" before puffing away as soon as the commissioner left.

"Things like this," Johnson said to the crowd, "will definitely make a difference."

When the day ended, and everybody chipped in to clean up the mess, filling two overflowing trash cans.

A box sat feet from home plate. It was filled with gloves.

MARCHING ORDERS: Assistant coach Tyree Baskerville talks to the kids before their game on "Step Up to the Plate and Strike Out Violence Day." Photo By: Michael T. Regan (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

The guy must've been tweaked on something. Why else would he have been stumbling about Diamond Street, mumbling mostly incoherently and flashing — and then pulling out — the knife he had in his waistband?

A couple of weeks into the season, the kids were gathering for yet another practice. They couldn't help but see the man who was threatening Coach Blade behind the backstop. And they couldn't help but see that Coach Blade was now wielding an aluminum bat as he approached his would-be attacker with a look that said, "You best know how to use that, or else you're in for a serious beating."

Though he clearly had his target out-weaponed — though giving away about 100 pounds — the man kept backpedaling when Blade came at him. After about 10 minutes of Rick and other adults trying to defuse a potentially devastating situation, the man turned tail and ran back across 33rd. Blade, not really hearing what the men were saying, hopped into a minivan and took off. He'd return about 20 minutes later, furious. (I wasn't up for asking about details, either.)

The park commission had reclaimed the bleachers they'd set up for Opening Day — temporarily, it turned out — and no banners hung on the backstop. Everybody knew the weeks and months after the start would be the most difficult. The kids didn't have to be out here, after all. And just like back in Rick's animal days, peer pressure still has quite a hold.

"We're having a hard time keeping this together," admitted Itchy, a stocky loud-laughing guy who never seems to have baseball-by-the-rulebook too far from his mind.

But even if a few dozen kids lost interest, forcing the 13- to 16-year-old teams to disband by late July, the All-Stars men held true to their commitment. With coaches sometimes having to ump or come up with lineups for both teams in a game — not to mention needing me to call a game one Saturday — the Diamond Street diamond rarely sat vacant. (This, even if it was never quite the draw of the neighboring Mander Playground basketball courts, which would be surrounded by hundreds of fans just about every night.) In fact, they expanded the 8- to 12-year-old league by a team from somewhere around 26th and Master and started playing "away" games behind an elementary school off 32nd and Huntingdon.

Foul language and bat throwing still earned swift benchings and the league still kept getting some attention. The Phillies invited Rick and four players down for a tour and a presentation during which they received a giant photo-op check for $2,500. Which was probably worth less to the kids than the chance to meet Ryan Howard, Shane Victorino and Michael Bourn.

Over the weeks, the quality of play gradually improved. But mirroring that trend was a growing concern among the fans and Rick: The coaches had started taking the games so seriously that they were driving the kids away. There were countless verbal spats over lineup changes, rules interpretations and ball-and-strike calls. Each time, the kids would slouch in the field or on the bench. All they wanted to do was just play the game.

"Take me out to the ballgame," became, "This isn't supposed to be about the grown-ups!" Their point: We don't care who wins. We just want them to have fun.

GLOVE AND RESPECT: The players had to show responsibility before being permitted to take their donated mitts home. By season's end, they could. Photo By: Michael T. Regan (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

"You gotta know it. It's electric!

Boogie, woogie, woogie."

It's 1:30 p.m. on the first Thursday of August, and the global thermostat must've broken. But there they were, eight men and women in yellow T-shirts reading "FEDS" doing the Electric Slide behind the backstop.

Unable to resist it, kids jumped in and tried to learn the steps. So did a handful of neighborhood adults, including Itchy, who can't help but be taken on the party ride.

If Opening Day was all about establishing an oasis, this was about changing perceptions. It was "Step Up to the Plate and Strike Out Violence Day," and the daily homicide ticker would slow to a trickle if these were going on in every neighborhood.

Five charcoal grills served up beef dogs and hamburgers. Bottled water, Romeo's Rap Snacks and Entenmann's crumb cakes were set out for the taking. Also on hand were two Phillies ballgirls (one in Dolce & Gabbana shades); Sixer "Ambassador" World B. Free; good-guy "Tolley," who peculiarly brought a football; and Hip-Hop, the Sixers' mascot. They were here to see an exhibition game between the 22 kids who showed up — they raked the field even before they were reminded to "be on your best behavior" — followed by a softball game between the local FBIs and Mansion All-Star coaches and parents.

