Kennedy: Kingston legend Kotowicz shares "magical" baseball memories

A young Joe Kotowicz (bottom row, left) joins his Oriole teammates for a game at Megaffin Stadium in the early 1950s.Photo: Joe Kotowicz

July 24, 2021

By Patrick Kennedy

Canadian Baseball Network

Like the daydreaming housepainter, “Joe the Picker,” a.k.a. Joseph Kotowicz, appears to have painted – or this case ‘picked’ – himself into a corner.

“I won’t be doing much picking until I get rid of some of this stuff,” Joe says, opening the door to a packed and clearly out-of-service dining room in the Montreal Street house that has been home to the Kotowicz clan since the latter stages of the Second World War.

The room is jammed with furniture, knickknacks, glassware, keepsakes, doodads, treasures, trinkets, oddities, and more. There is little room to stand, let alone sit, in the room where once his mother, Julia, for better than a half-century, served up perogies, cabbage soup, and other traditional Ukrainian dishes.

Outside in a hallway, an array of golf clubs that includes a few niblicks fills an umbrella stand.

“Ever seen one of these?” Joe asks, handing a visitor a Scottish-made, wooden-shaft putter from the early 1900s.

Keeping the antique flatstick company is a unique crystal-head putter that, like the majority of Joe’s wares, came from either a garage sale, a lawn sale or a second-hand shop.

Joe’s hit the “picker’s jackpot” on occasion. Like the time two vases caught his eye in a local Thrift Store. He purchased the pair for $40, and sold them months later on eBay for $4,500, to a buyer in California. (The vases were of Japanese origin and dated from the early 20th century.)

Joe once “picked” a painting at a garage sale for a $10 bill and unloaded it via cyberspace for $3,500, again to a buyer in California. Lest one gets the idea that Mr. Kotowicz caters solely to a West Coast clientele, he’s also sold his finds to people in Britain, Germany, The Netherlands, Australia, and across North America. Joe once ponied up a few dollars for a small box of inexpensive watches. Just his luck, only one was still ticking, a Rolex that Joe resold for $3,000-plus. He paid $6 for an originally unidentified city landscape, which turned out to be Chicago. Joe flipped it to Windy City resident for $400.

Of course, for pickers like Joe Kotowicz, as evidenced by his jumbled dining room and other storage areas chock full of God-knows-what, such eye-popping profit margins are the exception, rather than the rule.

“I try to pick stuff that nobody can put a price on,” explains Joe. “My joy comes in finding unique things.”

In that category is the intricately detailed bronze sculpture of a cowboy giving his horse a drink of water from his hat.

Long before Joe was pickin’, he was pitchin’ – a crafty baseball hurler who operated from the starboard side and possessed pinpoint control and a devastating overhand curve that, as they say in the dugout, “dropped off a tabletop.”

“That was my ‘out’ pitch,” Joe points out, blue eyes twinkling as he recalls the main weapon in his mound arsenal. He grabs a baseball from a nearby shelf, rubs it up, and demonstrates the grip and sharp wrist-snapping motion that made his pitch plummet.

It’s no stretch to say that for a brief period of time Joe Kotowicz was arguably Kingston’s best pitcher and perhaps a prospect for the pros. That latter suggestion was floated more than once by none other than longtime Whig-Standard hall-of-fame sports editor Mike Rodden. Take Rodden’s report of a 1957 Kingston Baseball Association senior finals playoff game at the Cricket Field. The headline read: “Giants Blanked by Youthful Joe Kotowych” (sic).

Rodden began: “Young Joe Kotowicz, talented and icy-cool 17-year-old righthander, revived memories of a budding Arnie Jarrell…” Noting the teenager’s post-season dominance over the talent-laden, runaway pennant-winning Razors (19 innings, zero earned runs, a meagre dozen hits surrendered), the sportswriter added, “This is pitching guile that bespeaks rare ability…a pitching masterpiece by a youngster who is headed for a place in the sun.”

“All I did as a kid was play baseball, every single day I could,” the oldtimer recalls, as Sparky, his pet budgie, perches on his shoulder. “The game meant everything to me.”

Joe Kotowicz, 81, reminisces on his early baseball days when he was arguably one of Kingston’s best pitchers. Photo by Patrick Kennedy

Joe never reached his “place” in the baseball sun, denied by the realities of everyday life – marriage, a young family, a workaday existence. Fate, too, played a part, too: Invited to pitch before a St. Louis Cardinals scout, the teenager caught the Asiatic flu and nearly died. Joe was just 25 when he toed the rubber for the final time.

He grows wistful remembering “growing up” at Megaffin Stadium, the then-new ball yard situated a couple of tape-measure home runs from the Kotowicz home. Though still a wee lad when the professional Ponies arrived, Joe soon became a regular at the games.

“I had my spots where I could sneak (into the stadium), but I also got in free for working any job they gave me,” he adds. “I sold programs, manned the scoreboard, served as bat boy a few times, peeled potatoes for the concession. I even climbed up to the press box and played (pre-game) music. If you were lucky, you came home with a few coins and maybe a baseball and a broken bat, which of course you fixed and used again.

“It was a magical time,” he adds. “You could be free and be a kid. You went to the games with friends, you came home afterwards, and your parents never worried.”

Joe’s been ‘coming home” to the same 1875 white frame house for most of his 81 years. His immigrant father, Sam, who worked at the nearby Davies Tannery, moved the family there when Joe, the youngest of three Kotowicz children, was just four years old. Joe got married and moved out in ’68 only to return in ’92 when the marriage dissolved. Always a devoted son, he was welcomed company for ageing parents who were both in their 90s.

The neighbourhood, however, had changed, and not for the best.

“I was sitting on the front porch the very first night I was home, and I saw four hookers right across the street. I let it go at first, but a day or two later I went over and said to them, ‘You’ve got five minutes to leave or I’m calling the cops.’”

The working girls laughed off Joe’s threat, so Joe opted for Plan B. He took to carrying a camera whenever he ventured out. The sight of a camera-wielding onlooker standing near idling vehicles “scared off the johns,” Joe notes with a chuckle. “That solved the problem.”