The two sides of Brooklawn baseball legend, 89

Time softens the hard edges of men and monuments, and 60 summers in the sun have smoothed the rough spots of the old man of Brooklawn American Legion baseball.

Why, it was a good two innings the other day before Joe Barth Sr. had a crusty comment for the umpires, and two innings after that before the 89-year-old founder of one of the East Coast's oldest and most successful independent sports programs took a talented team of teenagers to task.

"Is anybody on this team going to hit?" Barth asked the Brooklawn players, who were uncharacteristically sluggish during the first game of a doubleheader in the blazing heat at Haddon Heights' Eighth Avenue Field.

Barth still seems the same hard baseball man in his seventh decade with a team that has won 25 state titles, 12 regional titles, and two national titles - and has the look of another World Series contender this summer - as he was when he started the program in 1952.

As cantankerous and demanding as ever, Barth has little time for umpires who, in his expert opinion, miss calls behind the plate and on the bases - "Two blind men," he says in curt dismissal - or batters who swing at bad pitches early in the count when his team needs a good, grinding at-bat.

But that rough exterior, weathered and worn by his role in an astounding total of more than 4,000 Brooklawn games, disguises the true nature of the man, according to people close to the program.

"People think he's a grouch but he's not a grouch," said Dick "Ping" Shelton, who played for Barth's first Brooklawn team in 1952 and still regularly attends the team's games at the age of 74. "He cares so much about those kids."

Bob Nannay, a retired professor at the University of South Maine who played for Brooklawn in 1958, said Barth is best known by outsiders for his impatience with sloppy baseball, his competitive instincts, and his gruff manner. But Nannay says that's an incomplete portrait.

"The man is all business on the baseball field," Nannay said. "But inside he's one of the warmest, most loving, most humanistic people you'd ever want to meet."

Barth has built his life around baseball, founding the American Legion team on a little slice of sandlot off Browning Road in Brooklawn that now is known as Joe Barth Sr. Field, and asking generation after generation of players, and parents, to surrender their summers to the sport.

"He used to sit us down before the season," Nannay said. "He'd say, 'If you've got a girlfriend, get rid of her. If you have a car, get rid of it.' "

That's always been the open secret to Brooklawn's success: commitment. The program's play-to-play, day-to-day immersion in the sport builds sound, tenacious teams but leaves little time for anything else.

Barth spent 58 seasons in the dugout, most of them with a cigar jammed in the corner of his mouth. Now he lets his son, Dennis, the highly successful coach at Gloucester Catholic, run the team, while the program's patriarch usually sits in a lawn chair behind the backstop.

But he doesn't miss a pitch or a trick.

"It doesn't matter how old he gets," said Cody Brown, the Brooklawn star pitcher-outfielder who was The Inquirer's South Jersey player of the year this spring at Gloucester Catholic. "He wants you to do things his way. He doesn't sugarcoat it."

Brooklawn, won the 2011 Camden County League title and the state's District 3 title. Brooklawn clinched a berth in the Senior American Legion Mid-Atlantic Regional Baseball Tournament when it beat Washington Township, 16-5, at Moody Park in Ewing Township on Thursday.

Saturday night, Brooklawn won its 25th state championship. Down by 5-2 to Bordentown, Brooklawn exploded for 17 total runs in the sixth and seventh innings to come away with a 19-7 victory.

"It's unbelievable," Brooklawn third baseman Brett Tenuto said of Barth's contribution to the program. "We'll go someplace, and other teams will be looking at him and wishing he was a part of their program because he's like a baseball god."

It has been a family affair for Barth and his wife, Helen, and their five children. It has been a life centered on baseball, and that little field up the corner from their home, and those road trips to Maine and Virginia, to Yakima, Wash., and Bartlesville, Okla., and Rapid City, S.D.

"Every place I've ever been, they've treated us good," Barth said.

There's been remarkable success and magical moments. But there's been heartache, too. Two of Barth's sons, John and Bobby, have died, and the latter's death in an automobile accident in June 2010 was devastating to the family and many people close to the Brooklawn program.

"He was a great coach," Barth said of his son Bobby.

Mario Olsen was a pitcher on the 1991 Brooklawn team that won the national title and was invited along with his teammates to be honored at the 1992 major-league World Series in Atlanta. Olsen said that his mother was gravely ill and that his family couldn't afford to pay her way to Georgia.

"I was playing college ball in Miami, and I didn't think I would see my mom until Christmas," said Olsen, now a middle-school principal in Vineland. "But Mr. Barth paid her way to Atlanta to spend that time with me. It was the most amazing thing anyone has ever done for me.

"I still get chills when I think about seeing her and when I think about what Mr. Barth did for my family."

That was a grand gesture, but there have been thousands of smaller ones over the years. Meals bought. Transportation arranged. Hotel tabs picked up. Equipment supplied. College coaches called and cajoled into finding scholarship money for this player or that.

Sixty summers of baseball. All those games. All those innings. All those pitches.

That's what everybody sees from the other side of the fence, those late rallies and one-run wins, those clutch plays and comeback victories.

But people close to the program swear it's what everybody doesn't see - behind the scenes and beneath Barth's brusque exterior - that has made the man into a monument.

"I used to hitchhike from Runnemede to Brooklawn for practice," Nannay said. "One time I was thinking, 'How did I used to get home?' Then I remembered. Joe Barth drove me home. He always drove me home. But he always made sure he bought me a hot dog and soda first."