Pitch Perfect

Weiss shares lifetime love of baseball and BGSU

By Bob Cunningham

Baseball, maybe more than any other American pastime, is a sport ruled by numbers.

For Larry Weiss ‘67, those numbers are 16, 50 and 70.

Weiss almost had his dream of playing baseball derailed when he was 16 years old. A pitcher for his Canton Glenwood High School baseball team in the early 1960s, Weiss was covering a play at the plate when he broke his right wrist in two places after a player from the opposing team crashed into him.

The accident to his pitching arm prevented him from trying out with the Baltimore Orioles. The injury was thought to be so bad that orthopedic surgeons thought he might not be able to pitch again because of the snapping motion needed to throw a curveball. With a cast covering his entire arm, from his fingers to his shoulder, Weiss still attended the tryout but the Orioles’ representatives weren’t interested.

“The good news is, although I never heard from the Orioles again after that, I’ve been able to play a lot more baseball,” said Weiss.

He spent the summer of 1966 playing for a Class A team in Canton before graduating from BGSU in 1967. Weiss thought his days of playing the game he loved were over.

“At that point in time, there weren’t many baseball leagues for people beyond college age and so I started playing softball,” he said.

In 1973, Weiss changed gears on his business career and started working in the BGSU alumni office. Five years later, Weiss was named director of alumni affairs, a position he held until 2000. At the request of then BGSU President Dr. Sidney Ribeau, Weiss became the University’s legislative representative and spent the next seven years in Columbus and Washington, D.C. For his final three years, Weiss worked on a part-time basis as chair of the committee for BGSU’s centennial celebration.

Weiss retired in 2010. He currently hosts “The Morning Show” from 6 to 9 a.m. on the fourth week of each month on WBGU-FM 88.1.  

“So that keeps me busy now -- that and playing baseball,” said the longtime Bowling Green resident who turned 70 in July 2015.

Rewind to Weiss’ 50th surprise birthday party in 1995 thrown by friend and fellow BGSU alumnus Tom Walton. More than 200 people attended the milestone roast. Besides getting a lot of good ribbing from his friends, Weiss received a thoughtful present: a trip to the Cleveland Indians’ fantasy camp in Winter Haven, Fla.

“In January of 1996 I went to the Cleveland Indians fantasy camp and I hadn’t played baseball since I was 22,” said Weiss, a diehard fan of the Indians. “I went down there and pitched and actually had a little bit of luck.”

At 50, after impressing some of his peers with his pitching, Weiss once again was invited to try out for a team. This time, it was for a new league for older players called Legends of Baseball based in Cooperstown, N.Y., home of baseball’s hall of fame. The league hosts weeklong tournaments with a playoff at the end to determine a winner.

“After that week of fantasy camp, I really got the bug to play baseball again, I’ll tell you,” Weiss said. “It was eating me up that there wasn’t any baseball leagues around here. I love playing softball but I was such a diehard baseball fan that not playing baseball from the time you were 22 and the time you were 50 is a pretty long layoff, you know?”

He’s been playing ever since, on as many teams and in as many leagues as he can handle.

“So, I did go up to Cooperstown in 1996,” Weiss said. “In fact, Tom Walton went with me. We played up there that summer and then the the urge to play really came back.

“When you play in Cooperstown -- I’ll be going back in September. I’ve only missed two years since 1996 -- you go up there and you play eight games in four days.”

Then a few years later, Weiss saw a blurb in the Sentinel-Tribune newspaper seeking players to try out for a 48-and-over team for a league that plays at Ned Skeldon Stadium in Maumee, the former home of the Toledo Mud Hens.

“I went and tried out and made that team and I’ve been playing in Toledo every summer since then,” he said. “I’m guessing it’s been 15 years, give or take. We play every Sunday. The league is 48 and above, and I just turned 70 a few weeks ago so I do qualify for 48 and over,” he said with a laugh. ”The team I play on is called the Toledo Knights. Our teams isn’t playing real well this year but everyone is having a good time.”

The league in Toledo, the Mid American Masters Baseball League, is affiliated with the Roy Hobbs League, headquartered in Akron. Each year in November, the Roy Hobbs holds a “world series” in Fort Myers, Fla.

“I went down there for seven or eight years,” Weiss said. “You get to play teams from all over the country.”

Weiss also plays in the Men’s Senior Baseball League, which holds a yearly baseball tournament in October in Phoenix.

“You get to play on the same spring training diamonds that the major leaguers play on during February and March,” he said. “The last several years I’ve been going to Phoenix to play in the MSBL world series.”

In fact, the team Weiss played on last year, the Ohio Classics out of Canton, won the tournament. His teammates voted him the team’s most valuable player.

“It was really exciting,” Weiss said. “The manager, George Hughes, a guy I know from Canton, had been taking a team down there for years and last year was the first year he had been able to win the world series.”

When Weiss isn’t pitching, he can play every infield position except for third base. He even has taken on coaching duties for the team he takes annually to Cooperstown. He’s also the public address announcer for the Falcons baseball team at Steller Field.