by Mo'ne Davis
“Keep singing, keep singing,” we kept telling Myles.
We won the fall championship!
Myles would just start singing sometimes, and his singing became like good luck to us. Another day when we were down, we told Myles, “Sing while you’re batting!”
He started singing that song on his way up to the plate. We thought it was funny. We could even see his lips moving while he was standing at the plate and batting. For some reason, Myles kept singing and singing. He was an inspiration to us, and next thing we knew, he had hit a home run. Sweet!
We always laughed and had fun with each other and kept each other in a good mood.
That year, I got a lot better in basketball also. Even though my goal as the point guard is to help my teammates to score, sometimes Coach Brady asks me to help.
“Okay, Mo, now it’s time,” she tells me. “We need you to score some points.”
“Okay, Coach.”
When a coach asks a point guard to score, most of the time they mean that we should run some fast breaks. So I turn on the gas, but only as hard as I have to for us to get where Coach Brady wants us.
“She fakes people out; she does it under her legs and behind her back,” says Destiny.
“One game we were yelling and calling her Mo’ne, Mo’zart, Mo’ney, Money Mo’, Mo’ Easy,” says Nahla. “If you look in her eyes, you just see the determination to win.”
It’s always important to listen to the coach and be thoughtful about the other members of your team. When we catch back up, Coach will say, “Let’s see who else can contribute to the game.” Then I go back to the point guard’s main role of setting my teammates up to score.
But every game is not a success. The next month my team played Abington. Coach asked me to score some points, and I did—I scored thirty-four of our team’s forty-six points. But when the game was on the line, I let my team down. I missed five out of five free throws in the fourth quarter. The game ended in a tie, and it was all my fault. Normally I make 90 percent of my free throws. We would have won if I had made even one of them.
“Normally the game’s over, that’s it; win, lose, or whatever, she says, ‘That was fun, we did our best,’ and it’s over,” Coach Brady says. “This one she was visibly upset. For a moment she hung her head. But if you don’t know her well enough, you wouldn’t know it.”
One of the things that I thought was really cool that year was that at the end of the school year, I won the seventh grade advisors’ award. I didn’t know that the teachers, they watch your every step. So they pick certain things up about you like how well you manage your work and stay close to your friends. The award is for a girl who has a great work ethic, calm determination, and great tenacity in everything she does and inspires others to do their best work. I try very hard to be that girl.
CHAPTER 11
THE CHANCE TO COMPETE
AFTER ALL THE HARD WORK, SACRIFICE, AND DEDICATION, the summer of 2014, when I turned thirteen years old, was the best year of my young life.
That April baseball season started off with a bang.
On a day that was a little chilly but kind of warm, I hit a home run on my very first at bat. The next day, I hit another home run. We were winning, and the bases were loaded, and the ball faded right toward the foul line but stayed fair, and this time it made it over the wall. It was my very first grand slam.
For the next five weeks, I hit a home run every week. I don’t know how I did it. I think I retired from the twelve-year-olds’ team tied with Zion for the most grand slams—that year I hit two.
My pitches were humming also. It was kind of like I had found this zone.
“Physically she had refined her game and had command of her pitches,” Coach Steve says. “There are a lot of kids who throw harder, but none of them pitch.”
But I was throwing pretty hard. One day, Coach Steve brought a radar gun to practice and clocked one of my pitches at sixty-seven miles per hour. Wow! I wasn’t even throwing hard that day.
At the same time, we still played in the Tri-State Elite Baseball League and in weekend tournaments. After school let out in June, we played in the Cooperstown All Star Village tournament again, a thirty-two-team national tournament against teams from all across the country.
We went in as one of the tournament’s underdogs. Some of the other teams were the kind that go out every year to try to recruit the best players they can find. They do whatever it takes to win. Sometimes the kids don’t even know each other. They just fly in and out and don’t see each other in between. Their only goal is to win. That’s about the opposite of the Monarchs, where we see each other almost every day, and everyone plays baseball, basketball, and soccer, even if it’s not their best or favorite sport.
