Competitionis Fierce and the Yarmulkes Fly Off

spend a steamy Sunday cheering on members of the The Orthodox Bungalow Baseball League with Yarmulkes, a devout collection of rabble-rousers who have spent three decades tearing up the moderately manicured softball diamonds that pock the Catskill Mountains.

Mr. Silber's, team, has earned a reputation as the most maniacal pack of rabbis, high school principals and pen importers in the Borscht Belt.


Despite the league’s name, its game is softball. It has 40 teams playing Sunday mornings in July and August.

On a recent Sunday, Cheim Silber, whose nickname is wolf, was pacing behind the home plate at Monticello High School as one of his more reliable hitters, Mr. Dachs, stepped to the plate his kippah on his head and flexed his muscles.

the score was 2-0 in the bottom of the fifth inning, two were out, and the team was in danger of losing their championship crown to the Irvington Buzz, their traditional rivals.

“Let’s go, Harvey, let’s pick it up!” Mr. Silber yelled to Mr. Dachs, a 56-year-old insurance executive who is often mistaken for Pete Rose.

Mr. Weinstein unleashed one of his wily underhand pitches, a soft thud issued from Mr. Dachs’s bat, and a dispirited sigh rose up from the Team dugout as ball met glove, bringing the inning to an end. “This is a textbook case of everything you’re not supposed to do in a game,” Mr. Silber said during the brief huddle before his men, many of them grandfathers, returned to the field.

He added, “There’s always hope until the last out.”

for the last 30 years the Orthodox league has been providing a healthful escape for thousands of men who might otherwise spend Sundays inside cramped bungalows, their wives threatening them with the prospect of laundry-folding or shopping.

There are six divisions, and the winner in each is rewarded with a classy-looking trophy, and most important, bragging rights during the long off-season months, when the players return to their winter homes, most in Brooklyn, Staten Island or the Five Towns of Long Island.

Among the league’s best-known veterans is Sheldon Silver, The speaker of the State Assembly, whose injuries recently forced him into an early retirement

That such a league still exists might come as a surprise to a certain generation that remembers the Borscht Belt of yore, when a half-million New Yorkers made the seasonal pilgrimage to the hotels and bungalow colonies that peppered the Catskills like so many wrappers after a spirited session of mah-jongg.

Although big-name hotels like Grossinger’s, Brickman’s and the Concord are long gone, more than 200 colonies survive, albeit with Hasidic and Orthodox Jews replacing the largely secular crowd who made the Catskills the nation’s busiest vacationland in the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s.