The feds, some of whom shared tips on the finer points of baseball with eager-eared kids for a good long while, showed off their drug dogs and a monstrous mobile CSI truck while distributing information about FBI jobs, Internet safety and an "All About the FBI" activity book for kids ("When drug dealers smuggle drugs into the U.S., they hide the drugs in many different things. Put an X through the items you think drugs could be hidden in").

On the bleachers, somebody scrawled some acceptable graffiti: "Need more black men in Nation League Baseball. 33 Diamond Baseball!"

"Put down the guns and pick up our sons!" declared the emcee, back for the season's second showcase day. "Yeah, yeah, increase the peace!"

Among those watching was Dave Bellamy, a white-shirted cop who is about to be made captain after nearly two decades on these streets. "If one kid is helped, that's enough to say this made a difference," he said.

Asked about the three "RIP" messages written on the Mander bathroom walls, Bellamy continued, "If this was a disease, a medical disease, the CDC would've been in here already and quarantined us."

Bellamy's plain-clothed boss arrived and casually took a seat among the fans.

"Communities can take back their own streets," Johnson said privately, echoing an oft-criticized refrain that seems worthy of reconsideration here. "We can transform by being positive. Police didn't make this problem and police aren't going to solve this problem."

Asked whether the event validated his stance, Johnson affirmed, but agreed that, "Nobody was listening."

Then, it was adult-softball game time and pride was clearly on the line; an unspoken rivalry that meant you either brought your A game or you sat.

"You gonna need to be faster than that if you're gonna represent Mansion," I was told by a kid after getting easily thrown out at first on a grounder. (I needed to top the feds, too, so I was happy to hit the bench after the third.)

Over the first five innings, the outsiders were the Big Fed Machine, fielding crisp grounders, catching deep bombs and letting intensity wash over their faces as they took to the batter's box. It added up to a 7-3 lead. But the Mansion faithful kept raucously urged their team on to a victory that seemed to be slipping further and further away.

Then, in the bottom of the sixth of seven innings, Mansion broke it open thanks to a couple of fielding errors and a big home run. The 8-7 lead held. Being good sports, though super-mildly agitated, the Feds awarded a championship trophy and requested a rematch.

"We thought," half-joked Special Agent-in-Charge Jody Weis, "that we were playing a bunch of 13-year-olds. But that's OK. It's good that we can all get to know one another on a human level."

Group photos were then taken, as Rick took the mic both to thank the visitors and acknowledge the day's biggest failure, one that had gone widely unnoticed until now:

"It really shows you how important what we're doing is, when you find out that while we were here playing, a young man got shot just two blocks away."

THE COMMISH: Rick Ford and the rest of Men United will soon start a push to make mental-health counseling part of the violence-reduction conversation. (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

"All this shooting up here, these motherfuckin' kids make me sick. I swear, this is one fucked-up generation," said a woman sitting on her three-story brownstone's stoop a few doors in from 32nd and Diamond.

An hour earlier, a man took three to the head two at 32nd and Diamond. According to the Daily News, his girlfriend then tried to drive him to the hospital but crashed, ditching the car and her wounded man a couple of miles away near Broad and Huntingdon.

Back near the crime scene, dozens of neighbors sat on their stoops, within binocular-shot of the Feds. Of course, nobody saw or heard anything, but that didn't stop the cops from canvassing for information or circling at least 11 shell casings that littered the street and sidewalk outside Paolino Grocery.

"Everybody knows who fucking did it. Everybody," said a member of Men United who beat Rick to the scene by a few minutes. Seemed that it was a simmering beef between some locals and others who hang out on French Street near 29th. Christian names were bandied about.

"This is exactly what I've been trying to tell these kids," said Rick. "They should've been up there in the park playing instead of over here doing God knows what. And while all of us were right over there? Unbelievable."

(The victim might have been over 18, but the point was made all the same.)

In the morning, a call to the Police Department's public affairs office would come up empty for details. (So many shootings, too little time to cull information about them all.) But the officer who answered the phone had the logistics of another fatal shooting that happened close enough to the scene to merit mention:

2900 block of Diamond, Aug. 1, 55-year-old John Douglas Moore of the 1800 block of North 33rd Street, multiple gunshot wounds to the chest, 4:47 a.m. Pronounced at Temple, 5:51 a.m.

The Inquirer account of that shooting noted that Moore's brother Jimmie is a Municipal Court judge. "He did things," said an anonymous neighbor, "you're not supposed to do."

