Dobkowski, 50, who resumed playing softball this year after taking 15 years off, is part of a growing and graying group of men - and a few women - playing at an age when their fathers and grandfathers had long since put their mitts away.
"It's like riding a bike, I'm telling you," said Dobkowski, a salesman who appeared to fall off that bike a few minutes later when another grounder left him sitting in a cloud of infield dust.
Senior Softball-USA estimates that, in the last eight years, the number of players around the country 50 and older has nearly doubled to 2.8 million.
The number of organized teams that travel hundreds and sometimes thousands of miles to play in tournaments has doubled from 500 to about 1,000 in the last five years, said R.B. Thomas, the executive director of the International Senior Softball Association, one of 10 national senior softball groups.
"We have some 80-and-older teams now in the country," he said. "Older people are staying more active, and senior softball fits into a lifestyle for seniors."
Senior softball is so popular that it has prompted grown men to lie about being older than they really are.
"We had a little scandal where one team out in California had three players on their team that weren't 50," Thomas said. "They got banned for a considerable period of time."
The play can be so competitive that some players have been known to pull stunts one wouldn't expect of grandfathers - such as a Virginia man who wanted to play in Florida so much he bought a house there to sidestep a residency rule.
Then there are the bats. Sammy Sosa may be the most famous baseball player caught using a corked bat, but senior softball teams are on the lookout for high-tech bats that have been banned because they send balls flying a lot farther and a lot faster than other bats.
"Guys do try to sneak illegal bats in," said Bob Kolvitz, who plays and helps manage the Chicago Classics, one of the top senior teams in the country and winner of a recent national championship tournament in Manassas, Va.
The use of illegal bats isn't confined to senior players, of course. But there is a concern that they pose a particular danger for older men and women who can't react to line drives the way they once could.
"This year, there was a tournament that allowed these 'hotter' bats and a second baseman took one in the eye and lost an eye," Thomas said.
That's a long way, though, from the gentler version of senior softball played in Elgin. Here, there's no doubt the bats are legal. And the ball isn't quite as hard as those used in tournaments, meaning it doesn't travel as fast.
The players don't travel as fast either.
"Some guys are pretty well crippled up," said Bud Wilson, who at 75 is the oldest player in the Elgin Masters Softball league he started 21 years ago and still runs. "We've had guys get thrown out at first from center field."
But these men routinely hit line drives, and if a ball is hit near them, they usually catch it.
They obviously know the game and rarely make mistakes such as throwing to the wrong base or getting tagged out trying to stretch a single into a double.
And there are differences, starting with the way the game has been tweaked a bit to cut down on injuries.
Like other senior softball leagues around the country, first base is wider to prevent collisions between the first baseman and the batter. There's a second home plate - one for the catcher and one for the base runner - for the same reason.
The biggest difference, though, is the attitude of the players.
Bats aren't slammed to the ground after pop ups with the bases loaded. And about the closest thing to arguing with the umpire is the occasional question about whether a pitched ball had the minimum 6-foot arc.
"It's not our job," Jim Robinson, 54, said of the game. "We're just guys who like to have fun after work."
Senior Softball-USA: www.seniorsoftball.com
International Senior Softball Association: www.seniorsoftball.org |
