Little League, Big Dreams Read online

  Little League, BIG DREAMS

  * * *

  The Hope, the Hype and the Glory of the Greatest World Series Ever Played

  CHARLES EUCHNER

  PHOTOGRAPHY BY ISABEL CHENOWETH

  Copyright © 2006 by Charles Euchner

  Internal photos © Isabel Chenoweth, Isabel Chenoweth Photography

  Cover and internal design © 2006 by Sourcebooks, Inc.

  Cover photo © Isabel Chenoweth, Isabel Chenoweth Photography

  Sourcebooks and the colophon are registered trademarks of Sourcebooks, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks, Inc.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Euchner, Charles C.

  Little League, big dreams : the hope, the hype and the glory of the greatest

  World Series ever played / Charles Euchner.

  p. cm.

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4022-0661-0

  ISBN-10: 1-4022-0661-5

  1. Little League World Series (Baseball) (2005) 2. Little League World Series

  (Baseball) I. Title.

  GV880.5.E83 2006

  796.357’62—dc22

  2006012970

  Printed and bound in the United States of America.

  LSI 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2

  To a few who taught me along the way

  WAYNE COFFEY

  JIM LEESON

  ALEX HEARD

  Contents

  PREGAME: “Put Me In, Coach”

  CHAPTER 1: “The Greatest Sporting Event on the Planet”

  CHAPTER 2: Arriving at the Show

  CHAPTER 3: The Rise of Little League

  CHAPTER 4: Working Class Champs from Paradise

  CHAPTER 5: Little League Dynasty in the Caribbean

  CHAPTER 6: Training to Win

  CHAPTER 7: Now Pitching for Faust…

  CHAPTER 8: Hustling

  CHAPTER 9: Faith and Survival

  CHAPTER 10: It’s Not Whether You Win or Lose…

  CHAPTER 11: The Future Is Here

  CHAPTER 12: How They Play the Game

  CHAPTER 13: The Greatest Little League World Series Ever

  CHAPTER 14: The Life of Champions

  POSTGAME: Finding the Soul of Little League

  APPENDIX

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  INDEX

  For millions of American children, spring begins with tryouts for Little League.

  PREGAME

  “Put Me In, Coach”

  IN THE SIXTY-EIGHT YEARS SINCE A CLERK at a local oil-supply company in a small Pennsylvania town created Little League, upwards of forty million kids have played in all fifty states and more than one hundred countries around the world. Most of us have not been very good. When people talk about “Little League plays,” they’re talking about comical stuff, Larry-Moe-and-Curley routines—fielders dodging grounders and overthrowing balls, baserunners arriving at the same base at the same time, long sequences of wild pitches and passed balls, innings long on walks and short on action.

  At the same time, Little Leaguers and their parents and coaches often take the experience very seriously. From the very day that he decided to create a boys baseball league—Title IX and the National Organization for Women forced Little League to admit girls in 1974—Carl Stotz wanted players to act like miniature versions of big leaguers. He wanted teams to wear spiffy uniforms, play on well-manicured fields, hire umpires to call balls and strikes, and assign scorekeepers to keep track of standings and statistics.

  It’s natural for kids to imitate adults. Girls put on their mothers’ dresses and heels and apply rouge and lipstick, and boys dress up in cowboy gear and Daniel Boone hats and baseball uniforms. New Yorker cartoons poke fun at the make-believe mannerisms of Little Leaguers. In one 1999 cartoon, a coach tells two parents: “Would you explain to your son that there’s no free agency in T-ball?” A 1970 cartoon shows Little Leaguers celebrating a championship by pouring cans of soda over each other.

  But in Little League, kids don’t only imitate adults, but participate in a worldwide multimillion-dollar organization that organizes that dressing up and imitation for them. One long-running lament about Little League is that the parents take it much too seriously. Fathers devote not only whole summers to running the teams, but spend off-seasons plotting out their course. They scout players whose age is in the single digits. They make complicated strategy for player drafts. They contemplate trades (seriously). They work with designers on uniforms. They often care more about Little League than their jobs or family life.

  Kids line up for their chance to try out for the Original Little League in Williamsport, Pennsylvania.

  Little League has a strange un-Peanuts quality that has become the norm in America today. In the classic comic strip by Charles Shultz, the children lead lives free of adults. Charlie Brown, Linus, Lucy, Peppermint Patty, and the whole Peanuts gang create their own world of fantasy and play. Adults are neither seen nor heard, except for the occasional squawking sounds of teachers in the background. But in Little League—and other programs for sports, music, camps, and other activities—the adults have come to set the rules and manage every aspect of children’s play.

  The adults script the action in Little League and its ultimate event, the Little League World Series, down to the last detail. The kids, in turn, mimic the adults’ words and actions. No matter what the issue—pitch counts, curveballs, other teams and coaches, umpires, swimming in the pool—the kids say whatever the adults said, in fewer but similar words. When they’re together, you see the child constantly looking to the adult for approval and permission. The easiest way to get parents’ approval is to mimic their words and mannerisms. To an eerie degree, that’s the story of the Little League World Series.