The "keep fighting" voice in Rick's head that desperate day in 1990 won. He's still clean, 17 years later.

Donning his "Men United" hat, he's heading up toward LaSalle University to help the family of a recent murder victim deal with a "crisis situation." He took leave of the shell-shocked aunt and bottle-bag-toting uncle of yesterday's shooting and drives up the Boulevard. No, the vigils and stuffed animals aren't cutting it.

"It's a matter of respect. They don't value life. They don't respect authority. They think they can do whatever they want to do and get away with it," Rick diagnosed. "It's sickening."

So is the scene he's about to encounter. Three teenage girls, their parents and an uncle are crammed into an Olney living room talking to five members of Men United about John Marshall Jr., their loved one who, having served in the U.S. Navy in Iraq, was shot dead July 31, in front of his children, mere hours after returning to Philly.

This came on the heels of June 27, when the uncle had been shot in Juniata. The girls witnessed both crimes and, considering that the TV cameras offered a road map to where they're staying, are worried for their safety.

"We're just staying in and laying low," explained Marshall's sister.

There aren't tears, just numbness.

"Don't worry," Rick said. "You'll have a halo around you. We're going to help you get through this."

Meaning counseling. When the five men leave and huddle in front of the Marshalls' temporary home, this ad-hoc crisis-response team vowed to get the victim's nieces someone to talk to. They also decided it needs to be a permanent part of the equation, which got Men United Co-Chairman Bilal Qayyum thinking about one of the countless school classes he'd spoken to recently.

"I could tell this one kid was withdrawing, trying not to engage me," he recalled. "It turns out what when he was 4 years old, he saw his dad kill his mom and then kill himself. When the police got there, they found him and his little sister playing in the blood. That's deep-seated. How do you even start trying to help someone who's been through that?

"People in this community just aren't apt to seek the mental counseling they need. They consider it a sign of weakness, even when it's clearly needed. This is a whole part of the violence problem that nobody's even talking about. It's time we start talking about it, and doing something about it!"

All the men agree, but none as much as Rick, who, as a mental-health counselor, deals with everything from the run-of-the-mill addiction cases to the young girls who admit that their fathers are molesting them —as their fathers sit idly by reading a newspaper in the waiting room. "I've had to call the cops more times than I can count," he explained.

Today, he may live away from the incessant sounds of police helicopters, in Roxborough, but Mansion will always be home. "That's where we're from. We have to go back and help people have better lives," he said. "We have to look out for the old neighborhood, even if we've moved on."

By "we," he means himself and Itchy, with whom we later meet up back at the Mander. He, too, has moved on from the neighborhood and into Wynnefield, but the sport he loves has him back just about every day of the week.

As we cruised the Diamond, Norris, Dauphin and Susquehanna streets of his youth on a Friday night, Itchy said, "I'll see some of the kids out here wearing their uniform shirts at night, even if it's the night before a game. They're taking pride in it."

They're good kids, he said before mentioning that players from different teams had gotten into a bit of a dust-up at the Mander swimming pool a day earlier, but cooler heads prevailed. It made me wonder whether hotter heads would've prevailed if it hadn't been for three months of discipline in their lives.

"On a hot summer night like this, people in the neighborhood expect something's going to happen and, odds are, it does," he said. "It's a lot different today. I always wanted to get up out of here but I knew that when I did, I'd be back. And, I am back. Somebody looked out for me when I was younger, so why shouldn't I return that favor for somebody else's kid?"

Soon, he'd run into Devin, a teenager he'd coached in another league a few years ago, but who's since given up baseball for football. His eyes lit up when "Coach" Itchy talked about their trophies. "I still got 'em," Devin proudly announced, leading Itchy to realize what this summer's really been all about.

"How do I want to see this season end? With kids talking about it for next season already," he said. "That's what I'm trying to get across. That they can come up here and not worry about anything but playing baseball."

Photo By: Michael T. Regan (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

If central casting sought the guy to fit the stereotypical-suspect description in Philly, this is him. African-American male, 20s, braids sticking out from under his pulled-down cap, sleeveless white T, low-hanging jean shorts.

Yet here he is with the biggest smile on his face, laughing and having the time of his life.

"I got two kids out here," he declares, unsolicited, a few mid-August days into the playoffs. "This is how I want to spend my day off, watching my boys play baseball."

