Hardball Softball

Glowing under the orange night-game lights, Mary Benson Field looks like an image from an Edward Hopper exhibition. The baseball diamond is wedged between some sad, dirty buildings on the fringes of downtown Jersey City, New Jersey. Just beyond the outfield fence, an overpass of the New Jersey Turnpike bears a steady stream of long-haul trucks. But the Depression-era ambience vanishes when you notice Fred "Tuffy" Tufariello, 49, manager of the New York Stock Exchange softball team.

The NYSE team is the odds-on favorite to win the Wall Street Softball League's "world series," which plays out in the same place every October. But at this moment, Tufariello, a rotund, profanity-spewing smoker, doesn't like what he sees. NYSE is clinging to a precarious two-to-one lead over Atlantic Mutual, a team that it steamrolled in the series opener. Tonight, Tufariello's usually patient singles and doubles hitters are gunning for home runs -- but coughing up pop-ups instead.

Michael Cavataio, 42, NYSE's center fielder, takes a Sammy Sosa-size swing at a fastball -- and whiffs. "Leave the fences alone," barks Tufariello. "Get the lead runner on; that's how we play!"

Most of the 270,000 corporate softball teams in the United States play in coed or slow-pitch leagues. You know the score: The gang from the office chips in for a keg on a Friday night and whacks that big softball as it arcs lazily over home plate.

But NYSE plays modified fast pitch -- a brand of softball that is hardball in almost every sense of the word. Sneakers are traded for spikes. Pitchers fire underhand balls at 40 MPH. Players spit, swear, and generally comport themselves like aging minor leaguers who've lost their shot at the majors but plan to go down swinging.

NYSE dominates the Wall Street Softball League, which comprises weekend warriors drawn from New York's large financial companies. From nine to five, NYSE players work for a handful of Wall Street brokerages. Some are clerks who work the floor at 18 Broad Street, taking buy and sell orders from large, institutional investors. Others are brokers who actually make the trades. All of them ply their craft in a fishbowl world that's crammed with video monitors, phone banks, and crowds of noisy men (virtually all are male) in polyester blazers who spend their days shouting and thrusting slips of paper at one another.

"We might be dealing with millions of dollars on a single trade," says NYSE first baseman Larry Jensen, 47, a broker with Bocklet & Co. "The pressure can eat you alive -- unless you have a way to get rid of it."

That's where softball comes in. The baseball diamond is a safe haven, a place to reboot for another run on the Street. "At the end of a workday, you're mentally beat up," says Jimi Fagan, 45, the team's pitching ace and a broker at Lawrence Helfant & Co. "But then you hit the field, and you get to run around and scream and do something with your body."

As it turns out, NYSE's players are just as intense on the diamond as they are on the stock-exchange floor. They regard winning the league's world series as roughly on a par with nailing a big year-end bonus. That's why they drive to Jersey City on chilly autumn nights, change into their uniforms in an empty parking lot, and take the field before a crowd of exactly zero.

Will the bulls of NYSE prevail against scrappy Atlantic Mutual? The answer, it seems, depends largely on whether three of NYSE's blue-chip players and one manager turn in a market-beating performance.

Pitcher-Broker Jimi Fagan

From the dugout, Tufariello nervously eyes the chain-smoking Fagan as the star pitcher plows through Atlantic Mutual's lineup. "Hey Jimi, I've got the oxygen tank over here," rasps Tuffy, as Fagan lands another strike. The manager's admiration is total. Here, in the fourth inning of a one-run game, Fagan is the only thing that's keeping NYSE in the hunt.

By all rights, Fagan shouldn't even be on the mound. He retired two years ago from the team so he could spend more time with his teenage daughter, and to give his aching hamstrings a rest. Tufariello talked him into coming back as a part-time clutch pitcher this season. Now he's pitching each of the team's four world-series games.

Fagan's dark eyes seem to sink back into his head as he stares down Atlantic Mutual's cleanup hitter. In one alarmingly quick motion, he brings the ball behind him, to about head level, and whips it toward the plate, twisting his wrist to put a wicked rise on the pitch. The batter takes the pitch -- a clean strike -- and slouches back to the bench.

Fagan dominates Atlantic Mutual with his head as well as his arm. After playing nearly 15 years for NYSE, he's memorized the hitting tendencies of most of the league's veteran batters. He's got a plan, like any winning pitcher -- or, for that matter, like any winning broker.