Youth Baseball’s Violent Dad-On-Dad Rivalry

On the Long Island Inferno, two fathers, both with complicated pasts, took it all too far. Neither man was ever the same. [View in Browser]( [Esquire Sunday Reads]( Inside Youth Baseball's Most Notorious Dad-On-Dad Rivalry Dads bring their sons to Baseball Heaven so they can feel like pros. The facility, situated on an industrial lot off the Long Island Expressway, has recessed dugouts, proper bullpens, and stadium lights. On weekends, the lot fills with so many cars that minivans must illegally park on the roadway verge. Cleats click-clack on pavement, and cooler wheels groan. Fathers jockey for position to record their sons’ swings and fixate on pitch velocity, murmuring the incantation “What’s he at? What’s he at?” Between games, boys wander the park with Gatorade-stained lips and gnash on Big League Chew. Inside the café, televisions simulcast play on all seven fields. The turf is artificial, which means the grass at Baseball Heaven is always green. Every father finds his own way to this Eden, and for Bobby Sanfilippo, it all started at a batting cage on an autumn day in 2008. Sanfilippo and his seven-year-old son were taking practice swings when a skinny man in a windbreaker marveled at the boy’s bat speed. He handed Sanfilippo a business card. How would his son like to try out for a travel baseball team called the Inferno? It would be expensive at $1,200 a season and require an aggressive schedule of forty-odd games a year, some of them at Baseball Heaven. It was a far cry from the dozen or so Little League games they were playing at the time. But Sanfilippo’s son—who loved baseball so much his bedroom had a custom Yankee Stadium fresco—was thrilled at the prospect. Sanfilippo was trying to figure out how to be a good dad and make his son feel special, and he figured travel baseball could play a big part in that. He had grown up in Brooklyn, in a cold house with a cold father, the owner of several bars in East New York. His dad was a rough guy, and he took little interest in Sanfilippo, who had to “grow up quick.” His father got a brain tumor when Sanfilippo was fifteen, and they didn’t patch things up before he died four years later. Sanfilippo was determined not to repeat the same mistakes with his little boy. Sons grow up, and one day dads must leave Baseball Heaven, too. But Sanfilippo hasn’t moved on. During his years at Baseball Heaven, he found himself enmeshed in an epic dad-on-dad rivalry with a man named John Reardon that led tabloids to call him “a Suffolk County Steinbrenner,” “seriously sick,” and one of the worst dads in youth-sports history. Nine years later, he still keeps a file of dirt he dug up on Reardon, his alleged victim. In fact, Sanfilippo has been waiting for someone to call him up and ask for his side of the story. 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