Former All-Star Red Sox shortstop Rico Petrocelli: “blessed” to have grown up in Brooklyn
Brookyn native and famous former Boston Red Sox All-Star shortstop Rico Petrocelli was born in Coney Island Hospital just off Ocean Parkway near Coney Island Avenue in 1943. Petrocelli is the youngest of seven children whose family lived near the hospital on West 3rd Street.
Later, when Petrocelli was seven, his family moved to Bedford Stuyvesent on Kosciusko Street. That’s when he first started playing stickball and basketball. During the spring and summer months, he and his friends played stickball in the streets every day, or as he jokingly said in a recent interview with the Brooklyn Eagle; “We played until someone broke a window, and then we all scattered.”
When he was 10 his family moved to Sheepshead Bay, and that’s when, at 12 years old, the future major league star played his first organized baseball.