Exclusive | Meet NYCs oldest softball team, still swinging since 1982

It’s been 44 years since Willi Blumer last missed a softball season.He would be damned if this year was the first — even if he was too injured to actually play.

So when his longtime team, cheekily called Consenting Adults, gathered on a Central Park ball field last month, the 83-year-old pitcher settled onto the bench beside the people with whom he’s spent a lifetime of hits and runs.Then, as he has for decades, he followed them to the bar.“That felt great,” Blumer told The Post of being back after recovering from surgery.

There was never any doubt, he said, that he would make it back onto the field — even if he had to crawl there.That kind of devotion has held this ragtag co-ed crew together since 1982, when some of its members were in their late 20s or early 30s.That’s long enough to make Consenting Adults the oldest probable softball team in New York City.Blumer, Ed Campbell, 77, and Greg Czuchlewski, 71, have been there since the very first season, and many teammates have been coming since the 1990s and early 2000s.

Along the way, the roster has weathered personal triumphs, health battles, and losses, but the game has never stopped.“Based on my records, the team has played 448 games starting in 1982.Projecting the 4 years I’m missing takes us to almost 500!” said Czuchlewski, the team’s devoted statistician, who counts more than 135 people who’ve played at least one game.For Czuchlewski, softball has always meant youth.

As a teenager in Queens, he and the neighborhood kids would play in the park from morning until after dinner.“That was just like the heaven of having no responsibilities — it was still before people were getting jobs,” he said.In 1982, a friend in the magazine world pulled him onto a new team started by Scottish-born travel writer Robin McMillan, who borrowed its name from a racy marquee he’d passed in Times Square.Campbell, a psychologist, signed on that same year and claimed center field.

Money was tight, an...