FAST TIMES, SLOW-PITCHES: An Oral History of Professional Slow-Pitch Softball
In the late 1970’s a Columbus, Ohio promoter named Bill Byrne saw an opportunity. Byrne, who had previously been involved with the upstart World Football League, noticed that an old picnic game, born in the parks of Chicago, was exploding in popularity. He witnessed the amateur leagues play for crowds in the thousands and tournament purses reach sums of $10,000, and decided to take men’s slow-pitch softball professional.
You read that right. In 1977 a sport most of us associate with beer bellies and family reunions was organized into a professional league, boasting iconic sports names like Whitey Ford, Norm Cash, Joe Pepitone, Mike Ilitch and Ted Stepien. It would be a wild, short, and tumultuous ride. The following is the story of the ephemeral league, told by the people who lived it.
THE SET UP
Peter “Pudge” Narrai entered the league from its inception, first as part of the Milwaukee Copper-Hearth front office and then head of the league umpiring crews.
“I’ll explain to you why this is such… coulda been the greatest thing going… and I don’t really care who I insult… I’m 76 and I’m still mad at what they did.”
“For a while they had it going… in Detroit they had ten thousand people and we had the six, seven thousand here. This was big money back in ’77.”
Robert Brown began as an assistant to Detroit Caesars owner, Mike Ilitch, and would eventually become a league executive.
“Actually, he (Mike Ilitch) was the last franchise in the league. He had been, I think, approached. So had Jim Snyder, because they were the two top (amateur) teams in Detroit. I think what Bill (Byrne) was really looking for more than owners were locations. “
“He (Byrne) approached different people in different cities. He was looking at having three divisions, start out with twelve teams. He had a team in New York, a team in New Jersey, in Trenton. He had the two there. Then, you move a little further west and you’ve got Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnati, Louisville. Then, you’ve got Detroit, Milwaukee, Minnesota, Chicago.”
“He (Mike) had been approached like maybe the year before, about this new league. He wanted to make sure it was well organized, that they really had something stable. Mike was the last team in the league and he’s the one who got moving and really the best operation. “
Meanwhile in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, a small time bar owner was also making the jump from amateur to the new pro league. John Korinek Jr. helped run his family bar, The Copper-Hearth, as well as its softball team.
“We played in the ‘Big Eight’. That was the big league here in the city. We played in the regionals here… I met Ilitch down in Parma, Ohio when we were playing in the (amateur) world tournament in ’65 or ’66. That’s when I first met Mike. He’s the one that called me to get me into pro-softball. He said, ‘Yeah, we got this pro-softball league going with Bill Byrne.”
BILL BYRNE
In 1977, the 41-year-old sports promoter was moving on from his position with the Shreveport Steamers of the now defunct World Football League and noticed the popularity of the amateur slow-pitch softball leagues.
PN — “I’ll give Byrne credit, Byrne was a smart businessman. Put it this way, Steinbrenner, right? Cuban, all those guys that are the biggest rats. Jerry Jones in Dallas. What is their M.O.? They’re all rats, but they’re all millionaires and geniuses.”
JK- “I didn’t really care for him… I thought that the guy was just a hustler. But he had a good idea, he tried something and had he put his efforts towards really putting the money into the league and trying to get it going. The American Professional Slow-Pitch League. APSPL was the handle for the first league that was started under Byrne.”
RB- “On the one hand, they had a real professional league office in Columbus. He had a staff. Bill was in charge. Then, he had a PR person. He had an attorney. He had marketing people. He really did have the semblance of an organization. “
PN- “What he was, was a smart con-man.”
JK- “At the time the franchise (buy-in) was for like $25,000 and that gave you the rights to your area.”
RB- “One of the things that really enticed Mike (Ilitch) to get involved was that he said that the winner, the champion team would get $50,000, which was a good amount of money at that time. If you’re putting out these expenses and so on, $50,000 was in addition to your gate receipts and your concessions and advertising and things like that. It was a good way of recouping this.”
Ilitch’s Detroit Caesars carved out the best record in the league that inaugural season, and then pushed through the playoffs to the first ever APSPL World Series against an overmatched Baltimore Monuments.
