Little League, Big Dreams

by Charles Euchner

  The PR fallout from Almonte’s fraud was so great that Little League started to require three kinds of proof of age and residency, including birth certificates. Parents are told to keep records handy, in case a dispute arises. The mother of Kalen Pimentel, the star pitcher for the Rancho Buena Vista all-stars from California, had to run home for his birth certificate during one tournament when the other team challenged his age.

  But enforcing even the simplest rules can be hard. Teams that want to win will always find ways to cheat. And some of them will slip through Little League’s dragnet. In the qualifying tournaments in the Latin America region, another age scandal challenged Little League’s ability to keep its competition fair and honest.

  Because Venezuela hosted the Latin America tournament, the country got two entries, and they met in the championship game. Altagracia beat Valencia for the title. But before the tournament even started, Altagracia’s participation was the subject of a formal protest and investigation. The San Francisco Little League, another Venezuelan team that had lost to Altagracia in the national tournament, filed the protest.

  It wasn’t the first complaint against Altagracia. In 2003, the Sierra Maestra Little League complained about Altagracia after it won the Venezuela title. In 2004, the Coquivacoa Little League issued a formal protest because of Altagracia’s use of the same player who was under suspicion in 2005.

  “We were defeated by Altagracia in the national finals there in Los Puertos and since we saw the boy with some physical characteristics unusual for a twelve-year-old boy, we asked the board of directors for an investigation,” Luis Flores, president of the Coquivacoa Little League, told Diario Panorana de Maracaibo. “But they didn’t pay any attention to us. We also complained to the Council for the Protection of the Child and Adolescent of Cabimas and we’re still waiting for a reply.”

  Altagracia maintained its innocence, producing affidavits with detailed information about the player’s birth date and residence. Altagracia then won the Latin America tournament. Valencia went home, but joined San Francisco’s protest.

  Altagracia’s records for the player were in perfect order. The problem was, they belonged to the player’s younger brother.

  To settle the controversy definitively, the imposter was required to report to an office of Venezuela’s National Office of Identification and Immigration (Onidex). There, he submitted to fingerprint testing. Two days later, Onidex announced definitive proof of the fraud. “The fingerprints that the player that participated in the tournament carried out in Maracaibo is the older brother of the boy that appears as legally registered in the youth category of the Altagracia Little League,” an Onidex official said.

  But the controversy was even more nefarious than the Venezuelan media reported at the time. Because Little League now requires three documents to verify a player’s age and residence, the fraudulent birth document was not enough to get the illegal player in the game. A government official was implicated in doctoring documents to disguise the real age of the illegal player, Little League officials later revealed.

  Little League CEO Steve Keener was philosophical about the controversy.

  “If somebody really wants to do it, they’re going to find a way to do it,” he said. “They’re going to at least fool everybody temporarily. They may not ultimately [succeed] in the long run, but they can have people forge documents. If somebody is sophisticated enough to do that type of thing, they’re going to get away with it.”

  Part of the problem, Keener said, is cultural. Referring to Latin American teams, he said the scandal pointed to attitudes and practices “that are typical or common in those parts of the world.”

  People on all sides of the controversy reacted with anger, hurt, and resolve. Lilunia Osorio, president of the San Francisco Little League, criticized Little League officials for not acting sooner. The manager of the Altagracia team maintained his innocence. “They also deceived me,” Alfonso Avendaño said. “If they did it, it was because they hoped for extra money or some kind of scholarship that their son would win.”

  Luckily for Little League’s P.R. machine, no American media reported any details of the scandal.

  Here’s another reality of a big tournament like the Little League World Series.

  Any time you stage an international competition, with teams from different cultures and systems, it’s going to be a struggle to make the competition fair and equitable. And you’re never going to satisfy everyone.

  As the teams settle into Williamsport, another controversy simmered. One coach told me he planned to challenge the rules governing Little League’s international tournaments. The way things work now, he said, teams like Curaçao and Japan have unfair advantages.