Earlier this summer, he forbade his oldest from playing because he'd been acting up. "But when I was at work, my wife was letting him play since the team would have to forfeit because they didn't have enough players," he concedes. "I'll take that one on the chin. We cheat the kids if we don't let them play."

Already, the Twisters had beaten the Valiants, Dynasty topped C. Graham and the Bomb Squad defeated A Few Good Men in the first round. In the second round, the Dominators knocked out Dynasty, leaving Itchy's Bomb Squad against the Twisters in the semis.

On one bench, the Bomb Squad has only eight players, meaning that right field will go uncovered. Meanwhile, the Twisters apparently brought in a ringer of a kid from a team that already lost and sent him up to bat. At which point, all hell breaks loose. Lineup books are scrutinized. Shirts are pulled up to prove that kids aren't wearing another team's uniform, too. And mothers start yapping at one another from across the backstop.

"You've been doing this every game," one coach screams at Itchy. "Acting like you're some sort of pro every time I see you. You ain't no pro, Itchy!"

"We're protesting the game," Itchy responds. "Protest!"

"Let the kids play!" a few parents chime in.

Which they do once the grown-ups retreat. And Rasheen Armstrong, a quick, athletic kid who doesn't even need to tie the laces on both shoes to sprint the base paths — and who's lucky his father's letting him play — hit a home run. As the Twisters sing "Happy Birthday" to one of their players and divvied up the cake, they run the score to 13-0.

The next day in his capacity as commissioner, Rick would rule that the game should be replayed. Itchy, however, isn't having it.

"Their team hit and ours didn't," he says. "They beat us fair and square."

"This right here, gives me the feeling that baseball's going to be back in Strawberry Mansion for years," Itchy said last Saturday, which was one of those cool perfect-for-baseball days that bring relief during a too-hot summer. He's standing behind the backstop watching the Twisters (in green) and Dominators (in orange) play the first game of the three-game final series.

It's the culmination of their summer at an oasis in the midst of their violence-strewn edge of North Philly, and the kids put their lessons learned to good work. The first batter of the game, Damien, gets a single off Dominators starter Rasheen and ultimately scores on an error. From there, it's a showcase of the summer's defensive lessons and a pitching showcase. It will be the only hit Rasheen gives up while striking out 10 batters in the five-inning game. But Twisters starter Salem will do him one better: no runs and nine Ks.

Final score: Twisters 1, Dominators 0.

But Men United's North Philly captain Richard Dukes' mind is elsewhere.

"We've lost three generations. The '70s, when crack came into existence; the '80s, when it started to flourish; and the '90s were just out of control," says the old-head whose van windshield got shattered by a foul ball a week back. "Now, school's about to start and all we're hearing about are three gangs, the Allegheny Drug Boys and two from 26th and Master that are warring. We need to sit 'em down and get them to resolve these issues. Their mentality now is, 'We're not going to live past 25, so what's the use?' They don't even know what their beefs are anymore."

Scanning the couple-dozen-strong championship crowd, Dukes, who recently intervened in the recreation-center shooting at 26th and Master, sighs, "This place should be overrun with parents."

There's always next year for that.

No, it's never just about the kids, who are now allowed to take their gloves home with them. Somehow, the Strawberry Mansion All-Stars league built the foundation of a positive community outlet at a time when role models are harder to find, and kids are less apt to listen to mentors who give of themselves.

With crime enveloping them, a league that lost a good quarter of its kids, with sporadic parental support, still did what it was designed to do. The kids who stuck it out —even those who hung around the fringes after dropping out — better understand discipline, initiative, self-confidence, and it will keep going on.

At game's end, Rick huddles the kids around the pitcher's mound. His fatherly Pop-the-Cop-like presence captures their full attention.

"We had a safe summer. None of you got in trouble, and nobody got hurt. I'm proud of all of you," he says, before turning the mic over to his friend, gospel-radio DJ Troy Baylor.

"Our future is not dead. It's well alive. We are all winners," says Baylor, before asking the kids to share a moment of reflection.

They then bow their heads and pray that everybody survives the next two days.

(hickey@citypaper.net)

Postscript:

Well, it looks like somebody also slipped in a prayer for rain. Game 2 of the championship series was rained out on Monday and Tuesday. As of 10 a.m. Wednesday, Commissioner Rick Ford said play should resume at 32nd and Huntingdon Saturday with a deciding game (if necessary) at 33rd and Diamond to follow.

Check citypaper.net/clog for updates.