RB — “We beat them four straight. We beat them twice in Detroit, flew to Baltimore the next day and beat them again two straight and that swept the series. That’s when they found out that some of this was (built) on sand. For example, they had a team in Columbus. Guess who ran that team? Bill Byrne in that league office because they really didn’t have an owner. They became the owner and they were running it out of league funds. Really, they had some problems. The end of the year, that money ($50,000) wasn’t available.”
JK — “…Unfortunately all the money went to administrative fees and vacationing for the group. I just never took to the guy. In fact, I wanted to go after him after the first year because, you know… his whole crew that started the league, they took off and went to some island and enjoyed themselves and vacationed after he put this thing together. And then we ended up breaking off from him after that. In fact I told Mike, I said, ‘I want to go after…’ Mike said, ‘No, let’s keep things cool, let’s try to keep the league together, and blah blah blah.”
RB — “Then, Bill resigned with his organization or the owners voted him out.”
PN- “He was a crook.”
THE ILITCH VISION
JK- “Mike mentioned his dreams of buying the Detroit Tigers someday and that he was franchising his pizza joint and that’s how I got to know Mike. He’s a really interesting guy. “
Mike Ilitch was a lifelong sports fan and had his eye on professional ownership since his pizza chain, Little Caesars, began to flourish in the 1960’s.
RB- “He had also been a minority owner of the Detroit Wheels of the World Football League. They only played actually one year in 1973. That was his first venture into pro sports but it was on a much more minor level. Mike had an amateur team… the Little Caesars. We’re getting ready for the season. Then, Mike decided, I think it was probably, I think, yeah, it was probably April… “I’m going to do this. I’m going to make this a pro team.”
By April 1977 Mike Ilitch had his first professional sports franchise. However simply existing wasn’t going to be enough for the pizza magnet. He also wanted to win and would be creative in his efforts.
RB- “Mike was such a marketing guy. At that time, it was 1977, the last Detroit team that had won a championship were the Detroit Tigers, 1968. They were really beloved team. He went ahead and signed (former Tigers) Jim Northrup and Norm Cash.”
He also recruited from the best of the amateur ranks.
RB- “The team that had won the national championship in the ASA the year before was a team called Warren Motors out of Jacksonville, Florida. They had a guy named Mike Nye, who was a left center fielder, who was 5'10”. He was a former minor leaguer in the Chicago Cubs (organization). The guy was fast as can be. Left-handed, very flashy player. Then, Ronnie Ford was the shortstop. They were the co-Most Valuable Players of the ASA from Warren Motors. They were 94 and two the year before.”
So, while the league’s inaugural season had seen its front office collapse, Ilitch wasn’t willing to fold with them.
RB- “He definitely saw potential. He went to Louisville and he saw the crowds there and he saw the crowds in Milwaukee. He saw what he did in Detroit.”
PN- “I was in the meeting when Ilitch decided to do what would’ve worked. He was gonna bankroll everybody with five diamond complexes…so they could have made money all year round. At that time it would’ve cost, maybe two, three million.”
RB- “Facilities were everything to him, giving the image. ‘We need to have bigger fields. We need to have pro-type fields.’ He wanted to build a stadium. He had architects lay out a Caesar Stadium. If every owner was willing to commit to that, he would have helped finance them. He wasn’t going to pay for it but he would loan them money to at least begin because he felt there had to be some standardization. You can’t have one guy playing in a pasture, one guy playing in his back yard, and one guy playing in a 10,000 seat stadium.”
JK- “He said we got to have our own park so we could sell, so we could do this and that, and it was a great idea. He could afford to do it, (Kentucky Bourbons owner) Larry Gatti could afford to do it, there were a lot of teams that could afford it, but there was also probably a better portion of the guys that were in the league that couldn’t afford to have their own ballpark and everything.”
The other, often less wealthy owners, didn’t receive Ilitch’s vision and they decided to look elsewhere for league stewardship.
PN- “I was at some of the meetings, they were actually fighting.”
RB- “Being the kind of guy (Ilitch) was, he obviously was disappointed but he said, ‘You know what? I’m going to really put in an effort to try to make this thing go.’ Because he… saw the potential. The owners of the other teams were very aloof. These guys just really didn’t have the same vision he had.”
