During the New England regional tournament, a player from Westbrook, Maine, named Sean Murphy got so stressed he had trouble breathing. After pitching three strong innings, he went to his manager, Richard Knight. “Hey, Rich, you got to start warming up Joey,” he said.
Knight was confused. “Why?” he asked. “You’re doing great.”
“Well,” Murphy said, “I’m really, really nervous. I’m hyperventilating.”
Knight worked out a signal. If Murphy returned to the mound but decided he was still too nervous, he would tap the top of his cap. That meant he wanted to come out of the game. He went out for the fourth inning but left after one batter.
You can quibble with Knight’s approach—maybe he should have taken Murphy out then and there—but I think he struck a good balance. The key was that Murphy felt he could tell his manager he was nervous. All too often, eager-to-please players don’t feel they can approach their coach and speak honestly about their physical or emotional limits. All too often, the coach does not respond well when a player does speak up.
Finding the right balance might be the hardest task of a parent or coach. How the adults and kids seek this balance at the Little League World Series—or ignore the need to do so—could tell an intriguing story about the nature of sports and growing up in twenty-first century America.
To understand the challenges of Little League—and all youth sports today—I watched Little League games all summer and traveled to Williamsport for the Little League World Series.
The book is organized thematically. The first three chapters provide general background. Chapter 1 places Little League and its premier event into a larger context of youth sports. Chapter 2 describes the excitement of teams arriving in Williamsport. Chapter 3 tells the story of Little League from its founding to the present day.
Chapters 4 and 5 describe the teams from Hawaii and Curaçao, which played each other in the championship game of the 2005 World Series.
The next two chapters get into the nitty-gritty of baseball. Chapter 6 describes the training strategies of several teams. Chapter 7 explores the pitching injuries that result from overusing pitchers in the Little League tournaments—and what might be done to prevent such a rash of injuries in the future.
The next three chapters get into the culture of the Little League World Series. Chapter 8 looks at the culture of “hustling” in the series— whether it’s corporate marketers promoting their products or Little League enthusiasts trading pins. Chapter 9 delves into the growing importance of religious faith in sports. And Chapter 10 explores how different teams responded to winning and losing in the series.
The following chapters step back and look at youth baseball from a broader perspective. Chapter 11 explores Little League’s growing challenge from travel ball and other youth leagues. Chapter 12 explores the different styles of play that teams from different parts of the world bring to the game of baseball.
Chapters 13 and 14 conclude the story, with an account of the dramatic series finale—in which Hawaii beat Curaçao in extra innings— and a visit with the winners after they returned home to parades and new educational opportunities.
The book closes with a “Postgame” essay that considers how Little League might reform itself to put children back at the center of the game.
Howard Lamade Stadium is the promised land for millions of Little Leaguers.
CHAPTER 1
“The Greatest Sporting Event on the Planet”
IT WAS 10:30 AT NIGHT AND THE CRICKETS were making a racket and all of the sixteen teams in the 2005 Little League World Series had already padded up the long hills to their dorms at the Olympic-style village called International Grove.
The all-stars from Maitland, Florida, finished batting practice almost an hour before. Since then, I talked with two of their coaches and fathers. Dante Bichette and Mike Stanley were not typical Little League coaches. They were former major league stars.
Bichette and Stanley did not know each other well before they became coaches for the Maitland team. They’re an odd couple. Bichette is Oliver Hardy, soft and voluble, full of childlike enthusiasm. Stanley is Stan Laurel, more angular and circumspect, always deflecting attention off himself. In the first days in Williamsport, reporters repeatedly asked Stanley how the Little League World Series ranked among his baseball accomplishments. “It’s not my accomplishment,” he said. “It’s my son Tanner’s accomplishment.”
