17 June, 2004

The Hitter
Cape Cod League to honor one of its best hitters ever

     When war came, the natural put down his bat. He joined the Navy and went to the South Pacific, repairing warplanes on an aircraft carrier. When the war ended, he returned home to Sagamore, traded one uniform for another and picked up his bat again.
Tello Tontini would go on to put the Sagamore teams of the Cape Cod League on the map and hit his way into league record books. He played seven all-star seasons, winning two batting titles. He was twice the league’s most valuable player. He hit above .340 for four seasons.

     From 1946 to 1952, he dominated the game at the plate and in the field. He won the respect of spectators, his teammates and opponents. He came to Keith Field to play baseball. It was his passion. In those days, however, there were no scouts in the stands.

     So in 1952 Tontini was thinking about family matters and earning a living. He went home after that season, took his baseball glove and told his wife that since he would no longer need it he should burn the mitt.

     “This is a true story,” Alba Tontini said in her Sagamore living room on a quiet June afternoon 52 years later. “He didn’t burn it right away; but it was burned and we’ve regretted it ever since.”

     Prior to his second Cape League stint and military time, Tontini hit .513 as a catcher for Bourne High School and played for the Sagamore AA team when the Cape League was comprised of local talent, college players, men beyond their prime and hangers-on.

     When Tontini returned to the league in 1946, it had been reorganized and was taking on shades of what makes it a special baseball institution today with a following across the country.

     The general opinion around the league is that if Tontini had an agent, he would have played in the major leagues. Some say his swing was as fluid as that of Steve Garvey of Dodgers fame. Jack Sanford of Bourne, who was a Cape League standout and signed with the Boston Braves, says Tontini was “the greatest hitter I ever saw.”

     Tontini today smiles in reflection at such recollection of those good old days. He does not wax nostalgic. He does not pitch baseball yarns. There is no talk about the ballpark or the crack of the bat. Memories are an important part of the grand old game, but he does not embrace the national pastime as a dream in a very real world of other pressing matters.
Rather it seems baseball has its place and Tontini is content with that and does not relive past glory as one of the boys of summer. Baseball gave him all it had to give. He enjoyed his time. Then he took the uniform off. He departed without an exit line. But he likes to discuss the game.

     He does not remember his first home run or his last one; or if he ever hit a grand slam. But he has blasted the ball well out of the park at Keith Field with his 35-ounce Louisville Slugger.

     “I rapped one into the harbor up at Plymouth’s Nelson Street Field one time,” he says.

     Tontini’s baseball memories are of a different time.

     “I still love the game and follow it. But it’s changed. When we played, it was a big part of our lives because we didn’t have any money. It was what we did. I love to go to the Pawsox (Pawtucket Red Sox). That’s good baseball. They’re great to the kids over there; that’s the magic of it all. 

     “The game has come a long way,” Tontini says. “The guys who play today don’t need second jobs. They’re pro athletes year-round. They’re bigger and stronger. The ball is livelier. And television has changed this thing we call baseball. The players are millionaires.”

     Tontini watches the game evolve now that his summers do not seem as suitably long as when he played in a small-town park at the edge of a famous canal. He favors wood bats over aluminum. He marvels how parents take over on game nights and prepare the field. In the old days, he says, players cared for the field. “The kids don’t seem to do anything,” he says. “We’re in a different era.”

     Tontini left the Navy in 1946. He quickly got involved in his community and jumped back into the game. It was an era when baseball, as former commissioner Peter Ueberroth noted, maintained its grip “on the spirit and hopes of Americans.” Tontini’s skills were not diminished. He could field and hit and run with guys in their late teens.

     “I was still pretty aggressive,” he says. “Bourne put a team together. Bill Crump was the manager. We won the championship. We had a lot of fun. And some of the guys I see regularly still remember vividly what happened that year.”

     Tontini showed up for each succeeding season in the sun near the canal. His responsibilities in life were his work as an electrician, his family, his village and baseball. There was always time for baseball. The games were not all that unlike those dead-ball contests he played in his final Navy days in South Texas where the ballgame on the fringes of the King Ranch was a serious thing and it did not necessarily matter who was playing.

