About Pancho Coimbre Baseball in Central Park

Sixty-seven summers in the North Meadow

Jose Calderon and his wife Candita founded this league in 1959, and it has not stopped since. The league's own claim is that it is one of -- if not the -- longest running independently operated amateur baseball leagues in the United States, and for all intents and purposes the world. It is named for Francisco Luis "Pancho" Coimbre, the Puerto Rican outfielder Roberto Clemente repeatedly told a journalist was the better player, and it says its aim is to bring the positivity, enthusiasm and mentorship Coimbre brought.

It plays April to August, wood bats only, mostly in Central Park with occasional games on Randall's Island and in Red Hook. Rosters run to about twenty-five, and the league says its players come from high school and college ball, from the minor leagues and the major leagues, and from what it calls everyday sandlot monsters.

Almost nothing about a league of that age is recoverable from a website, and this one has written more of it down than any other in this directory. A High Cheese league page keeps the schedule, the standings and every roster at an address the league owns, so the sixty-eighth season is recorded the same way the sixty-seventh was rather than in whatever platform is current that year.