Little League, Big Dreams

by Charles Euchner

  “Baseball has taught him coordination,” his mother Dana told me. “Before, he was falling up stairs. Basketball is his true love but he kept falling on top of kids. In soccer, he had to stop playing because he kept falling on kids. There’s no insurance for broken kids.”

  One after another, buses carrying boys from all over the world arrived at the Little League complex. The buses came from airports in Harrisburg and Philadelphia, about two or three hours away, after journeys from all over the world. The trips totaled about 50,000 miles.

  Lance Van Auken, the public-relations executive of Little League, says his favorite moment of the Little League World Series occurs when the kids arrive on buses.

  “I like to stand by the fence and watch them come in,” he said. “Their eyes get big when they see the stadium, and they run over to The Hill and just want to slide down. Some of them slide down The Hill before they even get to their dorm rooms.”

  Throughout the World Series, fans and players slide down the hills overlooking Howard Lamade Stadium.

  Players came from all over the U.S.—as far away as Hawaii, California, Louisiana, and Florida; and points closer, too, Pennsylvania, Maine, Iowa, and Kentucky—to play in the 2005 Little League World Series. Foreign teams flew in from Japan and Guam in the Pacific; Arctic neighbors Canada and Russia; Venezuela, Mexico, and Curaçao in Latin America; and an outpost of ex-pats in Saudi Arabia.

  The complex sits about 1,000 feet above the Susquehanna River; a nearby lookout provides views of the river, farmland, and an airstrip. Back in the day, the hills cut an even slope from the river to the top of the mountains. But land was scooped out of the hills to make the river dams that protect the area from constant flooding. Little League’s stadiums and practice fields are built into those hills.

  As they settled into their dorms, players and their coaches and families posed for pictures with Lamade Stadium as the backdrop. They walked down the steep concrete steps that have been built into the hills—a total of more than 120 steps—and milled around the edges of the two stadiums. The two stadiums are as modern and sparkling as the best minor-league ballparks. The infield dirt is manicured perfectly, the Kentucky bluegrass as bright and finely cut as the turf in Fenway Park or Dodger Stadium.

  After exploring the complex during the day, the players and coaches watched ESPN at night to track the latest regional tournaments. The dorms have cable. Some coaches brought VCRs to record the games to scout future opponents.

  By the time these regional championship games take place, teams have advanced through district, sectional, and state tournaments. In the international bracket, teams move through sectional, national, and regional tournaments. The final games of the eight American regional tournaments are televised on ESPN.

  In the must-see regional title game, two California teams faced each other for the West regional title, playing in the scorching heat of San Bernardino. The favorite was the Rancho Buena Vista Little League, a team from outside San Diego; the underdog was Tracy, a team from about fifty miles east of Oakland. Vista’s Nate Lewis beat Tracy, 7–2, to advance to Williamsport.

  But the marquee player for Vista was a goateed young man named Kalen Pimentel. During the season, Pimentel hit more than thirty home runs—no one knows how many exactly because the team stopped keeping track—and batted close to .700. Pitchers walked him in almost half of his plate appearances. At one point, the righthanded Pimentel batted lefty to shame the pitcher into pitching to him.

  Pimentel’s a quiet kid who’s just gotten big before the other kids—and happens to have a top-caliber coach in his father. Like a couple dozen of the players in the World Series, Pimentel’s already reached puberty. You can still see traces of the child in his face, but his face is lean and his body well muscled. In the press conferences after games, Pimentel squirms like some of the other players, but more out of bemusement than awe or shyness. He has Derek Jeter’s smirk. When he starts to talk about how he hit a home run or racked up all those strikeouts, he suddenly sounds like a man. He explains, better than even the best coaches could, how he hit the ball because of an adjustment in his swing that enabled him to turn on the ball. But just when you start to think he is a man, you see him running around the complex with his teammates. He’s the Tom Hanks character in Big.

  Pimentel’s hitting scares other teams, but his pitching terrorizes them. If you want, you can pitch around Pimentel when he comes to the plate. Just throw junk, and he can’t beat you every time. But on the mound, you can’t avoid him. On pitch after pitch, he comes at you with a fastball that sometimes exceeds eighty miles an hour and a curveball that breaks as sharply as a good high school player’s bender. And he’s just forty-six feet away.

  Fear of Pimentel caused one team to purposely lose a game in the West regional tournament. The team from Tracy had a choice in the final game of pool play: win the game and you face Vista and Pimentel in the semifinal. Lose it, and you play an easier team in the semifinals—and a chance to play for the regional championship.

  Tracy used its second-string lineup and an inexperienced pitcher in the semis against Chandler, Arizona. Chandler won, 11–10, and so Tracy got Chandler again in the semis. Tracy won this time, 10–0, and advanced to the championship game against Vista.

  “I’ve been coaching years and years and I’ve never done that in my life and never knew how difficult it would be,” Tracy’s manager, Emmett Lee, told a fellow coach of his decision to lay down in the semifinal game. “We mixed up the lineup, but the kids just kept hitting the ball. You can’t tell them not to swing the bat.”

  Other wild games took place in the West regional. Peccole, Nevada, beat Snow Canyon, Utah, by the obscene score of 30–3. Peccole took a 9–0 lead in the first inning and manager Bobby Burns told his players to ease up—take only one base no matter what, bunt the ball back to the pitcher. But the assault continued. The game was halted after four innings under Little League’s ten-run mercy rule.

