The Timeless Boyhood of a Baseball Lifer

On a rutty baseball diamond in Wake Forest, where the players on the field come close to outnumbering the diehards in the bleachers, the measure of a man, even an older man like Kenny Glanville, is not his age or color or even whether he’s any good at the game.

There might be some curiosity about the number of seasons’ worth of dirt caked in his spikes. Which presidential era the grass stain is from. If that one guy’s knee always bent like that or if it’s a newer development.

But what really counts on weekend afternoons on fields seeded and raked with much younger folks in mind is who shows up, who laughs at the dumb stuff, who can put the rest of the world aside for a couple hours, and who’s not quite ready to leave his childhood behind. Maybe that won’t win a lot of adult league baseball games, but it will stir up a good friendship or two. 

A man who can hit what passes for a fastball and cover some ground in center field is welcome, but also almost beside the point.

Kenny Glanville is 61 years old. He is assistant tennis director for the City of Raleigh (and also plays that sport). He helped to raise a major league baseball player once, a very long time ago.

He is known to ward off slumps and late-game deficits by waving an action toy of Batman riding a motorcycle, which tends to discourage questions as to why a 61-year-old man still spends so much time playing baseball and coordinating his schedule between three adult leagues. Because there’s nowhere he’d rather be than in the outfield for the Swamp Donkeys, unless that is in the outfield for the Pittsboro Gray Marlins, or else in the outfield for the Central North Carolina Cobras.

It’s a love so deep he hardly noticed that across more than five decades playing baseball in formal leagues and wherever a couple dozen ballplayers might draw up sides, the game gradually came to look less and less like Kenny Glanville, a Black man.

“I think I got a little numb to it,” he said one recent afternoon in Raleigh, days before Major League Baseball would open its 2024 season. “It’s not ignorance. It’s just going to be what it is.”

Baseball’s Changing Face

On opening day this season, U.S.-born Black players comprised 6 percent of major league rosters (57 of 950), down from 6.2 percent the season before, 7.2 percent the season before that, and from more than 18 percent three decades ago.

In the fall of 2022, MLB played its first World Series since 1950 in which the rosters of neither team—the Houston Astros and Philadelphia Phillies—fielded an African-American player. In 2024, there are two Black managers, out of 30 teams, both of them in Los Angeles. (At the same time, Latino representation in the major leagues has increased to nearly one-third of current rosters; many of these Latino players are from the Dominican Republic and are Black.)

This is not Glanville’s burden. Current trends beneath the major leagues suggest an increase in U.S.-born Black players at the game’s upper levels could be coming. Ten of the first 50 players selected in the 2023 professional draft are African-American, as are 13 of the top 100 prospects for the 2024 draft.

Among those signs, the Sports & Fitness Industry Association in March reported that 16.7 million Americans played baseball in 2023, the highest recorded total since the organization began its surveys in 2008. Tom Cove, the association’s CEO, said a fuller analysis of its polling—who and what accounts for the growth, and from where—would be available in the fall. 

He also surmised the uptick would at least partially reflect MLB’s recent initiatives to make the game more accessible through grassroots programs and the establishment of 11 domestic urban youth academies from Compton, California to Washington, D.C.

“I can’t automatically guarantee that,” Cove said of a participation spike among U.S. minorities and in underprivileged communities. “But I’d say it’s a good bet.” He said, “There’s a lot more effort in creating avenues for baseball in, say, inner cities than there was. We took it for granted for way too long.”

Tony Reagins, chief baseball development officer for MLB, has overseen much of the growth in the areas where the game was losing ground.

“There are so many opportunities for kids to do the wrong thing,” he said. “Then you tell me there’s a spot where your whole life can change? And you can change your community? That’s real life.”

When he was a boy in the 1970s, Patrick Wilson played for a Little League team sponsored by Pudgie’s, a pizza joint near Williamsport, Pennsylvania. He continued to love the game, never forgot the pizza and, in 2020, became chief operating officer of Little League International.

Under Wilson’s direction, Little League recently reemphasized its philanthropic and social impact initiatives, which include reducing or removing league fees that might inhibit participation. In North Carolina, Little League funds four urban initiative leagues—two in Charlotte and two in Winston-Salem.

“We’ll never be satisfied,” Wilson said. “We’re focused on access for all of our kids. But when you have kids in underserved communities, where the cost of equipment, the access to the field down the street, is a challenge, and even registration fees, it does impact their ability to participate. 

“And so we’re trying to knock down those barriers as much as possible. At the same time, those barriers exist at its core. That’s what we’re trying to work against and then work toward providing that additional access.”

Engine, Engine Number 9

No one ever had to ask twice to get Glanville to play. Not in his youth, when his favorite team—the New York Mets—featured the Black stars Cleon Jones, Tommy Agee, Donn Clendenon, and Ed Charles. 

Not when he could look across the National League East standings and see the Pittsburgh Pirates starting nine Black or Latino players at times, and regularly starting five or six. Not when he was still in his own baseball prime, when his Mets ruled the National League with players such as Dwight Gooden, Darryl Strawberry, and Mookie Wilson. 