Our first game out, we beat the San Carlos Stingers on the Green Monster, the name of one of the fields that has a twenty-feet-high outfield fence. Then we beat another California team or two and even a Texas team. We proved to ourselves that we could compete with any team in the country.
It was a double-elimination tournament—lose twice and you’re out. We came out of the winner’s bracket with a 5–1 record.
“We went straight from the bottom team to the powerhouse of the tournament,” Scott remembers.
Between games, we lived in the All Star Village together. Our team stayed in the Jackie Robinson bunkhouse. The team right across from us was the Orinda Falcons, from California. We talked to them a lot, and their parents were super nice—they went to McDonald’s and brought us back french fries. We traded pins and undershirts with them and all the other kids. By the end of the week, we knew everybody.
At that Cooperstown tournament, we probably had our best-ever day. We played three games in a single day. We won our first two—we beat Top Prospects from Illinois. Then we played the Delta Dawgs from California, another really good team.
“Mo threw a forty-eight-pitch complete game,” Scott says. “They called it after five innings because of the ten-run rule.”
The ten-run rule is also called the slaughter rule. It means that if a team gets down by ten, they just end the game so they won’t get slaughtered.
Our next game up was against Team Mizuno, a powerhouse team from California.
“The team had no chemistry whatsoever,” Scott says. “We could hear the kids calling out numbers because they didn’t know each other’s names.”
The crowd was huge that afternoon—it was a big game!
We were down 4–1 going into the top of the sixth inning, the last inning. Our first two batters that inning got on. But then Scott missed a good pitch and flew out to left field.
I was up next. I got down in the count—it was 0–2. But then I got a good look at a pitch.
“Mo hits a line-drive homer straight over the center-field wall, to tie the game,” Scott says. “It was crazy! She put us back in it.”
Now the game was tied. Jahli was up, and he was hot! He had already hit two homers that game, and five that day.
So Team Mizuno brought in their best pitcher.
“He was HUGE,” Scott says. “He was throwing total gas!”
Even Jahli had a hard time handling his fastball. He also had a really good curveball.
“He was throwing really hard,” Jahli says. “I got a piece of him, but I struck out.”
Jared had been pitching that game. It was probably the best game he had ever pitched. He was dealing! He intentionally walked the three and four batters, because they were their best hitters, which meant the bases were loaded. But then he reached the pitch limit we had set for him for that day. Coach brought me into the game.
“She had only thrown forty-eight pitches the game before, so she still had a ton of arm left,” says Scott. “There were two outs, and a 2–2 count.”
So it was the bottom of the sixth inning and the game was mine to win or lose.
I wasn’t really nervous about it, because I knew that I could strike the kid out.
I threw a curve
ball, right down the middle.
Everyone started walking off the field—the Monarchs, the Mizuno kids on the bases, even the batter. But then the umpire called it a ball.
Are you kidding me? I thought. Okay, let’s just get this next one.
“Are you kidding me?” Coach Steve shouted at the umpire.
“You’re gone!” the umpire yelled right back, giving the sign that Coach had been ejected.
Coach never yells, and here he yells once and he’s kicked out of the game on the very last pitch? I had never seen Coach kicked out of a game before. But I had to focus on my pitches.
Now there were two outs, bases loaded, three balls and two strikes, and Coach Steve was on the other side of the fence.
I was pretty calm. Scott and I have been doing this for a long time, and we know each other inside and out. Then Scott did something sneaky. While Jared was pitching, Scott had figured out that the runner on second was stealing his signals.
“I noticed it early in the game,” Scott says. “They would move their arms up and down when it was a curveball, and they would fix their jerseys when it was a fastball.”
So we called a flip—we changed our signals.
