by Mo'ne Davis
Our parents stayed in Williamsport, in hotels. The tournament lasts two weeks. We could only see them after games in a tent outside the Grove. At first just Squirt was staying over. My mom would drive back and forth from Philly, and bring my brothers and sister, and my brother’s friends—I call them my cousins, and one of them my brother—from South Philly. But then she would have to go back to work.
Qayyah and Yirah would also come up on different days.
“We saw men and kids on other teams wearing Mo’ne T-shirts and a lot of posters and signs,” says Qayyah.
“I had a shirt, too,” says Yirah. “Mine had a picture of us three.”
During the week, Emma and I got to know each other, and I got to see her play a little bit. She was really nice, and she told me a lot about her team. Emma is also a pitcher and she plays first base. She played on the same team as her brother, who catches sometimes.
Play started in the double-elimination bracket on Thursday, August 14, but we didn’t have to play till the next day. Since the complex had this great rec room with a TV, Ping-Pong, video games, and lots of other stuff, me, Scott, Zion, Jared, and Jahli went there to hang out. I was playing Ping-Pong against Zion. One time, I hit the ball off the table and it rolled over by the TV. Zion went over to get it, and while he was getting the ball, he looked up at the screen.
“Oh, hey, Sport Science is coming up,” he said. Sport Science is this show on ESPN about the science and engineering of athletics. “Wait, it’s your name!” he shouted.
“What?” I asked him.
“I said it’s your name,” he said. “Like, you’re gonna be on Sport Science!”
I didn’t understand what he was talking about, but then the show came on, and it was about me—that was surprising and kind of weird!
They said that my pitching relied on “pristine mechanics,” not my size or my strength. They said that every time I throw the ball, the place where I let go of it—the release point—never changes by more than three degrees. That’s pretty precise! They said my arm moves 15 percent slower than a major league pitcher’s, but they still clocked my fastball at seventy miles per hour. Since we play on a smaller field, they said that batters have to react as fast to my pitches as a major leaguer would to a pitcher throwing a ninety-one-mile-per-hour fastball. They also compared my body mechanics to Phillies closer Jonathan Papelbon. He’s from Philly, and we’re from Philly, so that was cool. It was pretty nice to be a thirteen-year-old being compared to thirty-five-year-olds!
A little while after that, Eli and Jared came up to me and said, “You gotta come out of the Grove and go to the field, people are looking for you.”
They said it was these kids from North Philly who knew me. At first I was a little confused, but then I was like, “Okay, maybe I do know them.”
We thought they meant, like, four people, but when we got down to the field, it was a whole lot of people, and I didn’t know any of them. They wanted our pictures and autographs. On one hand that was kind of cool, but it was also kind of awkward. And there were a lot of adults—that was kind of creepy. We signed a few autographs, then Eli and Jared left us, and Scott, Zion, and I kind of got stuck in a corner. After a while, we just started walking away, then turned a corner and ran as fast as we could back to the Grove.
Later, we bumped into the Great Lakes and New England teams. They were having fun, having a battle with really bad funny raps, and combining their names and calling themselves “New Lakes.” We were just laughing at them. That’s when we first started talking to the kids from the Great Lakes team, Jackie Robinson West, from Chicago. They were the only other city team. Just knowing that another team had been inspired by Jackie Robinson, just like the Monarchs were, made me think a lot about the sacrifices he made so we could be here.
Before our championship series began, we started getting more superstitious. We reminded each other to be careful not to step on any lines on the baseball field before the game. I was careful to put some change or my barnstorming wristband in my back pocket. Jared made sure to sleep with a ball beneath his pillow. Scott had his orange ball. Every time he had it with him in the dugout we would win, so he brought it. And Zion kept praying before our games.
Game 1: Mid-Atlantic vs. Southeast Region: South Nashville, Tennessee
When I put on my uniform, on Friday, August 15, I put seven one-dollar bills in one of my pants pockets and a nickel in the other one for good luck.
