FISHTOWN native A.J. Thomson hunkered down in deep left field and scooped up a fistful of the small, sharp stones that cover the unforgiving playing surface of Shissler Recreation Center's baseball diamond, on Blair Street near Berks.
"This is what my 4-year-old daughter, Julia, plays T-ball on," he said.
"This is the last place in the city of Philadelphia where kids have to play on cinders. We've been trying for years to get the city to turn this into a grass-and-dirt field. We're still trying."
Bob Mulvenna, a fellow Fishtowner whose son, Bobby Jr., 5, also plays T-ball on the cinders, pointed to the raggedy patches of weeds that looked like they'd been randomly spattered all over the outfield by a paintball gun, and laughed.
"You'd better not hold onto those cinders too long, A.J.," he warned Thomson, "or you'll have grass growing out of there."
"That is not grass," Thomson said sadly, staring at the weeds. "That may be grass to us, but that is not grass. I've umpired and refereed for the Rec Department in just about every neighborhood in the city. I don't see any ballfields where kids play on cinders."
He said that back in his dad's day - the 1960s - Fishtowners took pride in the toughness of playing on the cinder field that was, and still is, known in the neighborhood as "Newt's," nicknamed for the Newton Coal Co. trains that used to service the coal yard just beyond the outfield wall.
"When we were kids, we all had our Newt's Tattoos - cinders in the knees," said Mike Bracciale, who played for the Fishtown Athletic Club in the '60s. "You'd go home after a game and your mom would get the tweezers and the peroxide out, and go to work on getting the cinders out of your skin."
But the days are long gone when youth baseball teams from Montgomery and Delaware counties were willing to play Fishtown A.C.
"They've refused to play at Shissler for years because it hurts and it's unsafe," Thomson said. "They've told us they don't consider it a baseball field. And I don't blame them."
Only the city Recreation Department league and the Northeast Peanut League will play baseball at Shissler. Thomson wonders why Fishtown so often gets a sharp stick in the eye in return for its tax dollars.
Last year, Mayor Nutter announced plans to close Fishtown's library and its swimming pool - meccas for neighborhood children. After angry demonstrations, he relented on the library but not on the swimming pool, which is shuttered this summer.
"We keep paying our taxes, but things keep getting taken from us," Thomson said.
Just beyond Shissler's ancient, crumbling, prison-style outfield wall, huge mounds of dirt mark the site of the $44 million Kensington Creative and Performing Arts High School - a state-of-the-art "green" showplace being built next to Fishtown's cinder ballfield.
"Are they just going to leave this abyss here?" Thomson asked. "I heard that they're planning to plant trees around the periphery of the field, where it borders the new high school. That's like putting lipstick on a pig. It boggles my mind."
"We have 760 children who play baseball and soccer on this field," said Dave Dougherty, longtime president of the Fishtown A.C. "You can see where, years ago, the Rec Department spread some dirt on top of the cinders in the infield.
"But the cinders have worked their way up through the dirt, and it's mostly back to cinders again. The outfield was always all cinders and still is.
"We've actually had visiting teams come down here and park on the field, thinking it's a parking lot, and ask us where the field is," Dougherty said.
Decades ago, he said, Fishtowners were proud of the toughness it took to play on cinders. But that's long gone.
"I'm part of the generation that grew up thinking you weren't a Fishtowner unless you had cinders in your leg," Dougherty said. "But Fishtown has changed. It's time for the field to change. They're playing on grass and dirt in Port Richmond, Bridesburg, Fairmount. Our kids need to be playing on grass and dirt, too."
As the setting sun cast its golden glow on the thousands of Shissler Field's dark stones, failing to make them look anything less than dangerous, the lifelong friends, all of them cinderball veterans, commiserated in deep left field, standing well beyond the range of the Fishtown and Bridesburg 11-year-olds playing a city Rec League game.
"They're building this gorgeous new school next door," Dougherty said. "They're pumping millions of dollars into the three-block area around us, and they're going to be left with a big, black, cinder hole in the middle. Does that make sense?
"I'm in this neighborhood and I'm out of this neighborhood," he said, "and all I see everywhere I go is things being constructed and things being planted, and I say to myself, 'How can they say there's no money to fix Shissler ballfield when I see all these people out there doing things all around us?'
"Our kids are playing on stones. The city needs to change that, because this is a city facility. Why can't our kids have a decent field like everybody else has?"
Seventh District City Councilwoman Maria Quinones-Sanchez said that she has set aside $150,000 to improve Shissler Rec, but wants community input as to how best to spend it.
She said that she's heard estimates of $300,000 to $400,000 to replace the ballfield cinders with grass and dirt.
"Recreation facilities like Shissler are near and dear to my heart, and I will do my best to make them whole," she told the Daily News.
"That is a heavily used ballfield, and we need to do right by it. I would not want to put a $40 million school next door and treat the rec center as a stepchild."
A few blocks from Shissler Rec, Jack Moore, 72, president of the Fishtown A.C. Alumni Association, who played on cinders more than 50 years ago and still lives in the neighborhood, agreed.
"I have a T-shirt that goes back about 40 years," he said. "On the front is a picture of one of our players rounding third base. On the back, it says, 'We do it on cinders.'
"That T-shirt went out with high-button shoes, that's how old it is. They never done nothing to that field. The outfield is exactly the same today as it was when I was 14, 15 years old.
"We called it the cinder pit back then. Still is."
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