“Mo threw a fastball, right down the middle, and the kid froze since the runner who stole my sign had motioned that it was going to be a curveball,” says Scott. “It was a strike.”
The kid dropped his head, dropped the bat, and turned toward the dugout.
“Ball four!”
What?! I had no idea what the umpire was thinking!
The batter was as shocked as everyone else. So he walked to first, and the runner on third scored.
We lost to Team Mizuno 6–5.
All the Monarchs threw their gloves down in disgust. Everyone in the crowd started jumping up and down and yelling. Everyone was screaming at the umpire. It was just terrible.
Some of us were so upset, we started crying.
“I wasn’t there, since I had to work,” my mom says. “But my job was watching it live-streamed on GameChanger. They showed how the ball went right down the middle of the plate.”
“And we got it on our camera,” says Coach Steve. “We had four cameras filming that game.”
After the game, one of the other coaches walked up to Coach Steve.
He said, “It was an absolute travesty what they did to your kids.”
For the rest of the afternoon, every coach kept coming up to us and telling us we were robbed. Even the coach of Team Mizuno said, “First of all, I should have been the one kicked out. And second of all, both of those pitches were strikes.”
If we had won, we would have played the San Diego Stingers, the team that we had beaten earlier that week, in the championship. Too bad for the Stingers, they had no pitchers left for the championship game. They ended up losing 13–10.
After their game was over, we all went to the championship dinner. The Mizuno kids were already sitting down when we got there, so we went over and congratulated them. We were still upset and we still thought the game had been called unfairly. But Coach had taught us to be classy—win or lose. That’s what a Monarch does.
In addition to the schedule we play for the Monarchs, some of us also play in an in-house league at the Baseball League at Markward Playground, just a few blocks from my house.
I didn’t know about it then, but at the end of the previous season, Coach Steve had had a conversation with Coach Alex Rice, Taney’s baseball coach.
We already knew Coach Alex and his son, Jack, both from playing against Taney and from playing in the Taney league. And Coach Steve ran camps and the kids from Taney would come. We pretty much knew all their players. Jack and another Taney kid, Jared, had also become Monarchs.
Well, it turns out that Jack and Jared had this dream of playing in the Little League World Series. When Jack was nine, Coach Alex had taken him to Williamsport to watch the Little League World Series, and Jack started dreaming about playing in it.
Now, most people think all youth baseball teams are Little League teams, but they’re not. You have to apply to be included in Little League and to play in their tournament. Originally the Taney league wasn’t officially Little League, and the Monarchs weren’t a Little League team either. Coach Alex had to apply to Little League headquarters to get their permission to join. So in 2013, Taney qualified as an official Little League team for the very first time. They did really well for just starting out—they made it to the district tournament.
At the end of that year, Coach Alex and Coach Steve were talking about their plans for next season, since it was the last year that we could play on the small-size baseball field. Your last year is a big deal because when the field jumps up to regulation size, it gets a lot harder and a lot of kids start to drop out.
“We’re gonna play Little League for one more year,” Coach Alex had told Coach Steve. “As far-fetched as it is, Jack and Jared still have this dream of getting to Williamsport.”
Coach Steve suggested that the rest of the Monarchs join the Taney League.
“We’ll have Scott, Mo’ne, Jahli, and Zion play in both leagues, along with Jack, Jared, and Carter, and they’ll be eligible to play in the Little League tournament for the Dragons,” Coach Steve said.
“Now that’s an idea,” Coach Alex said.
“Maybe we’ll have a really good team come out of that,” Coach Steve said.
“Imagine what the story would be if they ever got to Williamsport with a girl pitcher like Mo’ne.” Coach Alex laughed.
“Yeah, I know ESPN would do a story on it.” Coach Steve smiled.