“It was decided that Don (Rardin) would be the president of the league. They didn’t want to do what they did before. They didn’t want an owner running (the league), so Don wound up selling his half of the Cleveland team to Ted Stepien.“
JK- “…(Stepien) and Mike just didn’t hit it off. “
APSPL 2.0
In 1978 Ted Stepien was a middle-aged advertising executive who had built a multi-million dollar company and had dreams of professional sports ownership when he bought the Cleveland Jaybirds franchise, and promptly changed the name to Stepien’s Competitors. .
RB- “Ted also had an ego and he took over. When I first met Ted, I met him at an owners meeting. Then, the next time I saw him, he’s standing behind the bench of his team wearing a three-piece suit and passing notes to the manager about who to play. Ted was a little different.”
However, even with new ownership the financial chasm dividing franchises remained. With that, player wages varied wildly.
JK- “(I) had money put away, but in the first year I went through a good portion of what I had saved.”
Derek Gallagher spent all six pro seasons as an infielder with the Milwaukee Copper-Hearth/Schlitz.
“We were playing against a lot of great players and a lot of those guys were getting a lot more money than we got. “
“We heard that some of the other guys from Detroit or Louisville were getting paid anywhere from five to fifteen to twenty thousand dollars to play during the summer, which was considerably higher than we got in Milwaukee. “
JK- “Well, you know, people thought, ‘Oh, this is great. You got Mike Ilitch, you got this.’ They didn’t know that they had John Korinek, and a lot of guys that owned franchises that were just barely getting by on the skin of their teeth. And these (players) thought, ‘Oh, this is great.’ Because you got Mike Ilitch paying thirty thousand dollars a player. And everybody’s got money, right?”
Beyond player salaries, travel and accommodations varied from team to team.
RB — “(Ilitch) wanted to be the best pizza chain. He wanted to have the best teams. That was the way he was his whole life. He would spend whatever it took. “
“We had a charter flight. We flew out of Detroit City Airport, which is a smaller airport. He (Ilitch) actually chartered a plane for every time we went (on the road). Smaller plane. “
DG- “Our sponsor was a bar, and it wasn’t a mammoth bar. “
“A lot of times we would get five cars and stick three or four guys in a car and then drive our own cars. But eventually our owner bought a school bus and had it painted white and we used to call it the white whale. We would put plywood … on top of the benches in the bus so that we could sleep on it. Guys would bring a little air mattress or something and stick it on there and we would sleep on that. “
“I do remember… where we had to go through toll roads in Chicago. We couldn’t stop the bus because we didn’t have first gear and we couldn’t take off in second orthird. So we had to put it in neutral and coast through, and some guy would run out, throw the money in there and the gate would fly up, and here our bus would come and we’d put it in second gear and away it would go. So that was funny, and embarrassing… and embarrassing.”
Despite economic issues the league was gaining in popularity. Places like Detroit, Louisville and Milwaukee were filling bleachers by the thousands and Robert Brown was looking to capitalize on the momentum.
RB- “In 1979, I’m sitting in the office and somebody calls me, says, ‘You know, there’s a new all-sports cable channel that they’re talking about starting.’ Oh, really? Okay. Well, let me go and do some research. I go down and I see an article in Sporting News about this thing called ESPN. I pick up the phone. I call and I say, ‘I’m the American Professional Slow Pitch League.’’
‘Really?’
‘Da, da, da’ and, ‘Would you be interested?’
“One thing leads to another. We sign a contract with ESPN. That was huge and actually that was the first live sporting event on ESPN… the pro softball world series.“
“They came on the air with George Grande Sports Center at 7:30, or something, on September 7th. There we are. ‘We go to Lanan, Wisconsin for the American Professional Slow Pitch League Softball World Series of the Milwaukee Schlitz and the Kentucky Bourbons’… That was a big deal.”
THE FOAM IS RISING
After the 1977 season John Korinek decided to pursue outside sponsorship for his team. Through a family connection he was able to make a deal with Schlitz Brewery- the iconic Milwaukee brand.
JK- “(They asked about) changing the name of the team from Copper-Hearth to Schlitz, and at the time, hell, I had already gone through a lot of money myself and I didn’t have the money to begin with. I was trying to keep this thing afloat and I told him, ‘Yeah, heck yes, I’d be more than willing.”
