It’s been 44 years since Willi Blumer last missed a softball season. He would be damned if this year was the first — even if he was too injured to actually play.
So when his longtime team, cheekily called Consenting Adults, gathered on a Central Park ball field last month, the 83-year-old pitcher settled onto the bench beside the people with whom he’s spent a lifetime of hits and runs.
Then, as he has for decades, he followed them to the bar.
“That felt great,” Blumer told The Post of being back after recovering from surgery. There was never any doubt, he said, that he would make it back onto the field — even if he had to crawl there.
That kind of devotion has held this ragtag co-ed crew together since 1982, when some of its members were in their late 20s or early 30s. That’s long enough to make Consenting Adults the oldest probable softball team in New York City.
Blumer, Ed Campbell, 77, and Greg Czuchlewski, 71, have been there since the very first season, and many teammates have been coming since the 1990s and early 2000s. Along the way, the roster has weathered personal triumphs, health battles, and losses, but the game has never stopped.
“Based on my records, the team has played 448 games starting in 1982. Projecting the 4 years I’m missing takes us to almost 500!” said Czuchlewski, the team’s devoted statistician, who counts more than 135 people who’ve played at least one game.
Endless summer
For Czuchlewski, softball has always meant youth. As a teenager in Queens, he and the neighborhood kids would play in the park from morning until after dinner.
“That was just like the heaven of having no responsibilities — it was still before people were getting jobs,” he said.
In 1982, a friend in the magazine world pulled him onto a new team started by Scottish-born travel writer Robin McMillan, who borrowed its name from a racy marquee he’d passed in Times Square.
Campbell, a psychologist, signed on that same year and claimed center field. Money was tight, and the first shirts were cheap leftovers originally printed for an exterminator. They had a bug spray can printed on them.
Back then, the team was young and fast. They didn’t imagine they’d still be playing 44 years later.
Like a Hulu sports drama, the scrappy team even had a big rival in their early years — the Boat Basin Bombers. Beating them was the highlight of every season — and became the one time Campbell finally had his hero moment and blasted a ball right over the Central Park fence.
“That was the only game that I ever hit a grand slam,” he said. It was a triumph, even if the game wasn’t.
“We lost 10-9 in seven innings,” he sighed. “The fame and success was very fleeting.”
Into the trees
The team’s endurance is even more remarkable when you consider that Consenting Adults have never been able to score an official practice or game space.
Central Park permits are tough to get, so for 44 years, they’ve hopscotched from one patch of lawn to another. Today they play on a meadow near the Great Hill, where tree trunks and slopes are part of the field.
“We are definitely the only rogue team that’s ever played 40-odd years without a field in Central Park,” Campbell said.
There are no umpires, and teams call their own plays. When a player’s little kid wanted a turn at bat, the pitcher would soften the throw so the child could connect. But even adults have some leeway.
“You don’t have to hit well, said Campbell. “You just have to know how to get the ball into the trees.”
More than a team
The real reward has always come after the last out, around a long table at the Dive Bar on 96th Street, the team’s longtime sponsor.
“Ed’s slogan is that we’re a drinking team with a softball problem,” Czuchlewski joked.
Over the years, that table became a lifeline. Back when everyone was broke, the whole team would rent a truck and haul a teammate’s belongings to a new apartment. Players have toasted one another at weddings and propped each other up through breakups.
“We’ve had three weddings and two divorces. So we’re one up so far,” Campbell quipped.
Michael Titowsky, 70, who joined in 2008 after meeting Campbell at a youth soccer referee class, says the bar talk drifts from batting slumps to roommate battles to family news.
“We do try to support each other as much as we can,” he said.
Terence Hanrahan, 67, who joined in 2007, added that the get-togethers have become a gift.
“It’s a privilege to have two hours free on a Wednesday night to do something that gets you exercise, that you have fun with, you laugh, and you get to go out and drink beer,” he said.
The empty seats
Not everyone made it this far. Campbell counts seven former teammates who have died since the team began.
“By the time you are 77 years old, you’ve lost a lot of people you love. We carry on the memory of them by showing up and playing every year.”
When a longtime teammate lost her husband several years ago, a large group from the team filled the memorial service to stand beside her. And after the pandemic wiped out two seasons, Hanrahan emailed the roster to restart play, only to hear back from one regular’s wife that her husband had died that winter.
And the remaining originals admit that time is the one opponent they can’t beat.
For instance, Blumer was still pitching at 82 before his health caught up with him.
“You say I’m going to do this forever when you’re fine,” he said. “And then you’re not fine.”
Campbell has missed three seasons to two hip replacements and cancer surgery, and he’s itching to get back on the mound.
“I feel healthy and strong enough that I fully expect to be back pitching next year,” he said.
Not done yet
These days, a crop of thirtysomethings plays shoulder-to-shoulder with the veterans. Some were recruited on the spot. Hanrahan once spotted a big guy circling the Great Hill running track.
“I said, ‘Hey buddy, would you really rather run ten more laps or would you like to take a glove and get out here on the field and take a swing at the bat?’ He’s a regular guy on our team now,” Hanrahan said.
Carol Baird, 69, the team’s catcher, was the only regular woman when she arrived 15 years ago. Now a good chunk of the roster is female.
“This is my team and these are my friends,” she said. “It’s a great thing to find in New York that you can still keep playing softball at any age.”
“I have no plans to stop,” added Czuchlewski. “It keeps me young, really.”
When teammates get hurt, Czuchlewski has a simple request: Come to the bar anyway.
“Drag yourself to the bar, show up afterwards, because that’s really what it’s about,” he said.