  A long summer of baseball brings teams closer together than most can imagine at the beginning of the all-star season.

  Shon Muna worked to get his team from Agana, Guam, to Williamsport for almost a year. He took a team to the World Series in 2003 and barely lost out in the 2004 Pacific regional tournament. Guam had the same 2–1 record as the two finalists but didn’t play on because of Little League’s tie-breaker rule.

  Muna, a Rafael Palmiero look-alike with his brown skin and trim mustache, is one of those guys who are so devoted to Little League that he builds his love life around it.

  Two years before, Muna asked Clarice Briggs to marry him during the celebration of Guam’s Pacific regional championship. When the pair arrived in Williamsport, they had an idea: why not get married at Howard Lamade Stadium? Little League officials gave the okay and issued invitations. One of the team hosts, the Reverend Gary Weaver, officiated. One of Muna’s sons, Shane, held a bat and flowers. His other son, Shon Junior, held the rings in a red baseball glove. The bride wore a white pinstriped baseball uniform with white baseball hat. Guam’s uniformed players made an arch with outstretched bats as the Munas held hands and walked for the first time as a married couple.

  That was fun. But Guam didn’t last past the first round of games in Williamsport that year, and in 2004 Guam didn’t even make it to Williamsport. And in 2005 Muna not only wanted to get back to Williamsport. He also wanted revenge. He was determined to challenge a system that he says discriminates against Guam.

  Muna’s complaint is that Curaçao and Japan draw from a broader population pool than Guam. Guam, an island of 170,000 people, has four Little League organizations. Curaçao, with the same population, has only two. Japan has an even greater advantage—300 leagues for a population of 127 million—or about one league for every area of 423,000.

  “I predict that there will be lots of investigations over the size of the districts,” he said. “Curaçao, that’s the team I want to beat. They’re a very good team, the cream of the crop. But they have an unfair advantage. We just want to play by the same rules. It’s got to change.”

  I asked Lance Van Auken, Little League’s top PR man, about the organization’s rule that every league should operate in a population area of 20,000 people.

  “Each league is considered separately on the basis of available players, demographics, competition from other sports,” Van Auken said. “So, for example, a league in St. Petersburg, where the population is 80,000 or more (which should produce four separate leagues), we grant a waiver because that league’s elderly population is 50,000.” Another example comes from California’s Rancho Buena Vista Little League, which was split into two divisions with two all-star teams before the 2004 season but then reunited in 2005 after a direct appeal from the league president.

  The inequities remain, but there’s probably not much anyone like Shon Muna can do about it. As John F. Kennedy famously remarked, life is unfair.

  Through all the controversy, the Little League World Series remains one of the most enticing events in sports today.

  Why?

  It’s not necessarily the quality of play. Even if Little League showcased the best baseball among eleven- and twelve-year-olds—and it doesn’t—these kids are not even close to bein
g fully developed athletes. Most of them are still skinny kids with little of the musculature that great athletic performance requires. Everyone on the field is still learning how to play the game— how to pitch and hit, how to pivot on a double play or hit the cutoff man, how to get a quick jump out of the batter’s box or on the base paths.

  That’s the fascination.

  The Little League all-stars represent the ultimate works in progress, pieces of clay that are just taking shape. Those pieces of clay might develop into the most beautiful pieces of art imaginable—or they might just look like the odd-shaped mug or vase a second-grader brings home from art class. There’s no telling which of the kids playing in Williamsport might turn out to be a great athlete, worthy of a pro contract, a college scholarship, or even a starting position on a high school team. There is no way.

  Umpires are among the hundreds of volunteers every summer at the Little League World Series.