Coach Steve tells this story about a movie called Mickey, written by John Grisham. In it a dad, who’s played by Harry Connick Jr., gets into some money trouble with the government after his wife dies and goes on the lam with his son, and sets up a new life and a new identity. But they had a moral dilemma: the kid had just gotten too old to play in Little League, which ends when you’re twelve. (Because my birthday is in June, I still make the cutoff, even though I turned thirteen.) But the boy’s new identity makes him twelve again. It raises a moral question: What would you do? The kid’s dad decided to let him play. Well, it turns out that the kid’s Little League team was super good. They made it to the championships in Williamsport and the kid’s face ended up on the front page of USA Today. Back when he watched it, Coach thought, “There’s no way a Little League kid would get famous enough to end up on the front page of USA Today.”
“When I got the email from Coach Steve saying that Mo’ne plays for another team, I didn’t think nothin’ of it,” my mom recalls. “I’m like, ‘Okay, well maybe they needed another pitcher.’”
My mom already knew about the Taney league because Qu’ran had played for them.
I played on a team called the Taney Wizards. My Monarch teammates were scattered across all of the Taney teams—the Wizards, the Centaurs, the Minotaurs, the Cyclops, and other teams. Our games were all over downtown Philadelphia.
“There were days when Mo’ne had a doubleheader with Anderson, then had to go to Taney to play a game. She might pitch at Anderson, and don’t pitch at Taney. She might pitch at Taney, but not pitch at Anderson,” my mom says.
Yep! I was pretty busy. In between all the Taney games we played our usual games in the Tri-State Elite League.
“They were everywhere—sometimes they were in New Jersey or out of state,” my mom says. “It was hard to know where she had to be from day to day.”
When I played for the Wizards, sometimes I had to pitch against my teammates on the Monarchs. That was weird, but also fun.
At the end of the Taney league, my team, the Wizards, actually won the entire Taney tournament. In the Taney league, I got to know the five new kids who would eventually be on the Dragons: Eli, Joe, Kai, Tai, and Erik, this great kid who everybody notices is always smiling.
All totaled, seven different Monarchs—Scott, Jahli, Carter, Jared, Jack, Zion, and me—ended up playing on the Taney Dragons.
More of the Monarchs would have played, but some of my teammates, they lived too far from Taney to meet the Little League rules about who qualified.
So this was my new team, and the Taney Dragons really wanted to get to Williamsport.
CHAPTER 12
THE ROAD TO WILLIAMSPORT
THE PATH TO THE LITTLE LEAGUE BASEBALL WORLD SERIES IS a long one, and super hard. You have to play in the district championship in your area and win that. Then you have to win sectionals, states, and regionals to even make it. You’ve gotta be good—and have a lot of good luck.
Since Coach Alex represented Taney, he became the head coach of the Taney Dragons. Coach Steve stepped aside and basically became just another parent. We weren’t wearing Anderson Monarch uniforms anymore. Instead, we wore navy blue jerseys that said Taney in white letters. I was wearing my normal number eleven.
We started out in the district tournament, which has ten teams in it.
When we won that we advanced to the sectionals. We won the sectional tournament, and we went on to the states. But after the sectionals, we lost Scott and Jahli from our team. Before any of this had happened, their parents had signed them up to go away to a camp in New Hampshire for a month, and it was already paid for. It was one of those kinds of camps where you can’t take your cell phone or talk to your parents. They could only write letters.
So all of a sudden, we didn’t have our leadoff hitter or number three hitter—or our catcher or second-base player for that matter. The rest of the team ended up moving around, from position to position, and all around the batting lineup. Coach Alex moved me from second to the top of the batting order, and, in between pitching, I mostly played second base.
The states started with a picnic, where we got to meet all the teams that won their sectional tournaments. We advanced through our bracket and eventually made it to the championship. At one point in the championship game, we were down 4–0, but we got it together and came back to take the lead. When we won, we were like, “Oh my god!” There were 370 teams in the state and we were the best out of all of them. Along the way we adopted a theme song, “We Dem Boyz” by Wiz Khalifa.