With the first game of the World Series beginning on Friday, it’s the perfect time to swing by a coastal baseball-themed neighborhood in Anna Maria and pay homage to Anna Maria Island’s baseball past.
Start by walking on the beach near Cypress Avenue and look through the trees… you’ll catch a glimpse of statues of three young boys playing baseball in front of stadium seating.
Walk up the beach access and you’ll see that the house on the property sports a gate with the crossed bats of Milwaukee Braves ballplayers and Baseball Hall of Famers Warren Spahn and Eddie Mathews. Spahn, a pitcher, sold the house to Mathews, a third baseman.
Spahn gave the baseball treatment to a cluster of homes where Braves ballplayers lived during spring training in Bradenton from 1953-62, naming them “The Mound,” “Home Plate,” “Infield,” “Outfield,” “Shortstop” “Catcher’s Mitt” and “The Diamond.”
The Gulf-front neighborhood around Cypress, Spruce and Fir Avenues and Tuna Street has since traded most of the modest single-story homes for large two- and three-story homes.
But its history has been immortalized by an author with Bradenton Beach ties, whose book on the 100-year history of baseball in Bradenton and Anna Maria Island is expected be published before the 2025 World Series is over.
Baseball in paradise
Pasquale (Pat) Carlucci was born on Oct. 3, 1951, the day of the “shot heard ‘round the world,” when New York Giant Bobby Thomson’s home run won the pennant against the Brooklyn Dodgers.
It wasn’t the best of omens to his father, a Dodgers fan.
But Carlucci’s baptism into baseball led him into a lifetime of baseball fanaticism, culminating in his writing two books, “A Baseball Birthright: Chronicles & Connections” and “Baseball in Paradise: A Century of Spring Training in Bradenton,” which will be of special interest to AMI locals.
During a 2023 trip to his vacation home in Bradenton Beach, where he has vacationed with his family since 2013, Carlucci said he started getting “baseball signs.”
He investigated, and it turned out that 2023 marked 100 years of spring training in Bradenton, which he decided to recount in book form, starting with the St. Louis Cardinals, the Boston Red Sox, the Philadelphia Athletics, the Braves, the Kansas City Athletics and finally, the city’s present spring training team, the Pittsburgh Pirates.
Carlucci read up on The Anna Maria Island Sun’s coverage of the Anna Maria baseball neighborhood. He visited the Anna Maria Island Historical Museum, where he learned about locals like Joe Hutchinson, whose dad was Fred Hutchinson, a manager for the Detroit Tigers, St. Louis Cardinals and Cincinnati Reds, and Carol Torgeson, whose dad was Earl Torgeson, who played with the Boston Braves, Philadelphia Phillies, Detroit Tigers, Chicago White Sox and New York Yankees.
He discovered that New York Yankee Babe Ruth once owned the Drift-In in Bradenton Beach, that a baseball field in Holmes Beach is named for Birdie Tebbetts, who managed the Cincinnati Reds, and that St. Louis Cardinal Dizzy Dean once owned a gas station in Bradenton.
But even for those who aren’t baseball fans or history buffs, Carlucci said the book just might serve as a travelogue to their new favorite vacation spot.
Meanwhile, get ready. It’s almost game time.