  And that’s why so many of the adults enjoy the experience so much. Coach after coach told me that he liked working with twelve-year-olds because they didn’t talk back and argue. You say something, and they let it soak in and try to make it their own. The word “sponge” came up again and again—as in, “these kids are sponges; they’ll absorb everything you say without a whole lot of resistance.” After Little League, parents, teachers, and coaches say they encounter more resistance when they try to teach kids. The kids start to think for themselves and push back more aggressively.

  Like millions of people, I know something about the pros and cons of Little League from personal experience.

  I started playing Little League in the summer of 1970 when I was nine years old. My parents just moved our family to a small town on the Mississippi River called Muscatine, Iowa. We didn’t know anyone in town, and my parents thought Little League would be a good way for me to get out and meet other boys. My parents were casual baseball fans—they rooted for the New York Mets, the city’s replacement for their former favorite team, the Brooklyn Dodgers. No one in my family was especially athletic, but my parents liked the idea of their kid playing Little League.

  I hated the idea.

  My parents had to force me to go. I tried to avoid it. I hid once or twice and I grumbled about why do I have to play that stupid game in that stupid league. It didn’t help that my team, the White Sox, was terrible. Or that I was terrible. I couldn’t hit, or field, or throw. I was posted in right field, where my chances
to mess up were minimal.

  But sometime during that first season—as I stood out among the dandelions, watching those endless innings—I started to like baseball. The game’s rhythm and episodic action pleased me. I peppered my father with questions about the infield fly rule and scorekeeping. I liked chasing and, occasionally, catching the ball. I never could hit, but I drew a fair number of walks and considered myself quite the baserunner. Before long, I followed my parents’ lead and became a Mets fan. I started imitating my favorite players—Tom Seaver, Tommie Agee, and Cleon Jones—when I put on my uniform. That uniform was just a black T-shirt with the team name and Little League insignia silkscreened in white. But it was enough.

  With some pitches reaching the plate at a major-league equivalent of 100 miles an hour, it’s a wonder anyone manages to make contact with the ball.

  We played fourteen games—winning just two of them—and when school let out I wanted to play more. In the neighborhood where we lived, kids from all over would gather near my house, on a cul-de-sac, to play in the street. Even though (or because) we didn’t have uniforms or keep score, it was a lot more fun than Little League.

  We played with kids ranging in age from seven to about fourteen or fifteen. We usually played half-field, because the street wasn’t wide enough for a full diamond. We often played without teams. Different kids would play the positions and move around the diamond—right to left in the outfield, then third to first base in the infield, and finally pitcher to catcher—until they got a shot at bat. If you caught a fly, you’d trade places with the hitter, which created the perverse incentive of not hitting fly balls beyond the infield.

  We wore out dozens of baseballs—not because we hit them hard, but because most of them were inexpensive and poorly made. For the cheapies, we paid 69 cents. Sometimes a kid would bring a more expensive ball, but not often. We’d hit the cover off the ball and then tape it up, again and again. Sometimes we let the cover stay off and we hit the ball until the string trailed along the ball as it wobbled across the street.

  All these years later, I give Little League the credit for introducing me to baseball. I have not always been a dedicated fan—I have other interests too—but I have always come back to baseball. A number of years ago, when I was studying urban affairs, I wrote a book about the politics of sports in major-league cities. For years, when I lived in Boston, the Red Sox were part of the everyday rhythms of my life. Walking on the street, I’d call out to perfect strangers, “What happened?” and they’d tell me the Red Sox score. They knew what I was asking about.

  Baseball is a great game both because of the tension of a low-scoring game (which I prefer) and the dizziness of a slugfest (which can be fun occasionally). I like to see a power pitcher like Pedro Martinez overwhelm the opposition and a finesse artist like Greg Maddux flummox the other side. I like to see Manny Ramirez smash the ball out to the Mass Pike. And I like to see singles hitters like Ichiro Suzuki hit the ball exactly where the fielders ain’t.

  But I don’t just like baseball at its best. Like a lot of people, I have seen a few Little League World Series games on TV over the years. More often than not, the quality of play was strong enough to keep me tuned in.

  The best Little League players are very good. They pitch hard, locate their pitches not only near the strike zone but in the right part of the strike zone. They hit the ball hard—amazing, when you think about it, because balls whistle in to the plate at a major-league equivalent of ninety, ninety-five, even 100 miles an hour. (Those equivalents are determined by how much time a batter has to hit the ball; because the Little League field is smaller, a seventy-two-m.p.h. pitch allows as much time to swing as a ninety-four-m.p.h. pitch on a standard field.) The best Little Leaguers field well, keep their eyes on the ball, and know where to throw when they get the ball. They know how to hit the cutoff man and get a baserunner caught in a pickle.