Between them, Bichette and Stanley played nineteen seasons in the big leagues, collected 3,044 hits and 461 home runs, and earned almost $59 million. Combined, those numbers would add up to one Hall of Fame career. But Bichette and Stanley never made it to a World Series. The manager of the Maitland team, a bank executive named Sid Cash, joked that it took their kids to get them anywhere near a World Series. Cash had been coaching Little League for almost three decades, and he had never been anywhere near a World Series either. Maitland’s team, an underdog all summer, kept winning and winning. Bichette planned to spend the summer playing in an independent league, but cancelled those plans when Maitland won the district, sectional, state, and regional tournaments—all of them tough, since kids play baseball in the Sunbelt twelve months a year.
Long after the players climbed back to their dorms in the sparkling Little League complex, Bichette and Stanley explained how you teach baseball to a bunch of eleven- and twelve-year-old boys. The key, they agreed, is constant repetition. Keep trying even the most difficult physical feats, and you keep getting better and better.
Take hitting, which Ted Williams famously called the single most difficult act in all of sports.
What makes hitting so hard in Little League is the miniature fields. Carl Stotz, Little League’s founder, decided back in 1939 to use a field with dimensions two-thirds the size of a standard field. But kids get bigger and stronger every generation. The mean weight of a twelve-yearold increased from 94 to 111 pounds between 1970 and 2002. Most teams have a few kids who weigh 150 pounds or more. Those monsters can overwhelm opponents. A twelve-year-old kid throwing seventy miles an hour was once uncommon, but now it’s not. All the top pitchers now throw in the seventies, some in the mid-seventies. And some in the eighties. The smaller field makes the pitches seem even faster. A hitter facing a seventy-m.p.h. pitch on a Little League field has as much time to react as player on a standard field facing a ninety-one-m.p.h. pitch. A hitter facing an eighty-m.p.h. pitch has as much time to react—read the pitch and swing—as a major leaguer facing a 104-m.p.h. pitch.
Think about that for a moment. The kind of major leaguers who throw that fast—occasionally—are intimidators like Randy Johnson, Billy Wagner, and Roger Clemens. To hit against pitchers like that, hitters have less than two-tenths of a second to swing their bat.
Every time I think of kids hitting pitches coming in that fast, I think of the skinny arms with knobby elbows that poke out of short-sleeved jerseys. And then I think of the thick, muscled arms of big leaguers like Barry Bonds or Gary Sheffield. The kids have to get their bats across the plate as quickly as major leaguers, with fractions of the bodily mass and power. How fair is that? I’m amazed Little Leaguers ever hit that stuff, much less hit it hard.
But Dante Bichette says you can teach any decent little athlete to hit that impossible heat.
“The learning curve is just unbelievable,” Bichette said. “A lot of kids think they can’t hit a seventyor seventy-two-mile-an-hour fastball. So you go to a pitching machine and put in balls at seventy and at first they’re five feet behind. So they adjust, and then after a while they’re three feet behind. So they adjust again and eventually they get around on it. They can get an image in their mind about when to swing.”
Despite the excitement, the World Series also had its slower moments, as Canada’s Mitchell Burns can attest.
Hitting becomes a matter of deciding when to put the bat over the plate. You make a decision as the ball tumbles out of the pitcher’s hand. Whatever you do, don’t keep your eye on
the ball.
This is not your father’s Little League.
After talking about baseball and kids, passionately, for almost an hour, Bichette and Stanley started to walk up the hill.
Bichette needled Stanley. At first, Stanley didn’t believe that you could teach kids so much about hitting and fielding. All Stanley wanted was for his son Tanner to have some fun and win some games. But Bichette showed that you could teach these kids almost anything. As Bichette spoke about proving Stanley wrong, Stanley smiled and nodded.
As they trudged up the long incline toward the dorms at International Grove, the path wrapped around two stadiums bathed in the majorleague lights. No one was playing any baseball at this hour. No one would play any baseball for another three days. But the men who run Little League could not resist creating this vivid scene of stadiums glowing in the quiet of the night.
Dante Bichette, for one, was moved.
