South Stafford
The annual softball game between Strafford and South Strafford is pegged as an epic battle of the villages. Yet for all its mighty splendor, only a couple of the event’s organizers and their children are at Varney Field less than a half hour before first pitch late Friday afternoon.
Both are South Strafford residents, and although the traditional Fourth of July weekend matchup bears all of intensity one might expect in seven innings of slow-pitched banter and bloopers, the pair can’t ignore an unflattering truth.
Stafford always wins.
“They’ve had some college and semipro players over the years, and I think they have more (physically strong) farmhands up there,” says Jeff Solsaa about Strafford, also known as the Upper Village.
Solsaa is playing catch with his middle-school-aged daughter, Grace. Her throwing aptitude suggests South Strafford could use her assistance, but Grace won’t be playing. The game is intended for adults, or at least those who’ve aged out of Little League.
South Strafford’s Andrew Lane has helped coordinate the game for the last five years or so, and he hasn’t seen his village come close to victory.
“Sometimes we’ll have a really deep bench, and everyone has to hit,” Lane says. “(Strafford) might only have seven guys, but if all seven of them are good hitters, it actually works in their favor (to have fewer players). I don’t want to sound like we’re the Bad News Bears. There just always seems to be something that gives (Strafford) an advantage.”
Unsolicited, Lane is adamant there is no rivalry between the villages outside the game.
“There’s a lot of camaraderie between us. They’re our neighbors,” he said. “But one day a year, for two hours, they’re our mortal enemies.”
Players begin to file in about 10 minutes before first pitch, with at least a few beers floating around in the coolers. About 30 spectators show up, and members of a Girl Scout troop are there to sell lemonade.
Mercifully, the region’s heat wave ended just in time for the game. It’s a much more seasonal 77 degrees or so at Varney Field, next to the town recycling center.
Players estimate the game has taken place annually since the mid-1970s. Some claim Strafford’s dominance is 20 years strong, but Dave Perkins, an attorney and Southie, says not so fast.
“We won in 2010,” he says. “I remember because I was one of the only people to show up that year.”
Friday’s matchup begins with nine players in Strafford’s dugout and seven for South Strafford, forcing Strafford’s Phil Dimond to catch for the Southerners even while his own team is at bat. Dimond promptly commits a throwing error — surprisingly, no one accuses him of it being on purpose — then switches to the plate and blasts a home run to make it 2-0.
Strafford adds four more runs in the second inning, and it appears the rout is on for another year. Late arrivals begin adding to both teams’ rosters, inflating both to around a dozen.
Alger Brook Road, just south of the Upper Village, is supposedly the geographic cutoff determining who plays for which side, but liberties are taken. Willy Appleby, for example, has a house in Strafford now with his wife, Matty, but when he first moved to town, he stayed with roommates in South Strafford.
“My roots are here,” he proudly says while preparing to bat for the Southies.
Other rules are just as loosely enforced. While it’s supposed to be slow pitch rather than high pitch, no one bothers mentioning that to pitchers when their tosses begin gravitating to the latter. There is, however, plenty of ribbing.
Strafford carpenter Brian Johnson, a selectboard member, isn’t playing this year. Instead, he nurses a beer in the Strafford dugout as the unofficial scorekeeper, marking a tally under the appropriate village on poster board each time a run is scored. Other than his own amusement, his only other purpose is to rouse the Southies.
When burly South Strafford pitcher Erin Masteller offers a delivery slightly off the plate, Johnson pounces.
“Come on, Erin, we’ve seen better eyes on a potato,” he calls.
“Well, then don’t look,” Mastellar yells back.
South Strafford plates a pair of runs in the bottom of the second inning to make it 6-2, then Southie firefighter Cassie Maclay jumps into the lineup in the third and smacks a single on the first pitch offered. A batter later she’s across the plate, and South Strafford adds another to draw within 6-4.
The catcalls from Strafford’s dugout are suddenly a bit more subdued, and things get even more tense in the fourth inning. Lane dislodges the ball from catcher Paul Flannigan’s grasp in a collision at home plate, scoring in the process to make it 6-5. The subsequent throw home comes just in time to tag out Perkins as Strafford narrowly avoids a tie game — for now.
First-time player Gabe Zoerheide bloops a single for Strafford to help spark a pair of insurance runs in the top of the fifth, and the outs for both teams come quickly in the sixth and seventh. It appears Strafford has held on for an 8-5 win, another chapter in the longtime jinx over its neighbors.
But wait. There’s more.
The game is barely an hour old, and there’s still lots of daylight left. It’s clear that no one really feels like halting play.
“We’re playing 10 innings,” South Strafford’s Tom Scull calls out, and no one protests.
“Or until South Strafford gets the lead,” he adds under his breath.
In the bottom of the eighth, Southie Alan Donohue jumps over Strafford first baseman Laura Decapua and lands on first base the same time as the tag. The calls of “Safe!” from the South Stafford dugout are slightly more urgent than Strafford’s “Out!” pleas, and Donohue stays on base.
Pat Kelly bloops another single, Matt McDonough blasts a two-run hit and Sperry Wilson sends one bounding under the third baseman’s legs to score McDonough, who’s in town visiting Scull. It’s 8-8 going into the ninth, though Masteller tries to increase South Strafford’s fortune.
“We’re up by one!” he calls toward the Strafford bench.
“I don’t think so!” shouts back Johnson, ever wary in his insistence that South Strafford constantly tries to cheat.
The Upper Village goes quietly in the top of the ninth, and Carter Blanchard drives in Solsaa for the go-ahead run in the home half. Lane endures a lengthy at-bat, even clunking one foul ball off his own noggin, before driving it to shortstop.
An error allows Blanchard to score and, amazingly, South Strafford holds a 10-8 lead going into the bottom of the 10th. Strafford has just three outs to try to keep its streak alive.
Two of those outs come quickly before Shannon Varney hits safely to give the Upper Village one last hope. The next batter grounds out, however, and South Strafford has finally broken the curse.
Jubilant, they high-five while cleaning up the dugout and begin to shift energies toward Saturday’s Independence Day festivities in town — which, naturally, include a tug-of-war match between the villages on the common.
Also naturally, those from Strafford won’t let the Southerners enjoy their win without caveats.
“Let the record show, we were ahead 8-5 after seven innings,” says Zoerheide.
Johnson is less diplomatic.
“Every year, we win and they cry,” he said. “This year, we won, they cried and they got their way.”
Ribbing aside, the occasion is a hit among both players and spectators, a small-town tradition to be celebrated. Jay Badams, who was there watching his high-school-aged son, Jack, play for South Strafford, wishes more customs were as congenial.
“It’s so nice to come out here and see people from the community just having fun together and enjoying each other,” said Jay Badams, who is superintendent of the Dresden School District. “You don’t see it a lot in politics, but you can find it here.”
Jared Pendak can be reached at jpendak@vnews.com or 603-727-3225.