Broad Street Billy: Loving baseball keeps a family together

DURING THESE DARK days for diehards, the five Kosoy cousins - native Philadelphians who have gathered at Phillies spring training in Clearwater, Fla., for 20 years - remind us why we love our Fightin's and the game of baseball:

AVRUM'S LEGACY: "Our family gathered every Sunday at my grandfather Avrum Kosoy's house on Columbia Avenue in what was once left field of Columbia Park, where the Philadelphia A's played from 1901 to 1908 before moving to Shibe Park," said Joel Cassway, 67.

"Baseball was always a hot topic of conversation at the Sunday dinner table," he said.

Cassway's cousin, Jerrold Casway, 67, a college history professor in Maryland, wrote a biography of Ed "King of Swatsville" Delahanty, a Hall of Fame 19th-century Phillies outfielder who died mysteriously in Niagara Falls.

"My dad introduced the game to me around the breakfast table, explaining the morning scores," Casway wrote in the preface.

"The names and numbers were brought to life by voices carried over summer-evening radio broadcasts and by the flickering black-and-white images on a small round television screen. The game was taught after dinner by my father in front of our small rowhouse on a narrow city street."

CRYING IN BASEBALL: Joel Cassway said he is "not ashamed to say that when I first read those words, tears came to my eyes" because they also ring true for him; his brother Robert, a Philadelphia architect, and cousins Jack Weisman, 81, who played Santa Claus in Philadelphia's Thanksgiving Day Parade for many years, and Howard Casway, 65, an assistant attorney general in Virginia.

All five Kosoy cousins - none of whom are named Kosoy because an immigration officer "Americanized" their names to Cassway and Casway - have kept the childhood bonds formed at their grandfather Avrum Kosoy's Sunday dinners alive by honoring his lifelong passion: Philadelphia baseball.

LIVE FROM GAME 5: Harry Kiehl, 71, of Norristown, a Phillies fan since the 1950s Whiz Kids, stood in the left field upper deck last night as Game 5 began, thrilled to be watching his first World Series game at the ballpark.

His grandson, Anthony Milillo, 28, of Blue Bell, bravely resisted the pressure of his Phillies' fan pals and took his grandfather to the do-or-die game.

"It took me a whole lifetime to get to my first World Series game last year," Milillo said. "I wanted to take my grandfather to his first one because you never know when this will happen again."