Mike Antony Maggiacomo sees himself as a pitcher who has to “let it go.”

“The only way I’m going to be accurate is if I let it go,” he says.

And that’s what happened Friday when Maggiacomo, 55, became stuck between two walls for more than three hours next to a Walgreens on Kapiolani Boulevard.

He says he was throwing a baseball against a wall when it bounced into the space between the former Heald College site and Walgreens. He’s lost five or six balls to that space, so he thought he would finally go get them.

He slid a wooden pallet down into the space, shimmied down to it and was able to stand on it. But he decided he would have to leave the pallet to reach the balls on the ground — to let it go. But the wall narrowed as it went down, and Maggiacomo soon realized he wasn’t able to move.

Firefighters responded after others heard Maggiacomo calling for help, stuck in a horizontal position. They freed Maggiacomo by using saws to cut a hole about 4 feet high and 2 feet wide into a wall of concrete and rebar.

“You never get to say thank you to everybody,” he says.

Maggiacomo, who is homeless, says he wanted the balls because he dreams of starting a male and female baseball team called the Skylanders.

He grew up in Massachusetts and did a stint in the Army in Korea before coming to Hawaii in the mid-’80s.

A carpenter by trade, he’s struggled with drugs most of his life. In the late ’80s he said he went to Guam, where his son Christopher was born, and played for the Pepsi Giants, a baseball team in the Guam Major League, but he was sent to prison after being caught using someone else’s name.

In 1994 he said he made the cut for the University of Hawaii at Hilo’s baseball team, but drug problems kept him benched.

“That’s my uniform, pal,” he says. “Black sheep.”

He recalls being in extreme pain while stuck in that space Friday as a rock below him pierced into his side.

“How many times I got to tap out, ref?” he recalled saying. “It would be easier for them if I were dead.”