From East Orange to Montclair to Rutgers, Fred Hill was a baseball lifer | Izenberg – NJ.com

Fred Hill, a New Jersey baseball legend, passed away Saturday. He was that rare calendar-stopper (at least emotionally, if not physically) for whom the game was always the thing. From age 10 forward, there were always two questions:

“Who do we play?

And where?”

And if the answer ever came up, “A blacktop parking lot at Willow Brook Mall tomorrow morning,” whether the game is football or baseball, he wouldn’t have blinked.

Forget Ernie Banks and his “Let’s play two.” As long as Freddie Baseball could put on his spikes, make a double-play pivot or flash a sign to a hitter — and no more than 10 feet of snow fell — it was a great day to play five or six, or, why not, seven?

As a coach, he won nearly 1,000 baseball games during his 30-year tenure at Rutgers. But that doesn’t even begin to count the ones he won at Montclair State and with his high school teams. Seventy-two of his Rutgers kids went on to professional baseball. Twelve of them made the big leagues.

So when retirement finally came, his players from all those years gave him a testimonial to mark the occasion.

Retirement?

Can you tell the Mississippi River not to flow? Can you tell fish not to swim, birds not fly? Freddie Baseball was a baseball lifer. Always was and always will be remembered that way. I wouldn’t have been surprised if during those days after he hung up his spikes, he had jumped out of his car each time he passed a playground to revel in the sight of a stickball game, an industrial league women’s softball competition or one of those public park tableaus in which young fathers, wearing Yankees T-shirts, lob underhanded Wiffle Balls to toddlers with plastic bats.

Right to end, he remained the East Orange kid who never grew up. His was the logical extension of a world in which every parent in the neighborhood knew that every son who was late for dinner could be found playing football or baseball in the twilight at Soverel Park.

He is the kid who never left the neighborhood, who returned again and again with his children and his children’s children, and in his mind’s eye, he would see Flynn the Cop and the facade of Miller’s Confectionery, where they hung out from Holy Name School and on through Clifford Scott High.

“I went to Villanova on a football scholarship,” he once told me, putting it all in perspective. “I was there for three days. Then I woke up on the fourth, put everything I had into my bag and went back home. I walked in the front door, my father took one look at me and I knew I was a dead man. He wanted me to have that schooling so badly. What saved me was that I went around the corner to Upsala College, and they gave me a scholarship. Not only that, but he could see me play that way.”

The more things changed for Freddie Baseball, the more they remained the same. He played professional baseball well into his 30s. On Sunday morning, on fields in Newark and East Orange, he also played in the kind of touch football games that would have eaten the Kennedy family alive. In such contests, there was never any debate. You knew you had been “touched” by the quivering of your ribs.

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And for what seemed forever, at his side was the coach’s coach — Evelyn Hill. They produced six kids and folks who knew them best smiled and said: “It looks as though that marriage of more than 50 years just might last.”

It lasted through minor-league tours in the Washington Senators’ chain at Missoula, Mont., and Superior, Neb., which Evelyn remembers as a town two blocks long, where they lived in a basement with a bad stove and about 90,000 grasshoppers. There was that dot on the Florida Panhandle named Fort Walton Beach, too. This was very exciting for the elder Hill, who was young, hopeful and getting 400 bucks a month to play the game he loved.

She also remembers Quebec City, in the Summer League up there, when she had three kids sleeping in the living room of a three-room apartment, a fourth due in three months.

She did the light stuff, like the shopping, the laundry, counting the kids each night to make sure nobody forgot where they lived and, most of all, wedging her belly and her unborn child against the side of the car, bending over the open hood and jump-starting the engine.

Freddie Baseball did the important stuff. Like playing shortstop.

On this day, it was unseasonably hot. She had coaxed the car into starting. She stopped at a couple of stores and then to the supermarket for groceries. She parked the car. Her arms full of groceries, she staggered into the house.

As soon as he saw her, Freddie Baseball shook his head and said, “Do you realize I’m only hitting .220?’’

True love never survived a tougher test.

Well, you know about all the staggering number of high school and college football and baseball games he later won as a coach. What you might not know is that with school out in the summer, he did some coaching in the Essex County semi-pro league He was on the other side of age 50 when his catcher got hurt. So he went out and caught.

People with longer memories will tell you that his team lost when the other guys loaded the bases in the last inning and the umpire called a catcher’s interference. Freddie Baseball says he doesn’t believe it was intentional on his part. His son Fred Jr. says he never heard the story but would be interested to know.

How do you sum up Fred Hill Sr.?

Listen to Montclair State head football coach, Rick Giancola, now in his 36th year as Hill’s successor:

“He gave me my first job as an assistant coach at Clifford Scott High School. I coached for him there and at Pequannock High and at Montclair State. This is what he said the first time we met. This is who he was.

“I really don’t care what you know. I really don’t care what you don’t know. What I want from you is your time, your effort, your dedication, your willingness to learn and to respect the game and everyone in it.

“‘If you have all that, I will teach you the rest.’’’

Every teammate, every player and every coach who ever passed his way never forgot that lesson.

Jerry Izenberg is Columnist Emeritus for The Star-Ledger. He can be reached at jizenberg@starledger.com.