You are standing in the middle of the street with a broomstick and a rubber ball and the bases are a manhole cover and a fire hydrant and a parked car. That is stickball. The sport of the street. You do not need a field. You do not need a uniform. You do not need a league. You need a broom and a Spalding and a block where the cars are not moving too fast. Stickball is baseball for people who cannot afford baseball. Stickball is the democracy of sport. The street does not charge admission.

You have seen a kid hit a Spalding three sewers. That is the measurement. Not feet. Not yards. Sewers. A sewer is one block. Two sewers is two blocks. Three sewers is a legend. Willie Mays played stickball on the streets of Harlem when he was not playing centerfield at the Polo Grounds. Willie Mays could hit a ball three sewers. Nobody in the major leagues could hit a ball three sewers because the major leagues did not have sewers. The street had the only measurement that mattered.

You know the sound of a Spalding bouncing on asphalt. That hollow pink bounce. That is the heartbeat of summer in New York. The Spalding was twenty-five cents. The broomstick was free because your mother did not know you took it. The strike zone was chalked on a wall and the umpire was the kid who could not hit. Everybody had a position and nobody had a contract and the game ended when your mother called you home for dinner. That was the only clock in stickball. Your mother's voice.

You remember the arguments. The ball hit the car and the car counts as a foul and the other kid says the car is in play and nobody wrote down the rules because the rules were whatever the block agreed to. Every block had different rules. On my block a roof was a home run. On the next block a roof was an out. Stickball was the same sport on every block and a different sport on every block. That is how New York works. Same city. Different rules. Every corner decides for itself.

You walk down the block now and there is no stickball. The cars are parked too close together. The traffic moves too fast. The mothers do not let the kids play in the street. The Spalding costs three dollars. The broomstick is plastic. The block is quiet in the summer. You cannot hear a Spalding bouncing on asphalt because nobody is bouncing a Spalding on asphalt. The street lost a sport and the sport had no stadium so nobody held a ceremony. Stickball just stopped and the block got quiet and nobody said goodbye.