Our opening-round game started at three that afternoon.
It was the first time we had walked out onto the field of Howard J. Lamade Stadium, one of the two stadiums the Little League World Series is played on. The stadiums have this really nice grass called Kentucky bluegrass. The clay on the mound and base paths is almost orange and really smooth—a lot different from what we normally play on. I was careful not to step on the lines.
The stands at Lamade run along the first- and third-base lines. When we were warming up, they were already pretty crowded. There is also this big hill behind the outfield fence. That hill was packed with people sitting in lawn chairs. There was a sidewalk behind that part of the hill, and the hill kept going on the other side of that. That hill got packed, too. Eventually, about thirty-five thousand people watched us.
Coach Alex decided I would be pitching that day. In between warm-up pitches, I could see our families sitting in the front row along the third-base line, in the VIP seats for parents. For the first time, I could see my mom, but I couldn’t hear her.
ESPN2 was televising the game, and there were cameras all over the place.
Reporters were walking around with signs, asking, “Who are Jared’s parents?” “Who are Mo’ne’s parents?” The parents raised their hands, or other parents pointed them out, so that the cameras could find them during the game.
I can’t remember who, but right before we started, someone said, “That’s why we made it here, so try to savor every moment that you can.”
The whole situation was super, super exciting.
I breathed deeply and thought about Jackie Robinson, and how his courage generations ago helped me make it here.
But I was nervous.
I was biting my nails, until Jared came up and hit a three-run home run.
Later on, he told a reporter, “I just wanted to help Mo’ne out. Because I knew she was going to do well, but she needs a couple of runs. As soon as it went out, I was very excited.”
Jared, he’s nice, he’s very intelligent, and he’s very funny. Although he acts like he’s the oldest, Jared is the youngest member of our team, so it was amazing that he could do that.
After Jared homered, the nerves kind of went away, and we were just all telling each other, “Just go out there and have fun.”
I was able to get the first six batters out.
One of the things I remember most was that it was really loud in the stadium.
“We were wasting our vocal cords screaming at each other,” Jahli remembers. “So we started using hand signals.”
On one of my at bats, I got a pitch down the middle. I swung hard but got under it, and popped it up. If I had hit it straight away, I probably would have hit it out. I think their pitcher knew it. When I was running back from first base to the dugout near third, he gave me a high five, and he was like, “Good job,” like he wanted to say, “Thank you.”
We could hear the crowd getting louder, but I wasn’t really thinking about why. I wouldn’t find out till later that a lot of them were there to cheer for us because I was a girl on the mound, and I was striking out boys. A lot of people were cheering for me!
In the last inning, while I was pitching, the count was 3–2, with two outs. All of a sudden, the stadium got really loud.
“We got everybody to stand up and start cheering and clapping,” my mom says.
“The whole stadium started to say, ‘Go, Mo’ne!’” says Yirah. “I thought I was dreaming for a minute because I didn’t think this would ever really happen to one o
f us.”
The noise got to the batter, and he stepped out of the batter’s box.
The umpire told us, “Let’s just wait until this kind of calms down.”
“This whole line of reporters started lining up on their knees, on the ground, right in front of us,” Squirt says.
I stood on the mound and kind of blocked things out, so I didn’t get distracted.
“I don’t know where she gets that from,” my mom says. “She’s always calm. I could holler all night long, and Mo’ne will be so calm. Sometimes I’m like, ‘Did you even take in anything I said?’ And she’ll still be calm.”
“Mo’ne, she’s a breed unto herself,” says Qu’ran. “She’s cut from a different cloth.”
“I was just wowed, watching her,” says Coach Brady, who came up to watch the game.
When the batter stepped back in the box, I got set, went into my windup, and threw a fastball right down the middle.
I struck the kid out.
We won: 4–0.
That made me the first girl to pitch a shutout in Little League history. I threw eight strikeouts and only gave up two hits.
“Everybody was calling me,” says Qu’ran. “It was crazy!”
