Daddy ball

It started the way most dad-on-dad youth-sports rivalries do. But on the Long Island Inferno, two fathers, both with complicated pasts, took it all too far. There were claims of stalking, corrupt cops, and mob connections. Neither man was ever the same.

- DAVID GAUVEY HERBERT

DADS BRING THEIR SONS TO BASEBALL HEAVEN SO THEY CAN FEEL like pros. The facility, situated on an industrial lot off the Long Island Expressway, has recessed dugouts, proper bullpens, and stadium lights. On weekends, the lot fills with so many cars that minivans must illegally park on the roadway verge. Cleats click-clack on pavement, and cooler wheels groan. Fathers jockey for position to record their sons’ swings and fixate on pitch velocity, murmuring the incantation “What’s he at? What’s he at?” Between games, boys wander the park with Gatorade-stained lips and gnash on Big League Chew. Inside the café,televisions simulcast play on all seven fields. The turf is artificial, which means the grass at Baseball Heaven is always green.

Every father finds his own way to this Eden, and for Bobby Sanfilippo, it all started at a batting cage on an autumn day in 2008. Sanfilippo and his seven-year-old son were taking practice swings when a skinny man in a windbreaker marveled at the boy’s bat speed. He handed Sanfilippo a business card. How would his son like to try out for a travel baseball team called the Inferno? It would be expensive at $1,200 a season and require an aggressive schedule of forty-odd games a year, some of them at Baseball Heaven. It was a far cry from the dozen or so Little League games they were playing at the time. But Sanfilippo’s son—who loved baseball so much his bedroom had a custom Yankee Stadium fresco—was thrilled at the prospect.