And not today, on a warm Sunday afternoon at Heritage High School, opening day for the Wake Forest Swamp Donkeys (and the day before Jackie Robinson Day in the major leagues). The league is for players aged 30 and over. Kenny wears No. 9—“I’ve been Engine, Engine Number 9 since I was 10,” he says, in right field, batting seventh. 

He arrives a few minutes later than his younger teammates, changes into his uniform in the dugout, then drops a surgical bunt hit on the third-base line in his first at-bat. 

He is the Swamp Donkeys’ lone Black player. In the other dugout, the Copperheads also have one Black player.

“How you feeling, old man?” one of his teammates shouts.

“I’m good,” Glanville says. “I’m really good.”

At 5-foot-9 and a switch-hitter, Glanville built his game around speed and contact, intuition and hustle, the undersized man’s way onto a lineup card. When he was 13 and for the first time playing on a regulation-sized field, he opened a notebook and began recording his own statistics. In April, he began a 49th entry: “2024 Baseball,” his entire career in a stack of notebooks that document every at-bat, hit, walk, strikeout, and stolen base.

In 1996, during a game at Durham Athletic Park, Glanville stole second base, then ripped the bag from the infield and held it over his head. His teammates were bewildered. Between innings, he explained the stolen base was the 500th of his career, counting his first in his New Jersey town 20-some years before, according to his notebooks. They joined the celebration. He’s well over 1,000 now (the exact number awaits Glanville’s tabulation).

“I’m trying to get Rickey,” he said with a laugh, that being Rickey Henderson, whose 1,406 steals are the major league record.

“That’s Kenny,” said Carlos Mata, a teammate for the past 11 seasons. “And that’s why I love him.”

A few years back, Glanville was married for a second time. Wanting to get this one exactly right, he recited his vows while in full Batman get-up, “including the boots,” recalled one guest, which struck no one who knew Glanville as strange at all. Certainly not his bride, Lisa, who was dressed as Wonder Woman.

Given half a century, the game changes. Relationships with it change. The defects in the game and the limitations of those who play it are forgiven, if not ignored entirely. 

Glanville kept throwing a duffel bag into the back seat of his car. Wood bats mingled with aluminum bats. Teammates grew old and one spring wouldn’t be back. Young guys kept introducing themselves. On his car radio, there’d only be voices from some far-away ballpark, cheering or groaning, someone winning, someone losing, a pitcher and a hitter, and two different stories.

Three stories, including the man in the car. He said he never felt abandoned by baseball, never believed it had forgotten what Jackie Robinson started, hardly even wondered—looking around on a Sunday afternoon—where all the Black guys went. “But,” he said, “I don’t think I’m the face of it, either. I don’t feel like me or any rec league baseball player who’s Black is. We’re just playing.”

Maybe that is the face of baseball, though. The rec league guys. And then the kids on sign-up day at the local rec center and in Wednesday night practices who can hardly wait for Saturday afternoon. The boys and girls on high school mounds, in high school dugouts. Stickball games when nobody else is around. Black kids leaned into football, basketball, and track instead of baseball. That’s how you get to 6 percent.

“I could have retired, though,” he said. “I could’ve stopped playing rec league ball at 50 and no one would have ever known. You know?”

‘Old Guards of Baseball’

The uniform of Teaneck, New Jersey’s Cadmus Court Killas was a white Fruit of the Loom T-shirt with the team’s name on the front, ironed there by somebody’s mom. The letters fell off long before the season ended, so the first baseman played for the admu C illas and the left fielder for the Ca rt Kill. 

Glanville, then a teenager, was a player, the coach, the schedule maker, the traveling secretary, the trainer, and the team therapist. The team was mostly raised on—or within walking distance of—a cul-de-sac on the eastern bank of the Hackensack River. 

The boys biked to home and away games and were back before the street lights blinked on. Kenny’s brother, Doug, younger by seven years, played on that team, then played in high school, then at the University of Pennsylvania, then was drafted by the Chicago Cubs in the first round, then had 1,100 hits over nine major league seasons.

“He taught me to love the game,” Doug said of Kenny. “And he taught me how to love the game. With him, there was this steady, eternal love for the game … I think of my brother as one of those old guards of baseball that keeps the game alive. He keeps it breathing. There’s a heartbeat.”

Kenny smiled broadly at the memories of Strat-O-Matic baseball board games when snow clogged the driveway, of the two of them breathlessly recounting their own youth and high school games at dinnertime, of summer Wiffle ball when the last two on the cul-de-sac were the Glanville boys, Doug no more than 6 or 7.

“It’s 11 at night and he’d be shouting, ‘Mom! Ken won’t let me come in!’” Kenny recalled. “I was like, ‘No! We got this light post here, glow-in-the-dark ball, we’re gonna keep playing.’

“I couldn’t really make him do it, but I could see the longer he played, the longer he followed me, there was something there. He had a world of talent.” 

The neighborhood was typical of Teaneck. Kenny Glanville closed his eyes, returned to the cul-de-sac, and began pointing at houses. “We had Jewish family, Irish family, another Jewish family, Protestant family,” he recalled. “Then, up the block, we had Italian, Italian, and Hispanic.”