“…It was kind of a balloon payment of a three year contract that I had… They would give us money for uniforms… We went over there to Schlitz’ Brown Bottle (pub). We had a party. They were real nice to us, they were really good, but we didn’t get a lot of money from them. You get like 25 or 30 thousand a year… and then the third year was a big balloon payment. It was a couple hundred thousand dollars.”
The sponsorship would pay off, as Korinek’s team would win the APSPL World Series in 1979.
STEPIEN RULE
After the ’79 season Mike Ilitch had become disenchanted with professional softball. The league had not made a significant leap in stature and, after a road visit to a less than stellar facility, he decided to discontinue the team.
RB- “Mike just said, ‘Enough of it. I’m done.’ His ambitions and his view and his vision are not to go play in a guy’s backyard.”
JK- “I flew up to Detroit with Mike Ilitch and with Ted Stepien to try to hold the league together. We met at the airport up there and just couldn’t keep it together.”
“Mike wanted out because Mike wasn’t making money in the league anymore. It wasn’t a winner for him. He had a lot of other things going and I don’t blame him.”
Then, prior to the 1980 season, Ted Stepien decided to break off from the APSPL and form his own professional league. Korinek’s Milwaukee Schlitz team would join him in the North American Softball League (NASL). Robert Brown would join league office.
RB- “He came to me, said, ‘Look, I want to start a league, my own league. You know, I’d like you to run it. You know, I mean, I’m going to bankroll but you run the day-to-day stuff.”
JK- “I went over to that league and we played there. He… had a big press conference down here with us in Milwaukee.”
RB- “That was a big thing, having Milwaukee. Then, he took some of the better players in Louisville and he put them on a team. They went, played for his team in Lexington. He took some of the better players from the Pittsburgh team. He took some players from the Cincinnati team… It really weakened both leagues.”
“He thought he could get some more ownership but it turned out he really bankrolled six of the eight teams.”
Stepien needed to find management for his franchises and began to fill out the front offices.
RB- “He did not really want people around him who were going to say, ‘You’re not doing it the right way.’ He probably didn’t have the most expertise around him. “
“He got to know Joe Pepitone, (who) played in ’78 for the New Jersey team. Joe was a good player. I mean, Joe, of all the ex-major leaguers who played, he… was probably the best. He could hit. He was still in good shape.”
Former major leaguer and notorious party animal, Joe Pepitone, joined the Stepien enterprise.
RB- “First he worked as an account exec in his (Stepien’s) Nationwide Advertising office and then putting together a team in Chicago. Joe liked to schmooze but Joe really wasn’t the best worker so eventually and it was kind of disruption there because Ted had a business to run. “
PN- Let me tell you a funny story how naïve we are. By that time him (Robert Brown) and I are best friends… we go there, to the athletic club, we play basketball. Joe is there. All of the sudden, Joe says, ‘I gotta go get some coke.’ We think, ‘Ok, no problem.’ Son of a bitch! We think he was going for a Coca-Cola, he’s going for coke!”
RB- “We’re thinking, ‘There’s a machine right there…”
Eventually Pepitone was given the reigns of the Chicago franchise.
RB- “(Stepien) just tells him, ‘All right, you run the softball.’ They really did put a good team together, the softball team out of Chicago.”
Stepien’s flashy corporate style was also evident in his marketing approach. One stunt stands out in particular. To promote the league in Cleveland, Stepien decided to drop a softball from the top of Cleveland’s tallest building, Terminal Tower.
RB- “It’s in the square. It’s, I don’t know, an 80-story building or something (52 story). It’s like a landmark in Cleveland. Somebody had, back in the 40s or maybe the 50s, somebody did that. It was a promotion for the Cleveland Indians, a guy named Ken Keltner… caught the ball.“
“Ted’s, ‘Oh! What a great idea to promote my softball team. I’ll recreate this.’
“He had a couple of his players down but I don’t know if they took into account, when you drop a ball… there’s wind factors. You don’t exactly know where it is. You don’t have a guiding system. It’s not like a rocket that’s going to take you exactly where you want to go… He broke a couple windshields… One woman got hit in the arm, broke her arm. “
PN — “That cost him money! What… (fifty) stories? You know how fast a softball drops…? Might as well have dropped a bowling ball.”
