Where Have You Gone Uncle Ernie

The following NYTIMES article details the great tradition of NY City baseball. Back in the day (60’s-70’s) all the schools had baseball teams. There were also many local teams that played at the Parade Grounds, Bay 8th st., Kips Bay. Teams, made up of players from within a local area, with names like Ty Cobb, Gravesend, Bonnies, Cadets, Gil Hodges had fierce rivalries that sometimes spilled over beyond the baseball field. (Getting home was sometimes harder than getting a hit). But you survived, did not play soccer or cricket, and baseball was ‘the’ sport.
Those same weekend players, who played on fields of dirt with an occasional patch of grass, filtered back to their respected schools where baseball was still dominant, cricket was still a noisy bug, and uncle Ernie dominated on the same Lafayette mound as Koufax, Franco and a host of others who might have been as good.(AJT)

NYTIMES

SPORTS / BASEBALL October 2, 2006 Hardball Ain’t the Only Game in Brooklyn Anymore By LEE JENKINS and MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT Baseball is not gone from Brooklyn, but the baseball geography of the city has clearly been altered.