Pierotti's Clowns

In nineteen fifty-three, two brothers named Lou and Lee Pierotti founded one of the strangest sports teams in America right here in Los Alamos. Pierotti's Clowns played fast pitch softball in full clown makeup and costume, and they were called the Globetrotters of softball.

Here was the catch. They fielded only five players against the other team's nine, and they still won. Their pitcher could hurl the ball at more than one hundred miles an hour, fast enough to be nearly unhittable, while the rest of the squad worked the crowd with comic antics between plays.

Over nearly twenty-five years they won more than one hundred seventy games, appeared in six national magazines including the very first issue of Sports Illustrated, and raised more than two hundred thousand dollars for charity. They played their final game in nineteen seventy-seven.