In summer league, lawyers face off on the baseball diamond

The Office of the Public Defender’s softball team was down to eight players.

Everyone available joined the game, including juvenile court chief attorney David R. Fishkin, who had a pulled hamstring, and the team’s then-coach, Jesse Margulies, who is missing a leg.

They managed to beat the law firm they were playing against, though Fishkin can’t remember which firm it was. Such an unlikely victory is part of the appeal of Baltimore lawyers’ league softball, formally known as the Interprofessional Athletic Conference.

“There is a magical quality about it,” said Fishkin, a longtime player for the public defender’s team.

The lawyers’ league plays from May to August. This year, it’s composed of 16 teams of lawyers, most representing firms, government agencies or law schools.

The league has been around since 1970, and for the last 22 years it’s been managed by volunteer “commissioner” Kevin A. Dunne, a litigator at Ober, Kaler, Grimes & Shriver P.C.

Dunne admitted that the league, since it is run by lawyers, probably has a few more rules than
your average amateur softball league.

One example is the sliding rule, which Dunne created after he witnessed aggressive players taking bases when they didn’t have to and colliding with the unsuspecting young players manning those bases.

The league decided to shift the risk of taking an unnecessary base to the runner. The sliding rule states that a runner in that situation must slide if a collision with the infielder looks likely. If the runner doesn’t slide and hits the fielder, the runner is out.

The league also has lenient but precise rules about non-lawyer players. Non-lawyer employees of a firm or government agency may play, but lawyers’ spouses and significant others are ineligible. Each team is allowed up to three “legal ringers” per game who do not have to work for the relevant office, but they must be lawyers in Maryland and cannot work for one of the other members of the league. Team captains must notify Dunne of their legal ringers.

Oh, and police officers do not count as employees of the state’s attorney’s office.

The teams have sometimes (mostly) jokingly accused one another of hiring lawyers with an eye toward their softball abilities. Dunne said that when Sandra A. O’Connor ran the Baltimore County State’s Attorney’s Office, her team was suspiciously good.

“Sandy O’Connor somehow managed to hire a lot of males who had the build of lacrosse midfielders,” he said.

Peter F. Axelrad, who ran the league from its inception in 1970 until Dunne took over, said that in his day, judicial clerks could play for the state’s attorney’s office. One year, a clerk was a star player for the county prosecutors, he recalled. He gave then-state’s attorney’s office coach Dana M. Levitz a hard time about the clerk, Jason League, suggesting that Levitz had gotten a judge to hire him.

For what it’s worth, League was later hired on by the state’s attorney’s office and works there still, though he no longer plays softball.

Asked if any particular type of lawyer makes the best softball player, Dunne said that litigators are over-represented among the top players. But they also make up a disproportionate share of all players, possibly because they love to compete, he said.

“I would say this to you: I’m a litigator, and I would equate — in different professions, litigators would be surgeons if they were in the medical profession and if we were in the military, we’d be pilots,” Dunne said.

He pointed out that the state’s attorney and public defender offices, all litigators, have done well over the years.

T. Wray McCurdy, coach of the league’s only team that’s unaffiliated with a single firm or office, said he’s not sure if any one type of lawyer shines.

“The skills aren’t different, but perhaps their own subjective perception of their skills are,” he said. “The same lawyer that thinks that he or she is the greatest attorney who’d ever found their way into a courtroom generally thinks they’re the greatest thing that’s ever found their way on to a baseball field, too. That seems to translate very well.”

McCurdy’s team, the Great Americans, is composed heavily of lawyers who used to work for the Baltimore County State’s Attorney’s Office; most, like McCurdy, are now solo practitioners. Others work for State Farm Insurance, the Law Offices of Peter G. Angelos and Royston, Mueller, McLean & Reid LLP. They are all in their 50s.

The demographics of the league have changed since its inception. Many of the players from back in the day are still playing, but they’re just older. That holds true especially for the Great Americans, McCurdy said.

“[The] reason they allow us to stay in the league is, we’ve never won this league,” McCurdy said.

