Best of SI: The Rise and Fall of Central Park Press League

It happened every spring. Blacktop refugees feeling the sylvan pull of Central Park. They’d wander in—suits and sailors, daytrippers and druggies, stroller moms and straphangers, tourists and triathletes—all hoping to escape the cacophony and chaos of midtown Manhattan. To sunbathe or smoke a joint. Ride a carousel or a Cannondale. Read a book. Unwind. Then they’d hear it.

“Play ball! … He’s tagging up! … Goddamn motherf------ a------! … You’re gone—here’s a token, take the train!”

If it was a Wednesday afternoon in the park’s southwest corner, their afternoon delight was inevitably interrupted by the rancor of the New York Press League—by employees of the city’s top media outlets, many of whom covered baseball for a living, playing softball with the same ardor as the pros they chronicled. Often more.

“I’d hear it every year,” says Ben Walker of the Associated Press. “Don’t those guys have jobs?”

Yes. But they never let those jobs impose on their softball careers. Fred Lief, who pitched wire-to-wire in the Press League—which is to say that he played every season between 1976 and 2018 for one of the two wire services, the AP or UPI—says, “There is no other institution in my life, not a job, not my marriage, that endured as long.”

Lief underwent four knee surgeries in his softballing days and, unofficially, was Charlie Browned more times than any hurler in Press League history. He took the mound late into his 60s.

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