  The very idea of televising kids’ games has always seemed strange to me, but then again, the mass media always look for oddball stories. For years, the championship game was aired on Wide World of Sports, ABC’s sports anthology. Wide World showed any event that could be turned into a contest, so the annual Little League game didn’t strike me as too strange.

  In the last generation, the Little League World Series has lost its status as the elite showcase of kids’ baseball in America. Tens of thousands of travel teams have come into being. Those teams play in hundreds of tournaments across the U.S., all year long. Even though Little League’s national tournament gets ungodly exposure on TV, the best baseball gets played elsewhere. The best 100 or 200 travel teams are probably better than the teams in the Little League World Series.

  Little League might not even have the best talent in community leagues anymore. Cal Ripken Baseball, the PONY League, and even Dixie Baseball now attract players as good or better.

  But TV keeps shining the spotlight on the Little League World Series. In 1984, a new cable TV network called ESPN—hungry for programming of any kind—started broadcasting more and more games from the Little League World Series. Every year, the Little League World Series TV schedule expanded. By 2005, thirty-seven games were broadcast on either ABC or ESPN.

  It’s like Little League has done the impossible and invented a perpetual motion machine. Little League got TV to broadcast the games as a novelty; as the years have gone by, more and more games have gotten on the air, which draws a bigger and bigger national audience, which draws some ringers from travel teams, which makes for a good show…and that convinces the suits at ABC and ESPN to keep broadcasting the games.

  To supporters, Little League offers a priceless opportunity for kids—and their parents and neighbors—to get together and play the game at the community level. Because they’re volunteers, coaches do it for the love of the game, and that spirit infuses everything the teams’ families do together. Even though most coaches have not played at a high level, they are usually lifelong enthusiasts of the game and have plenty to teach kids about hitting and pitching, fielding and teamwork.

  Over the course of a season, teams often come together in ways that amaze everyone involved. Little League becomes a primary way for neighbors to get to know each other, and the spirit of teamwork continues off the field. After the fathers and mothers have dragged equipment to the field, prepared potluck meals, and traveled together to tournaments, they become a big extended family.

  Along the way, the children learn not only the great game of baseball, but also something about how communities work together. If baseball is part of America’s civic religion, then Little League provides the village churches that animate that spirit.

  To detractors, Little League and its annual World Series represent the worst aspects of modern childhood. Rather than simply letting kids run free in the summertime, to play games and swim and build forts, modern parents insist on organizing and professionalizing childhood. Kids get signed up for Little League, swim teams, computer camps, basketball tournaments, music lessons, church retreats and don’t have a chance to make their own worlds.

  Parents and coaches are so determined to win that they put their kids through grinding summers of practices and tournaments with travel teams. Before their arms have fully developed, kids are throwing curveballs that could ruin their arms forever. The kids are told to commit fully or get off the team. When they travel to tournaments, they aren’t allowed to swim in hotel or dorm pools for fear that they’ll stub a toe or overtax their developing muscles. When they lose, they get chastised. When they win, they’re told they didn’t win by enough.

  When an umpire blows a call, the coaches and parents complain bitterly. They stomp around and scream (as I heard countless times following Little League tournaments), “You suck, ump!”

  Behind the scenes, some families quarrel with each other. With TV time on the line, some parents snipe about playing time. Why does her kid get to pitch? My kid’s better! When a manager makes a questionable decision on the field, parents are quick to
complain. After games, cell phones ring with grievances about field strategy and treatment of kids.

  Experts on youth sports have a term to express the problems that swirl around major events like the Little League World Series—Achievement by Proxy Disorder, or ABPD. When parents and coaches depend on their children to succeed for the sake of the adults, competition becomes corrupted. Kids should play for enjoyment, to develop their bodies, and learn teamwork and fair play. But the adults often turn the game into their own field of dreams.

  Sometimes, you wish the adults would just leave the field and let the kids run their own games, like the Peanuts characters.

  “It felt like the players were the pawns on the chessboard for those coaches and adults,” Mike Ludwikowski, Little League’s trainer, told me after one bitter contest between teams from California and Florida.

  In reality, both assessments of Little League are right. The poet Keats talked about “negative capability,” the ability to hold contradictory thoughts in your mind at the same time without pushing too hard for some resolution—in his words, “capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts.” To understand Little League, you need that approach. Little League is both good and bad, richly rewarding and exploitive, a special little cocoon and a harsh microscope, fun for fun’s sake and a corporate hustle, a place of new friendships and a time of wrenching homesickness, an opportunity to learn a great game and a place where coaches often teach the wrong lessons.

  Somehow, coaches and parents need to find a way for kids to experience the exhilaration of competition while also acknowledging that the kids are just kids. Some children thrive on the pressure and others wilt. Competition can be great. I wouldn’t want to shield children from any kind of competition or test. But it’s also important for adults to keep the game a kid’s game, to know when enough is enough—and give the kids an easy way to say when they’ve had enough.