The ANNOTICO Report

Baseball came to Italy at Nettuno, a small seaside town an hour south of
Rome, after the amphibious landing of thousands of American and Allied
troops in January 1944. American soldiers soon built two structures on the
beach: a P.O.W. camp and a makeshift baseball diamond.

Dave Bidini talks about the history of the Italian Baseball League, and his
experiences in the Italian Minor Leagues.

To me the highlight was when Joe DiMaggio was visting Rome, and hearing of
Nettuno's storied past, and their passion for baseball,
left mid lunch, and arrived mid game, and put on an exhibition to a  hushed
and awe-struck crowd.

New York Times
By Dave Bidini
May 8, 2005

The Nettuno Peones are the last true Italian baseball team.

They speak a southern coastal dialect in the crumbling dugout of their home
field, drink espresso in the first, fourth and seventh innings, feast on
cornetti and brioche before games and devour huge pots of pasta di mare
between doubleheaders. They call home runs fouricampi, catchers mitts
ciavatte - Nettuno slang for big slipper - and they shout "Pia la palanca!"
(Try swinging a bench!) when opposing hitters strike out.

Once, while the Peones were being drubbed in the first game of a playoff
doubleheader with their division rivals from Palermo, a player's father
arrived with a bucket holding the fall's first clipping of grapes, their
fresh, wet stems wound with spider webbing. The Peones' eyes lit up, and so
did their bats.

Finishing off the grapes before the second game, they went on to defeat
Palermo, astonishing Nettuno's silver-haired manager, Pietro Monaco, the
Italian base-stealing legend, whom I saw smile for the first time in eight
weeks.

Peones baseball was alive.

Although Nettuno's A division professional club and other Serie A teams
have taken to signing Dominicans, Venezuelans and Americans to improve
their chances, the Serie B Peones, in a town that discovered baseball out
of the ashes of war, resist such recruiting.

The game came to Nettuno, a small seaside town an hour south of Rome, after
the amphibious landing of thousands of American and Allied troops in
January 1944. American soldiers soon built two structures on the beach: a
P.O.W. camp and a makeshift baseball diamond.

When the war ended, most of the soldiers left, but some remained, and soon
two men, Sgt. Horace McGarrity and Col. Charles Butte, were organizing
scrub ball. Gloves were fashioned out of pizza boxes and broomsticks made
into bats in games contested on a patch of land bequeathed by Prince Steno
Borghese from his estate.

They used leftover pierced-steel airfield planking for seats and stuffed
bags of canvas to make bases. Butte remembers that "we cut off a tree trunk
to make home plate, and my wife sewed team uniforms out of requisitioned
khaki."

Relatives of several current Peones played for these early teams, and after
a few weeks hanging around them in the summer of 2002, the names Marcucci,
Tagliaboschi and Glorioso became as mythic to me as Tinker, Evers and
Chance.

The Nettunese are mad about the game and proud of their baseball heritage.
Everywhere I went, I inevitably ran into someone who had once hit a famous
home run. Ball fields in Nettuno outnumber churches, six to five, and to
this day, children making their first Communion are given new gloves and
bats, which are then blessed by the priest.

Taking an after-dinner camminata, or little stroll, along the sea wall is
akin to walking down Lansdowne Street before Red Sox-Yankees games,
complete with bobbing ball caps and assorted Major League Baseball
paraphernalia. The town's main fountain outside Piazza Mazzini is where
Nettunese baseball veterans gather; they are a great source of storytelling.

I spent many hours in their company, listening to them describe cleats-high
clashes with rival Roman teams, and, in Monaco's case, the time he was
invited to the Cincinnati Reds' camp, where he played alongside Johnny
Bench and Pete Rose before being shipped to Buffalo, where the story ends.

Old-timers remember a summer day in 1957 when Joe DiMaggio came to Nettuno.
He was having lunch in Rome when he was told about Nettuno's affection for
baseball. Legend has it that DiMaggio put down his knife and fork and asked
to be driven there immediately. He arrived at Borghese's field by jeep
during a game between the Nettuno Glen Grants and A. S. Roma.

The crowd, hushed and awe-struck, found its loyalties divided when DiMaggio
- accepting an offer to demonstrate his batting skills, and wearing the
same suit he had worn to lunch - stepped in to face the mustachioed Carlos
Tagliaboschi, a champion in his own right in Nettuno.

The small, rakish Tagliaboschi settled into his caricamento, or windup,
and, with his heart beating like a timpani, offered DiMaggio his most
biting fastball. DiMaggio reached for the ball and missed. The fans paused
for a moment's respect, then exploded wildly, incredulous that
Tagliaboschi, their 5-foot son of a sailor, had slipped a pitch past the
world's greatest hitter.

DiMaggio took off his jacket, folded it neatly into a square, laid it at
his side next to the plate, then rolled up his sleeves and told
Tagliaboschi: more.

He threw and, as the story goes, DiMaggio made contact, sending the ball
over the outfield wall, the neighboring farmer's field, a road, the sea
cliffs and the beach, until it bobbed like a puppet head in the surf.
Minutes later, the Tyrrhennian Sea was filled with thrashing scamps trying
to bring back this cherished piece of history.

Which, of course, they did not.

DiMaggio hit home run after home run, astonishing the crowd and exhausting
Tagliaboschi, who yielded to a few of his teammates, eager for the
privilege of serving up homers to a giant of the game.

Finally, someone shouted: If you keep hitting, we'll have no more balls!

DiMaggio stepped out graciously and was back in Rome by nightfall. The game
continued.

Nettunese baseball was alive.

Dave Bidini is the author of "Baseballissimo: My Summer in the Italian
Minor Leagues" (McClelland & Stewart).

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/
05/08/sports/basketball/08peones.html?