The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
Organizers aiming to make Torrington ‘softball crazy’ again
TORRINGTON — Torrington was known as “the softball capitol of the state” in the ’80s, says Torrington Parks and Recreation Department softball coordinator Ken Frizzo on a rare Thursday evening last week when impending thunderstorms weren’t making his scheduling job miserable.
The program had up to 120 softball teams in the ’70s, 80-100 in the ’80s, he said, and games were scheduled seven days a week.
“We were softball crazy and, if you didn’t play on a team, you didn’t have much to say around the water cooler at the office next day,” Frizzo says. “But demographics change.”
And COVID-19 didn’t help.
The Torrington Softball League’s men’s and women’s divisions carried on last year after the state lifted some of its outdoor sports restrictions, but combined team numbers were down to 29 from 39 the year before.
Frizzo, Parks and Recre
ation Superintendent Brett Simmons and their threeperson men’s and women’s player committees helped boost the numbers to 35 this season (21 men’s teams, 14 women’s) by removing non-resident restrictions (previously limited to five non-residents per team) and easing some game-forfeit penalties, but they’d love to raise the numbers higher.
“Our job is to make the game more enjoyable for the players,” said Frizzo, whose committees helped urge field improvements in the early 2000’s that making the Toro and Joe Ruwet complexes “as good or better than anyone’s in the state.”
And despite the drop from last century’s huge numbers, a visit to both sites last Thursday evening presented the snapshot impression their efforts are paying off.
Don’t tell the sweating, hollering and smiling players on the Sawyer’s Girls and Torrington Downtown Partners/USA Hauling teams at Ruwet or Benchwarmers 2.0 and Alfedo’s and Jimmy’s Meatballers at Toro they’re not still softball crazy.
At Ruwet, with cars lining the roadway approach to a full parking lot, Sawyer’s Stephanie Maxwell scores on a hit by former Torrington High School player Abby Fisher; another Sawyer’s player, Marissa Morris, was legendary Raider pitcher Sydney Matzko’s catcher at Torrington, moving on to UConn, then graduate school to become a special education teacher in Seymour. She now coaches the U14 CT Titans based in Terryville.
Danielle Doray, a current player at Wamogo High School (the women’s league welcomes players from age 14 up; the men’s league, 16 up), suits up in her catcher’s gear, adding extra warmth in the heat.
“It’s worth it,” she smiles. At Toro, an excited bunch of guys shares the sentiment in one of two games being played simultaneously on the fields as they wrap up a win for the Benchwarmers with a triple by Andy Low and a home run from Ed Collins (only five homers are allowed in men’s and women’s per team; after that, it’s an out).
Benchwarmer pitcher Pat Morris lobbies for a photo slot on the newspaper front page in his Darth Vader look on the mound with mask and helmet obscuring all trace of his face.
“They’ll know who it is,” he laughs.
On the sideline, player/ scorekeeper Parker Malargno says the Benchwarmers, last year’s C Division champions, now automatically moved up to B Division, had to wait a week for their finals game last summer when one of the Benchwarmers was exposed to Covid.
Further back, Ashley Crance holds her 11-monthold baby with a toddler playing at her heels. They’re here to support Dad, Nelson, in his first year with the Benchwarmers. Ashley plays with her own team in a Friday game in the women’s league, weather permitting.
“I had to take a year off for the baby, but I’ve been playing for two years,” says Crance, who met Nelson while both of them served in the Marine Corps.
Back home, league coordinator Frizzo pores over the scheduling spreadsheet he installed for the league website in the early 2000’s.
In a combined schedule of six games a night, starting at 6:15 p.m. five days a week, “the software lines everything up correctly and produces scheduling packages for the men and women,” he says. “Then, when we have rainouts, like we have so often this summer, the best made schedule turns into a mess.”
Nevertheless, for Frizzo, like Danielle Doray at Ruwet Park in her catcher’s gear, it’s clearly worth it.
Call him softball crazy.