Bobby Haber, about Kenny’s age, talks just like a guy from the old neighborhood should talk—a little rough, a little loud, and wholly non-hostile.

“We were the Hungarian Jews,” he said.

They were next door.

Bobby lives a town or two over from Teaneck and has been a financial broker for the better part of 40 years. About the cul-de-sac, he said, “If you could play, you were welcome. If you wanted to play, you were even more welcome. Color didn’t mean anything.

“I think when you’re a kid, you don’t even think of those things. You’re just happy to play. Who you played with wasn’t as important as it was just to play. And the more who played the better.”

Kenny and Doug’s father, Cecil, grew up poor in Trinidad. He was a cricket and soccer player. Also, a pianist and a poet. He emigrated to America and became a psychiatrist and college professor. 

He died in 2002 and was buried with the baseball that was Doug’s 1,000th big-league hit. Their mother, Mattie Glanville Clarke, was raised on a farm in Oak City in eastern North Carolina before the family—she was the oldest of four children—moved to Rocky Mount. 

She attended schools, she said, with “second-hand books, second-hand everything, Jim Crow everywhere.” She graduated from college (as did her three siblings) and became an educator, teaching chemistry, biology, and mathematics when there was one other Black teacher in the high school. “And she taught home economics,” she said.

Mattie lives in Chapel Hill. She’s 87.

“I have trouble today even,” she said, “looking people straight in the eyes, little things you don’t even know are there, still are. But my husband didn’t have that. And he built in those kids, what would you call it? Courage. An ability to see the world.”

Doug retired from baseball in 2004, when he was 34 years old, and now broadcasts games for ESPN Radio and the Chicago Cubs. Kenny, who played at Teaneck High School, then chased the next game, the next at-bat, the next shot at Howard University, at St. Thomas Aquinas College, at Bergen (N.J.) Community College, at Rutgers University-Newark and at Atlantic Christian College (now Barton), never retired. He knew—just knew—there’d be a place for a switch-hitting, base-stealing center fielder somewhere. It was on him to find it.

If that place meant he’d be the only Black player in the team picture again, if it seemed a lot of time had passed since major league rosters reflected America’s team picture, then he’d take a deeper breath and ask where in the lineup he was hitting.

Once, in the spring of 1982, when he was playing at the University of South Carolina as part of an all-Black roster at Howard, a fan near the dugout noted that Howard had yet to register a stolen base. “Well,” the man shouted, “put a TV at second base, I’ll bet he’ll steal it.”

Six years later, walking on the campus at Atlantic Christian, a fellow student yelled out, “Hey, moolie!” Kenny kept walking, not angry, not even hurt, but curious.

“Why,” he thought, “wouldn’t he just say the ‘N-word?’”

On most days, Glanville had only to look around the field on a Saturday afternoon, around the dugout, at a team picture, to know he was the outlier. Usually, it didn’t occur to him to look.

The Face of Love

The world can be too serious. Part of that world is who we are, who we want to be and who we could be. Part of that is representation, inclusion. You don’t have to live in that world every minute of every day, though, and some days you can just be the right fielder and No. 7 hitter, not surrounded by white and brown and Black, but by teammates, some of whom you wouldn’t even know their last names. 

Sometimes it’s a shame the game doesn’t look more like you and maybe doesn’t come from where you come from, and probably doesn’t see things the way you do, but it’s still the game. Still a high sky and a cloud of gnats and a place to breathe.

Maybe he’d already done his part. Late nights in Teaneck. A brother who’d be part of the small percentage, but still part of it. The game and how to love it. Strat-O-Matic. Baseball cards and breaking in a new glove and getting a rolling lead off first.

In Chapel Hill, Mattie laughed softly at the memories—“You can’t imagine your life until you look at it backwards,” she mused—and at the over-sized place baseball had in their life, and the perfect way it fit her boys. She knew there’d be no fighting it, even if she’d wanted to, starting on those muggy nights on a cul-de-sac in Teaneck.

“There’s not enough of our people, right?” she said. “There’s not enough. And Ken maybe doesn’t so much care about that. But he’s the face of don’t-give-up-on-something-you-love. I think his contribution is a personal one. More personal than public. Doug would represent—and know he’s representing—Black people. Or he’s representing his family. Ken is the face of love. He just has to do it. Nobody’s seeing that. Black folks are hardly seeing it. But he’s the face of love.”

On this Sunday afternoon in Wake Forest, the Swamp Donkeys way ahead already, Kenny swings a bat in the on-deck circle. A teammate shakes his head, marveling at the flexibility, the sustained elegance of an athlete who’s pushed his prime nearly to retirement age.

“You don’t quit playing because you get old,” the other man says, almost to himself. “You get old because you quit playing.”

Kenny approaches the batter’s box. He looks over his shoulder and nods. He’s done his part. Now it’s his turn again.

Tim Brown covered baseball for more than 30 years for several publications, including the Los Angeles Times. He is the author of three books, most recently The Tao of the Backup Catcher with Erik Kratz. He lives in Raleigh.