Summer In The City

Here's an article I wrote for SI.com four years ago about summer sports in New York:

It was getting dark outside. The action was just getting started at the Dyckman courts. Not a 10-minute walk away, four baseball games were still in progress at Inwood Park. There are no lights on the field, so the day was almost done. The sounds of rapid-fire Spanish and the smell of charcoal filled the air as families set up cookouts. Teenagers with flat-brimmed hats and baggy shorts sat on coolers, mothers watched over their toddlers, and old men sat in chairs and smoked cigars. They watched the games, commiserated, cheered.

A shapely Dominican grandmother, perhaps in her mid-50s, wearing short shorts and heels, with her purse hanging off her right shoulder, held a red whiffle ball bat in her right hand and smacked one pitch after another thrown by a small boy. All the while she kept up a running conversation with two friends seated nearby in folding chairs, pausing only to yell at another boy to stop punching his sister. When the next pitch came her way she hit it like a man who did her wrong.

[Photo Via: Freshness]