He said the Great Americans do well in the regular season, in which games are played just once a week, but stumble during the playoffs, with multiple games per week, “because we’re old.”

“If they would allow age to be some sort of tiebreaker, we would win each time,” he said.

McCurdy said some teams have had trouble interesting younger lawyers in playing.

Cate Hopkin, who coaches the Tydings & Rosenberg LLP team, said summer associates and
young full-time associates are encouraged to play at her firm and others.

“Usually, the associates are in good shape and not too far removed from the shape they were in, in high school,” Hopkin said. “We try to get the young, fit associates out there if we can.”

If nothing else, it’s an opportunity for young lawyers to get to know attorneys in their own firms and elsewhere outside of a professional context, she said.

No quotas

One thing that has not changed much over the years: Despite a big increase in the number of women lawyers in the past 30 years, the league remains predominantly male. Longtime players speculated that could be because women do not want to play in a mostly male league.

Some of the teams have more women than others, said Baltimore County Assistant State’s Attorney John Cox, who coaches his office’s team.

There are many teams “truly and completely out to have fun; they tend to have more women playing,” said Cox, acknowledging that his comments are not politically correct. “We go out there and women in our office are certainly encouraged to play, but we also really like to win.”

Axelrad, the former commissioner, said the issue of women in the league came up over and over when he was commissioner. Some proposed setting a minimum number of female players on the field at all times, as many amateur leagues do, but that idea was defeated repeatedly.

University of Baltimore School of Law Professor Kenneth Lasson said arguments with the league’s professional umpires during games are common.

“It’s not unheard of for players to be protested, for players to give the umpires a hard time and to try to argue the way lawyers may argue a case for interference or for rules interpretations,” said Lasson, a civil liberties, international human rights and dispute resolution professor who coordinates the law school’s team.

The pro umpires were one of Dunne’s innovations. Back in Axelrad’s day, players would umpire other teams’ games, and the playoffs were umpired by judges of the black- or crimson-robed variety.

“You can’t imagine how some of the lawyers were incensed that I would pick real judges to umpire the playoff games,” said Axelrad, who used to work at now-defunct Frank, Bernstein, Conaway & Goldman and is now with Council, Baradel, Kosmerl & Nolan P.A. “They would say, ‘Peter, for God’s sakes, Judge so-and-so can’t see well. Judge so-and-so made more mistakes in the championship game.’”

Axelrad said he always told the complainers he would think about it, but then kept on using the judges because “it added some class.”

Big games

The league’s big rivalries are between the two state’s attorney’s offices, the state’s attorneys and the public defenders, DLA Piper US LLP and Semmes, Bowen & Semmes P.C., and Baltimore’s two law schools.

“One school wants to prove that it’s really better than the other, and of course there’s a direct correlation between your softball ability and your lawyering ability,” Lasson said.

Still, the rivalries are friendly enough that in years when the University of Baltimore does not have enough players to field a team, its students play for the University of Maryland.

Many teams have dropped out of the league over the years, mostly because they can’t find enough employees who want to play. The Office of the Attorney General left in the 1990s for that reason, Dunne said.

But, he said, the office will get back in the game this year. Rumor has it — and a spokeswoman for the office confirmed — that Attorney General Douglas F. Gansler himself will play.

The league may be friendly, but it’s not immune from injury. One player broke his leg sliding. A managing partner dislocated his shoulder running to first base. Dunne himself still has a bone scar that shows the distinct pattern of softball laces.

Most spectacularly, a summer law clerk was hit in the face by a line drive and had to be taken off the field with four broken bones. (The clerk’s team left the league, Dunne said.)

Why, after all these years, does Dunne run the league?

“I’m an idiot?” he suggested.

Actually, he regards it as a form of public service for the legal community. He said the practice of law used to be more collegial than it is now, and softball brings that element back. He said he hopes the league “can inculcate young lawyers that they don’t always have to be confrontational.”

That said, “If I thought the time passed, I would step aside,” Dunne said. “If your article should generate anyone else who wants to be commissioner, give them my phone number.”