The Little League officials took my jersey and told me that they were going to put it in the National Baseball Hall of Fame. They gave me a replacement.
They had a bunch of us do a press conference. By now, I was used to getting interviewed. You just gotta be pretty calm. Sometimes you get the same question over and over, but sometimes you get really cool questions.
I have this problem with one-word answers, like “Yes” and “No,” and short ones, like “I don’t know” or “I’m not sure.” So I try to keep my answers at a middle length, because three-word answers can be super dull. And I try not to be too hyped, because if you’re too hyped, you could look kind of goofy.
“There were all these different people, and she was sitting there making jokes,” Squirt says. “She had an answer for everything they said. I was like, ‘How does she do this?’ Nobody helped her, and she had no time to practice.”
But I didn’t really feel comfortable about how many of the questions were directed at me. We are a team, and you can’t win a game by yourself. It’s not like I can pitch to myself and then go catch it. Everybody on the team was part of our win. Sometimes I thought my teammates could give better answers, so I passed the question to them.
CHAPTER 14
WE’RE OUT
AFTER OUR FIRST GAME, WE HAD BATTING PRACTICE AND fielding practice, and Coach Alex changed the batting order. Up until that point, it had started with Scott, me, Jahli, Jared, and Zion. But he wanted to get our strongest hitters—Jahli, Jared, and Zion—up more often to give them a lot of at bats. He dropped me to sixth.
Batting sixth is fine with me. When you’re at the top of the lineup, you’re most likely a good hitter, so the pitcher will throw you a lot more curveballs to keep you off balance. When you’re sixth, you get a lot more fastballs, which are easier to hit.
When I was pitching, Coach Alex was paying attention to how many balls I threw. Kids in my age group can’t throw more than eighty-five pitches a day, and depending on how many pitches you throw, you’re required to rest a certain number of days. I had thrown sixty-five pitches against Tennessee, so I was eligible to pitch again in game three.
Game 2: Sunday, August 17: Mid-Atlantic vs. Southwest Region: Pearland, Texas
After our first game people were very hyped. The Taney Dragons were the talk of the tournament and a lot of people were rooting for us to win.
Jared was up next to pitch. I played third base.
I got my first hit that game, and I got an RBI. But the game was pretty crazy. When Jack was running home to score, the catcher tagged him super hard, and he got hit in the mouth. His tooth cut his lip, and his lip was swollen and bleeding. He had to leave the game.
After Jack left, Coach moved me to shortstop.
The game was really back and forth. It was like they would score, then we would score. At one point, Jared gave up a two-strike home run and got really upset. We had to try to calm him down.
But in the last inning, we came back.
Scott came up to bat.
“It’s my job to get on base,” he says.
Since a lot of teams know how fast he is and that he can beat out a bunt, Texas pulled their third baseman in really close to home plate.
“The third baseman was right on top of me, since I always bunt down the third-base line,” says Scott. “So I dragged a bunt down the first-base line. It was my first drag-bunt hit ever!”
Jahli was up next. He struck out, and then Jared flew out. But then Zion hit a triple.
“When Scott was rounding second, I was saying to myself, ‘Coach Alex, send him, send him home,’” says Zion.
He did and Scott scored, which tied the game. Then Tai was up. There were two outs, and he was down 0–2 in the count, and Zion was on third. Tai hit a ground ball to the shortstop, which should have ended the inning. But the shortstop rushed and overthrew to first. Tai was safe at first, and Zion scored.
We won: 7–6.
After the game, someone told me that I was only the sixth girl to get a hit in Little League World Series history.
In the press conference afterward, Tai said that his walk-off single was probably one of the best things that had ever happened to him in his baseball career.
“A win’s a win,” Coach Alex said. “We just felt good.”
Later on, I learned that we had a larger television audience than the Yankees–Red Sox game on Sunday Night Baseball. ESPN2 never outdraws ESPN.
But by then, we were definitely in a batting slump.