  No twelve-year-old child has developed fully, physically or emotionally. A kid who lords over other preteens in a summer tournament is not necessarily going to lord over the same group of teens. Some of the scrawny kids will grow into sturdy young men, muscled athletes with explosive power, and take over. Even the best teenagers will get left behind as the field narrows to the high school and college varsities and sundry professional leagues. In fact, researchers have found that excelling at an early age can be a handicap, especially for pitchers. If you throw a lot of innings as a teenager, even into your twenties, you are not likely to develop the capacity to throw very well for very long. The best pitchers at elite levels were often second-tier as they grew up.

  Crowds of 10,000 or 15,000 or 25,000 fans at Lamade Stadium—and millions more sitting in front of a TV set—watch the games because of the not-quite-thereness of the kids. Watching works in progress has its fascinations. Physically and socially, the kids do things today that they couldn’t consider just weeks before.

  Take Dante Bichette Jr. This rosy-cheeked kid from Maitland, Florida, never threw a curveball before the summer. Then his dad took him and his teammate Skip Kovar aside at a tournament. Dante Bichette Sr. taught the boys how to throw the twelve-to-six-o’clock curveball. In just a few hours, these kids learned enough to baffle some of the best Little Leaguers anywhere. When these works-in-progress took the mound, you could see them getting better—almost inning by inning.

  Little Dante’s maturation was not just physical or athletic. For the first time, he had to learn how to deal with failure on the field. After a player from Iowa hit a long home run against him in Williamsport, he admitted that his sweet little world just got rocked. “It was killed. I was shocked,” he said. “No one’s ever hit that far against me.” He had to learn how to recover from that setback. And his teammates had to help. After the home run, Tanner Stanley and Florida’s other infielders gathered on the mound for a brief pep rally. “We got your back,” each chirped to the stunned pitcher—street talk from suburban kids in support of their manchild. Bichette became a better pitcher, a better athlete, because of his mistake.

  Another kind of maturity develops during that ten-day tournament. Thrown together in a long festival of baseball, the youngsters learn how to deal with a constant stream of attention. Some never move beyond the short, shy responses to the media but others become poised stars. Dante Bichette Sr. and his wife Mariana taught their son how to handle the media before coming to Williamsport. On the way home from a game in Florida, they asked Dante Junior what he’d say when reporters asked him questions about his feats. In their first mock Q&A, he gave them one- to three-word answers: “Yes,” “It felt good,” “No,” “I guess so.” No, that’s not enough, his parents said. You gotta handle the media, give them polished phrases. They prepped him to expand his answers. In Williamsport, Dante Junior talked like a pro.

  And you see it all happening right in front of you, over a period of just weeks.

  Games take place morning, day, and night during the early days of the Little League World Series.

  Aaron Durling, an American ex-pat playing for the team from Saudi Arabia, became the biggest player in the Little League World Series in 2005.

  CHAPTER 2

  Arriving at the Show

  WANT A SYMBOL OF HOW big the Little League World Series has gotten? Take a look at the kid from Saudi Arabia who would make Babe Ruth look like a yoga instructor.

  Aaron Durling is a fleshy, molasses-skinned boy. He walks shyly, slowly. He speaks quietly, usually only when someone speaks to him. When a stranger approached him in Williamsport and asked if he could call him “Jumbo,” Durling softly said yes. The stranger tried it out: “Hi, Jumbo!” Durling smiled, but didn’t respond.

  As far as anyone can tell, Durling is the tallest player in the history of the Little League World Series. He stands six feet, five inches, and weighs 226 pounds. His size is the early buzz of the 2005 World Series.

  As teams from around the world gathered in Williamsport, Durling was the focus of conversation.

  From a distance—walking down the long hills to a practice field, gathering for a team photograph, awaiting instructions from coaches—Durling almost looked like an old man. Like all his teammates, he bleached his hair white in a show of unity. But to join his teammates in anything they do, Durling has to lean over. He almost bows when he talks to his teammates. When he can, he sits so he doesn’t have to stand so high above them.