As we walked up toward International Grove, Bichette paused. He announced, with a potent pause between every word: “The—Little—League—World—Series—is—the—greatest—sporting—event—on— the—planet.”
And then he continued his climb up the hill.
The Little League World Series is a lot of things—among them, certainly and strangely, the most famous and visible of all youth sporting events in the United States.
People all over the globe work for years and years to reach this small old town on the Susquehanna River. All of them have watched the Little World Series on TV and some of them have made a pilgrimage to the series. Something about the event—the beauty of the stadiums or the tension of the ten-day tournament or the vividness of the characters— captured their imagination and made them want to perform on the stage themselves.
Jace and Brenn Conrad, players for the Little Leaguers from Lafayette, Louisiana, watched the event on TV since they were in diapers. Dante Bichette Jr., the star player for the Maitland, Florida, Little Leaguers, dreamed of pitching in the World Series when he came to Williamsport as a spectator with his famous dad three years before. Blaise Lezynski, a star with the Council Rock Little League in Newtown, Pennsylvania, can tell you about every great feat in Little League World Series history.
The adults also fantasize of reaching Little League’s peak, maybe more than the kids. Rich Knight, the manager of the team from Westbrook, Maine, has brought kids from his local Big Brothers program to Williamsport for years and dreamed of returning as a manager. Hirofumi Oda has been working to bring a team from Chiba City, a suburb of Tokyo best known as the home to Japan’s Disney World, for twenty years. After watching the World Series on TV, he carried vivid images of the event in his head. When he got a tour of the stadiums from his translator, whose family was one of the original sponsors of Little League in 1939, he started to cry. “Now, I am here,” he said.
Advancing to the Little League World Series is a quest, every bit as much as Raiders of the Lost Ark or anything else Hollywood has to offer. Between the 8,000 or so teams and the ultimate prize lie all kinds of obstacles to overcome—trickery and cheating, homesickness and cabin fever, illnesses and injuries, internal strife, jealousy, cynicism, distractions, economic hardship, boredom, and dumb luck, to name just a few.
Having won sporting’s greatest game of “Survivor,” they settle into this old town for two weeks of constant baseball.
The environment is a big part of the experience. Williamsport has all the charms of a small town because it never grew out of its old form. In the late 1800s, Williamsport was the lumber capital of the world. Cutters took down white pine, Eastern hemlock, and hardwoods in the Allegheny Mountains and sent them down the Susquehanna River to Williamsport’s mills. The wealth from those operations produced the nation’s largest collection of millionaires per capita. Those moguls built an elegant downtown, with a city hall, public library, churches, parks, law and insurance offices, a grand hotel, bookstores, cafes, clothiers, and restaurants. Just off the downtown core is a row of Victorian houses called Millionaires’ Row.
When a pair of Biblical floods wiped out the city in 1889 and 1894, the timber industry was already in decline, and city leaders eventually decided not to try to revive the industry. When the federal government built Interstate 80 twenty miles south of Williamsport, the city missed the development that vast transportation networks foster. The city has struggled to attract industry. A city planning document calls Williamsport’s history “a story of unceasing struggle for survival.” In the 1990s, Williamsport became a magnet for “influx people” when public-health officials decided that Williamsport’s small-town serenity was attractive for drug and alcohol addicts trying to resist temptation and settle into healthy routines. At one point, influx people comprised 10 percent of the city’s population.
The town still looks great. Partly because of its economic stagnation, downtown looks like a quaint set for a 1940s movie like Shadow of a Doubt. Chain retailers like Staples, Starbucks, McDonald’s, and the Gap haven’t taken over downtown because they can’t find enough customers to survive there. So downtown has an old-timey feel, with its small-scale men’s clothing store, candy shop, cafe, bookstore, microbrewery, and Greek restaurant. The downtown is great for TV visuals.
