Steven Ward back in April of 1985 helping me out with a photoshoot for my photography class.
Yesterday, March 29, 2026, I got the news that my childhood friend, Steven Ward, died in a car accident. That’s sad news and it got me thinking about our childhood together and particularly playing stickball. We spent a lot of summer days playing stickball.
Growing up Steven and I played a lot of sports together. He was a year older than me but we were always around the same size and athleticism. He had an inch on me as I was five foot eleven and he was six feet tall but we were both good athletes. We played even in most sports. We played football, basketball, baseball, volleyball, and any other sport we invented together. I remember patio hockey being an invention of ours.
This wasn’t city stickball that’s played out in the streets with manhole covers and sewer grates marking the playing field. This was suburban stickball. It was called Strikeout in other neighborhoods. If you’ve even seen a box with an X through it painted on a schoolyard wall that was stickball. The box was the strike zone.
The batter stood in front of the box with a broomstick as a bat and the pitcher stood a marked distance away with a tennis ball for him to pitch. If the pitcher could get the ball in the box without the batter hitting it the pitch was a strike. Outside the box was a ball. You know the drill.
If the batter hit the ball there were markings out in the field where the hit would be a double, triple, and home run. Past the basketball court was a double and such. Any ground ball past the pitcher was a single. If the pitcher fielded the ground ball it was an out. Of course any fly ball caught was an out too. You could have multiple people play and have outfielders, and occasionally we did, but most of the time it was just Steven and I.
Over the years we played in multiple places such as the schoolyard across the street and the schoolyard down the block about a mile away. But the summers I mostly remember were when we were in high school playing in his backyard. Somewhere around the summers of 1982 to 1986. He lived next door to me so our yards were connected with a fence in between them. You had to get it over the fence for a double.
When we played in Steven’s back yard we usually had a boom box with us listening to some cassette tapes or the Mets’ game. It was Steven who was the baseball fan and he loved the Mets. I especially remember listening to games as we played during the summer of 1986 because that was the year the Mets eventually won the world series. There were a lot of happy Mets’ games that year.
The album I remember listening to the most was the original Asia album. The reason I remember it the best (besides the fact that we played it a lot of times) is that one song, “Heat of the Moment,” had the line, “Now we find ourselves in 82.” Songs rarely mentioned the year they were made in them and I noted that at the time. Even at the time I knew that I would forever associate 1982 and playing stickball with Steven to that song. We were marked in time by it.
I remember the band and title of one more album from that time but not the actual music. Steven was a huge fan of the band, “Toronto” and the album, “Get it on Credit.” He used to play that cassette tape in the car a lot. He was the only person I’ve ever met who even know who that band was let alone was huge fan. So I associate them with that time period too.
Steven didn’t have a wall with a box on it in his backyard so we made our own. We were always building stuff out of wood and so always had some laying around. It was almost always scrap wood and all these days later I can’t even remember where we got it. It’s not like we were going to the lumber yard to buy it new but there was always scrap wood around. But now that I contemplate it this may have been after Steven and I turned his basement into a finished basement. Twice. But that’s another story. He did order lumber at that time. So there could have been extra two by fours from that.
We used two by fours to build a frame about four feet wide by six feet tall. We then nailed a piece of plywood the same size to it. We painted a box with an X on the front of the plywood and propped it up leaning it on a couple more two by fours. It took the two of us but we could put it up and take it down in a moment.
I wrote before that we were even athletically in most things. But by the time we were in high school we were not even in stickball. My sport was football and I was a good quarterback but his sport was baseball and he was a pitcher on his high school team. I probably lost at least three quarters of the games we played.
The main difference between us was that Steven could throw a curveball. Throwing a football is easier on the arm than throwing a baseball (or a tennis ball in place of a baseball). Throwing a curveball means snapping your arm as you release the ball in a way that puts a lot of strain on your elbow. It hurts. That’s why you always see pitchers icing their elbows. Not having that much interest in baseball I was never willing to learn to endure that pain it took to learn to throw a curveball. Steven was and did.
I was a solid stickball pitcher and I was accurate enough to hit any part of the box anytime I wanted to but without the deception of a curveball I was at a disadvantage. In the guessing game of where the pitcher is going to throw the ball it’s an easier guess if the ball is traveling straight.
Not being able to hit a Major League curveball has kept a lot of otherwise good baseball players from being able to make it in the big leagues. We were playing stickball and Steven’s curveball was far from the major leagues but I still couldn’t hit it consistently.
It’s tough to explain why I had a hard time consistently hitting a curveball but it all has to do with perception. When swinging a bat, even a stickball bat, you are guessing where the ball is going to be. It’s an educated guess based on what the pitcher has done before and is doing now but it’s still a guess. You’re not reacting to where the ball is. There is no time for that. So when the ball doesn’t travel on a straight line, as it should, my brain and body could not anticipate where it would end up. My swing would often be hesitant and I’d miss. Or I’d straight up miss. That made me lose a lot of otherwise close games.
I’ve always been athletically competitive and it was never any fun to lose all those games but I loved playing anyway. It was a challenge. We always had multiple cans of tennis balls around the yard so we wouldn’t have to chase balls down if they got hit. The pitcher would just pick up another one and keep pitching. It’s the way we spent a lot of our high school summer days. Hanging out and playing stickball. The hanging out was half the fun.
Of all of the sounds of the game that comes back to me as I write this the sound of the stick hitting the tennis ball is number two. The strongest sound is of the tennis ball hitting the plywood. It was a distinctive sound that I heard over and over as we played. As both pitcher and batter. A thunk that’s forever in my memory.
Our last summer playing stickball was probably sometime after high school in one of our college summers off. Maybe it was the years of playing or maybe it was because Steven wasn’t pitching for his high school team anymore but I finally got better at hitting the curve ball. Just when I started to get a few more wins we got too old for the game. We gradually stopped playing. One day we played our last game and didn’t even know it. Since he was a year ahead of me in school he had to go out and get a real job first. Grownups don’t play much stickball.
Goodbye Steven.