Brooklyn Kickballers Scared of Saplings

The Brooklyn kickballers have a new opponent this season: twenty freshly planted baby trees! The Brooklyn Paper reported yesterday that the leafy obstacles were planted as a part of Mayor Bloomberg's Million Trees program, and affect all three kickball fields. Allegedly the city chose that spot in order to restore the area to Gilmore Clark’s 1936 design. They told us about how in the past "McCarren Park was decimated by the Asian Long Horn Beatle crisis and lost more than 50% of it's tree canopy coverage."

Problem is, the players have been colliding with the saplings. Brian Riccardi, who's on a team called P. Diddy's White Party featuring Fat Kid Hustle, told the paper, “Considering our steady diet of PBR [a popular ‘beer’], someone is bound to get hurt.” Earlier this month, the fields had been reoriented, but the players were hoping that would only be a temporary solution. Kickball commissioner Kevin Dailey told us just yesterday, "I'm working with the city to try and transplant the trees."

We talked to the Parks Department's Stephanie Thayer today, who is also the executive director of the Open Space Alliance, and she told us, "In a standard review of contractors' work after the planting, the Parks Dept., determined that four trees interfered with the foul lines of designated ball areas, and these trees were transplanted within McCarren yesterday." Hopefully the other 16 will be able to withstand the sports activity. And any more complaints about too many trees in the park and we're going to plant some cacti out there.