While we were focused on our next game, everyone was talking about the Taney Dragons. Our pins were the hottest pins to trade at the tournament—everywhere we went, people wanted them.
All of a sudden, I had turned into a role model for girls. The fact that I was playing with the boys and striking them out showed people that girls can play against boys in sports and be as good as they are, if not better. And that you can’t just expect us to be real emotional—girls can have nerves of steel.
I didn’t mind that. It was kind of nice.
“There was a lot of buzz about her. People were starting to ask for her autograph,” Miss Robin says. “The kids were all signing balls. Someone told me one of her signed balls was going for two hundred dollars on eBay.”
“At the World Series, I would see big, husky guys with Mo’ne Davis shirts on,” says Coach Brady. “Seeing them wearing her name on their shirts and on their backs was just so thrilling for me.”
“I heard a boy say that his hero was Mo’ne, and that he wanted to pitch like her,” Dr. Sands, the head of my school and Scott and Jahli’s school, remembers.
We didn’t know it at the time, but while we were playing, our friends and classmates and families back home were cheering us on.
“We were watching Mo’ne on TV,” says Qayyah.
“Some of the kids in my school were saying, ‘You seen that girl on ESPN playing baseball? She’s striking everyone out!’” says Qu’ran. “I would just sit around and say, ‘Yeah, she’s good. I think she’s gonna make it to the major leagues.’”
Qu’ran was the first person to tell me that I was blowing up on Twitter.
“I kept seeing these Kevin Durant tweets like, ‘This youngster’s out here throwing flames—and she is a girl. I love it. Hashtag ‘It’s a new day,’” says Qu’ran. “But she ain’t retweet, so I thought she must not know what’s going on.”
But when he told me what was happening, I had seen it already.
People like Michelle Obama, Magic Johnson, Russell Wilson, and Mike Trout tweeted me. It was super, super surprising.
All across Philly, there was Taney-mania. People were watching us on TV at home, at the neighborhood bar, in the TV section of electronics stores—even Philadelphia’s mayor, Michael Nutter, hel
d a watch party on the plaza outside of City Hall.
My friends at Springside were celebrating, too.
“We had a sign made running down the fence along the side of our playing fields, and it had a little Taney cap, and it said, ‘We heart Mo’ne, We heart Jahli, We heart Scott’—the kids who were students here,” says Dr. Sands. “Then we had watch parties, where we put these big screens on the field and hundreds of people came, and tons of news trucks were up and down the street. We sold ballpark food—popcorn and Philadelphia Water Ice. People had blankets and lawn chairs and sat out on the lawn. It was an old-fashioned feel-good moment.”
Later on, someone told me that during the game, the boys’ soccer team started shouting “Mo’ne, Mo’ne, Mo’ne” over and over. The kids at our school are really great.
August 19, 2014
It was day five of the Little League World Series and the Ping-Pong battle in the rec room was on. I had just lost, and was just sitting there on my phone. I got this text from Squirt. It was a picture of me on the cover of Sports Illustrated magazine.
At first I was a little confused. I knew that I had talked to them, but no one knew that they were planning to put me on the cover. Yet someone had sent a picture to Squirt, and Squirt sent the picture to me.
Later on, this guy from Williamsport we called Cousin Josh bought copies for everyone on the team. When I signed one for him, it was the first time I saw it in person.
I didn’t know that the cover of Sports Illustrated was that big of a deal. I didn’t read the article for a while. But people started telling me that I had bumped Kobe Bryant off the cover. Then some of the kids on other teams started saying that if you got on the cover of Sports Illustrated, it was a curse. There’s a long list of people who had had bad luck after being on the cover. Like the LA Dodgers. When Matt Kemp and Magic Johnson appeared on the cover in May 2012, they had the best record in baseball. But out of their next eleven games, they lost eight of them. And the Denver Broncos quarterback Peyton Manning. In February 2014, he was featured on the cover for setting all sorts of passing and touchdown records. But right after that, the Broncos lost one of the most lopsided Super Bowl games in NFL history, 43–8.