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(Photo: NICK REYNOLDS / Staff Photo)

The Heritage Builders Softball League in Ithaca threw its first pitch with a heavy heart Tuesday night, as the league gathered to remember its first opening day in a long while without Jeff Rosenberg, of Elmira.

A mainstay on the softball circuit and a regular on the Uncle Joe’s roster, “Rosey,” as his friends knew him, died of colon cancer earlier this year after a four-year battle with the disease; he had his first surgery in January 2012.

Several dozen players, family members and friends were on a sunny field by Cass Park’s ice rink Tuesday to remember a man who refused to be held down by the cancer inside him.

One of his last wishes, league Commissioner Stu Bergman said, was to have his ashes scattered on the Ithaca ball field. The city wouldn’t have allowed that, so Bergman had to substitute potting soil, which he plopped on the bleachers in front of him.

ITHACA JOURNAL

Jeffrey D. Rosenberg's Obituary on Ithaca Journal

 

“Some of you knew him, and some of you didn’t,” Bergman said to those assembled. “But you’re here.”

Rosenberg’s presence loomed large on the Cass Park diamonds. A player for 28 years up through his diagnosis, he was a fighter through his treatment, undergoing seven rounds of chemotherapy as well as surgery. He made it back on the diamond the following year and got a hit in the final game of the season, time enough to see Bergman and teammate Kevin Faehndrich put on "Rosey Night," a benefit to raise money to offset some of the costs associated with Rosenberg's cancer treatment.

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Stu Bergman, commissioner of the Heritage Builders Men's Softball League, addresses the assembled crowd at opening night Tuesday in Cass Park. (Photo: NICK REYNOLDS / Staff Photo)

 

The $600 raised went to start a foundation to help spread Rosenberg's method of, as he put it in a 2013 interview, "embracing" his disease and using his perspective to help others cope.

He was always one to put friend before self, the league members recalled, many recounting their favorite Rosey memories before the first pitch was thrown Tuesday. There was “the Rosey run” — how he’d charge toward home, head held back and a competitive fever in his eye. There was the month he made the trip from Elmira, where he moved a decade ago, several times a week to help a player with his pitching mechanics.

“At the end of his life, he went on a cruise every month,” Bergman said. “One of them, he invited me. He says, ‘I got good news, and I got bad news. Good news; you’re taking a cruise. Bad news; you’re gonna miss softball.’”

His last 10 years, Rosey played catcher on Bergman’s team. He wasn’t remembered as much of a talker in the box, respecting his opponent’s ability to dig in at the plate, but he was out for victory; his winning streak was ingrained in his DNA.

“One of the last things he said to me, before he died,” his sister, Myra Maclag of Rochester, recalled. “Was ‘Myra, I’m coming back a major leaguer.”