     Baseball has always been a game of structure dominated by sudden reverses, sudden disappointment and sudden glory as fleeting as that must always be. Box scores in the newspaper the next morning were important reading in Sagamore during the glory years. 

     Sagamore would come to dominate the Cape League. Its teams were the winners, building a serious niche in summer. They put it together year after year. The Clouters. They got the recognition. They were more aged in wood than an acquired taste. They were the best.

     Tontini was among them. He hit .390 over this stretch. His friend Dudley Jensen says Tontini “put the numbers up, played the game well and then walked away at the height of his popularity and his talent.

     Alba and Tello Tontini live on Eleanor Avenue off Sandwich Road in Sagamore. The area was known as “the Hill” before the Sagamore Bridge and Coca-Cola plant went in. Alba enjoys baseball and its memory-lane aspects as much as her husband.
There is fitting irony to their love of the game. They attended the Cape League movie “Summer Catch” when it was literally the last picture show playing at the Buzzards Bay Theater.

     “It was OK,” she says. “Cute. Flat. But we enjoyed it.”

     Tontini was as quietly talented when he played as he is modest in his recollections today. Men who played with him and against him say they never knew him to be confrontational. They say he was never thrown out of a ball game. He avoided the verbal and physical confrontations.

     Rather he looked forward to his next turn at the plate. There, they say, he did his talking. The old Cape Cod Standard-Times called him “a ballplayer’s ballplayer and the ultimate team player; as brilliant a clutch player as the league has to offer.”

     The year he departed, 1952, he led the league in hitting at .398 and tied for the home run title. That was the year he decided to burn his glove. Half a century later, he concedes he should have saved it for a baseball display somewhere, perhaps at Heritage Museums & Gardens in Sandwich where the Cape League Hall of Fame is housed.

     Tontini is active in retirement. He does not seek work. It comes his way. There is a woman of few means with a fence to continually fix. The church across the canal has an electrical problem to resolve. Small jobs here and there. In between, he found time to build a stone wall rock-by-rock across the manicured expanse of his back yard where hillside rhododendrons hold sway in the early-summer haze of a late canal-side afternoon.

     “The little old ladies seem to have his number,” Alba Tontini muses. “They use it and off he goes.”

     Tontini likes being active. He avoids boredom. “I don’t feel any different than I did 20 years ago,” he says. “I attend some [Bourne] Braves games and like to watch the [Sandwich] American Legion games. They’ve done a lot for the region and the game, especially the Legion teams. Some kids can play quite a few positions.”

     Tontini’s admirers say he played every position on the diamond. One amazing thing, however, still remains; it is what he did with his bat when something needed to be done.

     In the 1947 All-Star game, Tontini was playing shortstop for the Upper Cape alignment of the Cape League. The opponent was Mashpee. The game belonged to the pitchers. On Tontini’s trip to the plate, he waited for his pitch and soundly slapped the ball. It was a home run and the only hit of the contest.

     He did much the same thing in 1951. His home run won the game for the Upper Cape in the seventh inning for a 5-3 victory.
Baseball may have played a big part in his life, but each fall the Tontinis attend the reunion of his USS Card crew. This year it is in Kentucky. The numbers are dwindling. 

     “I guess we’re that Greatest Generation Tom Brokaw wrote about. We’re passing every day,” Tontini says. “So we like to get to the reunions and revive the memories. It’s important. We were so young, but I guess we were no younger than the kids we sent to Iraq.”

     The Cape League will honor Tontini’s time in a baseball uniform this season. He will be inducted into the league’s Hall of Fame. He smiles at the notion. Then there is the quick thought about finding a suitable photograph for the league to use on the plaque. It seems an appropriate late-inning circumstance of sorts.

     Those who remember the hitter and his time making it to first base more often than not fail to mention one thing. Could he bunt? A bet against him on that score would be a bad one.