RB- “Eventually, one of his players caught it. He was an outlandish guy.”
PIZZA OR BEER
Meanwhile John Korinek Jr. got an offer from his old rival Mike Ilitch.
JK- “He had called me up and flew me up there (Detroit) and we sat down. Like I said, it wasn’t that he was chasing me for anything, was giving me an opportunity. He wasn’t chasing me to get involved with him or anything, he wanted me to work for him at the time.”
Ilitch was expanding his Little Caesars pizza empire yet again, and offered Korinek his own Milwaukee area franchises. It would have set up Korinek with a reliable, corporate backed business and financial stability for life. Korinek turned him down.
JK- “At the time I had the bar going, I had my bar going. Also had a contract with Schlitz Brewing Company. Schlitz Brewing Company had, it was kind of a balloon payment of a three year contract that I had coming and I had to try to keep this softball thing afloat…”
What Korinek didn’t know was that Schlitz Brewing Company- the beer that made Milwaukee famous- had been declining in sales for years, and by 1981 was in the process of being bought out by, somewhat ironically, a competitor out of Detroit.
JK- “…and then what happened was Stroh’s Brewing Company bought them, and the contract went defunct.”
Korinek was left with no balloon payment, no sponsor, and no pizza franchises. Beyond that, the survival of professional softball itself was in jeopardy.
A LITTLE BITTER
During the 1980 season Ted Stepien gained controlling interest in the Cleveland Cavaliers and realized his dream of NBA ownership. With this, his focus was removed from NASL and his interest in continuing with the league gone.
PN- “I’ll explain it this way. .. guy sees you in the store. He don’t like you, ‘I don’t like Italians’. Pulls out the gun, shoots you, you’re dead. Ok. I understand that he’s a flat-out evil guy. Then there’s Ted. Come in, ‘Look what my wife bought me for Christmas! A brand new gun’. Flips it around, goes off, shoots you. You’re still fucking dead. That’s Ted Stepien. He’d never do it on purpose, but you’re still fucking dead.”
JK- “(W)e wanted Robert Brown to run the league, and in order to hold it together the last year, but we couldn’t keep the league together with the amount of money to pay the administrative fees. So we ran it out of my office.”
The new league would be called the Untied Professional Softball League (UPSL) and would last only two more seasons, until 1982.
RB- “Then, the league fell apart. The guy from Philadelphia said, ‘I’m not coming back.’ Louisville had done very well with attendance. They were on the front page of the Louisville Courier-Journal… but as soon as they got a minor league baseball team… they just stopped drawing fans. He decided he wasn’t going to be in and then it just got to the point where it just kind of died.”
JK- “…we just couldn’t hold it together… we couldn’t keep it going, ’cause it was too much to fund. “
DG- “And it’s just a darn shame that these millionaires couldn’t work it out together, because it would have been a great thing.”
PN- “If you got guys like this, that can’t see across this fucking table, and you’re trying to start something big, where do you think you’re gonna go?”
“As you see, I’m a little bitter.”
EPILOGUE
In 1982 Mike Ilitch would purchase the NHL’s Detroit Red-Wings and turn them into a perennial Stanley Cup contender. Ten years later, he realized his dream of owning his hometown Detroit Tigers. Ilitch passed away in 2017, but his legacy lives on in Detroit today.
Ted Stepien would continue his controversial ownership of the Cavaliers until 1983, after having the dubious distinction of having an NBA rule named for him. “The Stepien Rule” restricts how NBA teams trade draft picks. He’d go on to own other professional basketball teams as well as another short-lived league. Ted Stepien passed away in 2007.
In the late 1980’s, John Korinek’s family sold the old Copper-Hearth. He would own and run several bars in the coming years, but never achieve the success or staying power of the old tavern.
JK- “I suppose I would have done the same thing if the chance arose again and I’d have got a guy like Mike call me up because I just always felt that Mike had the golden touch. He was just a classy guy. I liked him as a person. Not only as a businessman, but as a person. He was just a class act. He really was and I liked him a lot. I thought that we could pull that thing across. You ask me would I do that again, I probably would have. I probably would’ve given it a shot again. “
John Korinek Jr. continues to live in Milwaukee, working as a bartender at a Mexican restaurant. He hopes to retire in a few years.