  For the last five years, Durling has lived with his family in Saudi Arabia. His father works for the national oil company. Life in Dhahran is isolated, with a small village of Americans and other ex-pats living among 100,000 people in the heart of Saudi Arabia, but almost completely removed from the Arab kingdom.

  The all-star team from Dhahran breezed through the Trans-Atlantic tournament—a contest of ex-pats based mostly in Europe—for the last five years. This year Dhahran outscored its rivals by a combined score of 80–2. But the competition was not very good—teams from Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Italy, England, and Spain. The Saudi players and coaches knew they had not faced the same tough competition as Japan and Guam, California and Hawaii, Curaçao and Canada. Their goal was not to win but to “show people we belong here.”

  As soon as ESPN learned about Jumbo, its producers taped spots of him and smaller players. They got the smallest player on the Saudi team—DeRon Horton, four-foot-nine, seventy-seven pounds—to hide behind Gulliver and then pop out from behind. Then they shot Durling with Curaçao’s Rayshelon Carolina. At four-seven, seventy-five pounds, Carolina is the smallest player in the whole tournament (less than onethird of Durling’s heft). The camera lingered at their shoes, one a size thirteen, the other a size six—and then slowly moved up. Then Carolina played peek-a-boo behind Durling.

  Durling comes from a family of big Texas athletes. His father and grandfather played college football. His grandfather went to the Baltimore Colts training camp without ever having played football. He can tell people he once shared a locker room with Johnny Unitis. The Little Leaguer’s aunt, Margo Graham, played four seasons in the WNBA and still holds discus and shotput records at the University of Houston.

  Two questions followed Durling as he ambled around the complex.

  The first question: Was he really just twelve years old? Little League limits eligibility for its summer-long “Major League” tournament to boys and girls who are ten, eleven, and twelve years old. The cutoff date for eligibility has always been July 31—a date selected to conform with the Williamsport Public Schools cutoff date for kindergarten, many generations ago. Little League officials checked Durling’s records—once, twice, three times. He was legit. Durling’s parents point out that he’ll qualify for Little League again next year.

  The second question: Can he play?

  The conventional wisdom in youth baseball is winning teams need one or two imposing power pitchers and at least one big bopper at the plate. Big kids have dominated play in Williamsport. In 2002, Louisville’s Aaron Alvey pitched twenty-o
ne shutout innings and struck out fortyfour batters. In 1982, Cody Webster, of Kirkland, Washington, pitched a two-hit 6–0 shutout in the series final to end Taiwan’s thirty-one-game winning streak. Sean Burroughs dominated the series in 1991 when he pitched two no-hitters in Long Beach, California’s second straight championship. In 1971, Lloyd McClendon of Gary, Indiana, hit five home runs in five at-bats and took a 3–3 tie into the ninth inning of the championship game against Taiwan.

  But size does not guarantee dominance.

  At the batting cages at the Little League complex, Durling got caught in the black netting as he got in and out of the cage. When he stepped up to the plate, he struggled to coordinate his far-flung body parts. His bat moved slowly toward balls from the pitching machine. He missed more balls than he hit. Other players hit virtually every pitch from the machine. In the World Series games, Durling did not get a hit. He did not get much of a chance, because he did not play much more than the minimum of one at-bat and one inning in the field every game. In short, he’s not very good. Not yet, anyway.

  Baseball is not Durling’s favorite sport. Basketball is. Durling told his teammates and players from other teams that he’s going to play Division I college hoops. The University of Texas has contacted the family. Wink, wink. Colleges are not allowed to recruit kids at such a young age, but they can tell kids they’ll be watching the summer tournaments that Nike and Adidas stage to showcase the best teenaged basketball talent in the country.

  The value of baseball for Durling is that it forces him to do things on the diamond that can be brought into the flow of basketball—charging forward and moving back, moving to the right and to the left, reacting to pitches sizzling into the plate at major-league equivalents of ninety or ninety-five miles an hour.