Colorado Rockies Nolan Arenado Played Street Baseball on New Year’s Eve

Before saying goodbye to 2016, Colorado Rockies third baseman Nolan Arenado and his family played street baseball in his neighborhood on New Year’s Eve.

Nolan Arenado has a cousin, Josh Fuentes, who’s in the minor leagues in the Colorado Rockies organization. They were together on New Year’s Eve, so what better to do than play a little baseball in the street? And why not live stream it on Instagram?

Nolan Arenado is one of the best home run hitters in baseball. He’s had two straight all-star seasons in which he hit 40-plus homers and had 130 or more RBI. Fuentes hit .307/.366/.505 in 105 minor league games last year. Even though they’re professional baseball players, they still can’t resist playing a little baseball in the street just for the fun of it. To make things slightly more fair, the natural right-handed hitters hit left-handed during their New Year’s Eve streetball game. They still raked.

A couple of other major league players were on hand to add their thoughts to the action. Rockies shortstop Trevor Story was there. He was among the front-runners for NL Rookie of the Year last season until he was injured in late July. At the time, he had 27 homers and 72 RBI in 97 games. Also giving his commentary was Brandon Barnes, who played for the Rockies the last three years but signed with the Miami Marlins in mid-December as a free agent.

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While it was mostly fun and games, there were a couple of “bench clearing brawls” after pitches came a little too close for comfort. That’s pretty much a given during most family competitions, especially when you have competitive athletes involved. George Brett was one of four Brett brothers who played professional baseball. You can imagine the fights they got into when playing ball together growing up.

Long before Arenado and his family played baseball in his suburban neighborhood on New Year’s Eve, the legendary Willie Mays played stickball on the streets of New York. Mays grew up playing stickball and continued to play during his first couple seasons with the New York Giants. He was just a kid himself at the time, 20 years old in his Rookie of the Year season in 1951. He once said about playing stickball, “We played with a mop handle, cut the top off. The stick was small; the ball was small, too. We’d play on 155^th Street in Harlem, in between cars. And if you hit it over the roof you were out . . . because you’d lose the ball!”

Mays was once asked if his manager, Leo Durocher, had problems with his stickball playing. Mays smiled and said, “Leo didn’t want me to play there, he didn’t want me to get tired. But it was good for me because that’s how I learned to hit the breaking ball. Guys would bounce the ball to you and you’d have to hit it, and sometimes it would bounce this way, that way. That’s a breaking ball. I could hit anything that moved—the change up, the breaking ball, curveball.”

Mays loved playing stickball with the neighborhood kids. He said, “I played stickball in the morning, around 10, for about an hour. There was a bunch of kids. They’d come and knock on my window, ‘cause my window was on the ground level. I could walk from where I lived down the street to the Polo Grounds. So I’d buy the kids ice cream, then go to the ballpark. I did that all year in ’51, and in ‘52 until May, when I went into the military.”

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It’s nice to see Nolan Arenado continuing a long tradition of big league players playing baseball in the streets.