The World Series itself takes place across the river in South Williamsport. Games are played in two stadiums—Howard J. Lamade Stadium (named after the publisher of a local newspaper called Grit) and Volunteer Stadium. In Lamade Stadium, the place where the big games are held, two grassy ledges create semicircles beyond the outfield fence. That’s The Hill. Fans come and lay down blankets like they’re at a G-rated Woodstock—no booze, no rebellious music, no nudity—and watch the games morning, day, and night.
The Hill is not just a grassy bleacher. It’s also a playground. Kids throw baseballs and Frisbees and footballs. They find pieces of cardboard and climb to the peak, up by the Little League administration building, and slide down The Hill over and over. During the course of the World Series, so many people slide over the grass that the edges of hills turn from bright green to a heavy brown.
Total attendance for the ten-day World Series usually surpasses 300,000. Some major league teams, like the 1979 Oakland A’s, have drawn fewer fans over the course of a whole season.
Whatever else you say about the Little League World Series, remember this: it’s probably the hardest tournament anywhere to win. At the beginning of the summer, more than 7,000 Little League organizations across the United States select players for all-star teams. They play as many as twenty games in qualifying tournaments, starting in early July and concluding in the middle of August. Only eight of those teams survive and win a berth in the Little League World Series.
Hundreds of teams from outside the United States compete for a berth in the series. They all play their own regional tournaments to qualify for Williamsport—four in the Americas (Canada, Mexico, the Caribbean, and Latin America), one in Asia, one in the Pacific, one in an amalgam region called EMEA (Europe, the Middle East, and Africa), and one in a grab-bag region called Trans-Atlantic, which consists of American and other ex-pats living overseas at military bases and corporate outposts. The foreign teams usually have a lighter load; some play only six or seven games to get to Williamsport.
It’s hard to handicap the Little League World Series at any stage.
The Sunbelt teams are usually the best, but teams from Connecticut and New Jersey have pulled some famous upsets. Teams from Southern California have historically done the best in their very difficult West division, but teams in places like Nevada and the rest of California are strong every year too. Sometimes, it’s the weakest teams that reach Williamsport. In 2005, teams from Owensboro, Kentucky, and Davenport, Iowa, made repeat appearances in Williamsport. But that’s just because the competition was weaker in their regions—the Great Lakes and Midwest regions—and not because they developed nationally competitive programs. Sure enough, both teams went 0–3 in the World Series for the second straight year.
I
nternationally, the Asia, Pacific, Caribbean, and Latin America divisions are strongest. Japan emerged as the top team in Asia in 2005, winning the tournament despite having the same records as Hong Kong and Chinese Taipei. (Little League’s tie-breaker rule, which gives the victory to the team that yielded the fewest runs, gave Japan the title.) Guam won the Pacific title for the second time in three years. Curaçao, the defending champions, prevailed for the fifth straight time in the Caribbean tournament. And a team from Venezuela won the Latin America tournament.
The World Series begins with pool play. The tournament’s sixteen teams are divided into four pools of four teams each. Each team plays three games against other teams in the pool, with the top two teams in each pool moving to the next round. Then the teams play one, two, or three single-elimination games.
Any time you create an event that provides TV glory and riches to the winners, some contestants are going to bend and break the rules to win.
Ever since the Danny Almonte scandal of 2001, Little League has struggled mightily to police teams playing in the qualifying tournaments for the World Series. But making regulations often just emboldens people to look for ways to get around those rules.
In 2001, Almonte played for a Bronx Little League team that went to Williamsport. Almonte pitched a perfect game and became a national celebrity. President George W. Bush praised him and Mayor Rudolph Giuliani gave him the keys to the city. But Sports Illustrated discovered that Almonte was fourteen years old—two years older than he said—and it turned out that he didn’t live in the Bronx, go to school there, or even play on a regular Little League team. After the series was over, Little League stripped the Bronx team of its honors and banned its president and coach. Almonte’s fraud became a morality tale, a story of how people who want something too much ruin it for everyone.
Little League, Big Dreams Page 2