  The best regional championship game—and the most painful to watch—took place in Indianapolis. In the Great Lakes tournament, the team from Owensboro, Kentucky, survived a punishing last-inning rally to beat Kankakee, Illinois. Owensboro took an 11–4 lead into the bottom of the final inning with its toughest pitcher, Nolan Miller, on the mound. But Kankakee sent ten batters to the plate and came within a run of tying the game.

  Miller, a thin boy with his pale face reddened and glazed by exertion on a muggy midwestern night, lost all control of the game. He started to overthrow the ball. Rather than using his whole body to power his pitches, he threw with just his arm. Manager Rick Hale came out to encourage him during the assault. “Just relax, take a deep breath,” he said in his long drawl. “You okay?” Hale tried to lock eyes with his exhausted pitcher. “I believe in you, baby,” Hale finally said before walking off the mound.

  All the while, the parents on the Kentucky side were having fits in the stands. Bring in a new pitcher, Ricky! C’mon, Ricky, he’s too tired to finish it!

  Hale later explained why he left Miller in the game when he was obviously exhausted.

  “I didn’t think I had anyone else who could have withstood that punishment,” he told me. “When [Kankakee] started their move, I said, ‘How is it going to be easier to live with yourself if you lose this thing?’ My assistant coach was begging me to make a move. That’s the only game I’ve watched on tape and it’s painful for me to watch it. It was a calculated move. It’s not like I was in a coma. Nolan’s the only kid I got.”

  Nolan Miller did, in fact, finish the game. But by the time Kentucky got to Williamsport, Miller’s arm was hurting. So were the arms of his teammates.

  Excitement blends into nervousness in the early days in Williamsport. When they want to win too much, managers can start acting like jerks.

  Before leaving for Williamsport, I visited Tom Galla, the manager of the 1989 Little League World Series champions from Trumbull, Connecticut. Trumbull’s victory became big news because it inte
rrupted a long period of Asian dominance. The Asian teams were so strong— and controversies over rules violations were so rampant—that Little League banned foreign teams from the World Series in 1975. Overall, Asian teams won championships in sixteen out of the previous twenty years when Trumbull, Connecticut, won in 1989.

  But Galla admits now that he almost ruined his team’s chances.

  “When we arrived in Williamsport, everybody jumped off the bus and looked off the edge of The Hill and saw the stadium: ‘Wow!’ The next thing, they gave the kids jackets and brought us over to the infirmary. We were in line and the Taiwanese team shows up right behind us. Our kids were dressed like American kids—shorts, T-shirts, sneakers. These guys [the Taiwanese] had their practice uniforms on, they were carrying these bags, brand-new baseball gloves, brand-new spikes, brand-new everything, and they just looked really sharp, really professional.”

  A newsboy hawking papers is just part of the retro feel of the Little League World Series.

  Galla panicked at the display of professional confidence. And he pushed his own players too hard.

  “We went down to the field and I was a miserable SOB in practices, yelling at everybody, making a nuisance of myself,” he says. “I was nervous that they might think we can’t do this. I was putting everyone through their paces, more difficult than ever before.”

  Then, in a flash, he says he realized that he was sapping the game of its fun, making the players press.

  “Then I walked around the practice and talked to each kid individually when they were still on the field and I said, ‘You did a great job today, I just want you to know that you guys belong here.’”

  The team was loose the whole way, winning four straight games and the title. In the final, Trumbull beat Kang-Tu Little League, 5–2. The starter for Trumbull was Chris Drury, who became a star in the National Hockey League and played for the U.S. Olympic team in Turin in 2006.

  For the teams that do not qualify for the Little League World Series, watching the games can produce regrets—and anger—about what might have been.

  When a bunch of kids from Paramus, New Jersey, watched the Mid-Atlantic Region championship game on TV, they got upset.

  One of the teams in the game—Pennsylvania’s Council Rock Little League—was comprised of most of the same players who competed as as the Newtown Blue Dawgs travel team in the Sports at the Beach tournament in Rehobeth, Maryland, over the Memorial Day weekend.

  So what?

  For weeks, the Paramus Little League tried to get permission from Little League officials to do the same thing—play in both the Little League tournaments and the Sports at the Beach tournament. But Little League officials told John Tenhove, the coach of both teams, that there couldn’t be “too many” of the same players on both teams.

  The reason was that Little League bans forming all-star teams before June 15. If a Little League’s top players competed together as part of a travel team before June 15, that might be tantamount to creating the all-star team before the magic June 15 date. That rule has a good rationale. Teams competing for a spot in the Little League World Series should play on equal terms.

  The Paramus Patriots travel team signed up for the prestigious Delaware tournament before the 2005 Little League season. Tenhove didn’t want to get called for breaking the rules later on, so he went to Little League’s regional headquarters in Bristol, Connecticut, for clarification of the rules.

  “They told me that since we had so many players on the travel team, we were forming the Little League all-star team before June 15, and so that was a violation,” Tenhove says. “I kept asking them, how many is too many? Seven? Eight? Nine? I never got an answer.”

  Since the Patriots already made a commitment to Sports at the Beach, the Paramus Little League pulled all its all-star teams out of Little League tournaments.

  “The Williamsport tournament is very attractive; I would have loved to take a shot at that,” Tenhove says. “My kids and my whole team watch it every year. When it came on TV this year, I got calls from my players: ‘Hey, coach, the Newtown team’s on TV.’ That’s what bothers me. They were allowed to play [in Little League tournaments] and we weren’t.”

  So when the Paramus players saw some of the Newtown Blue Dawgs on TV, competing for a spot in the Little League World Series, they called Tenhove.

  Hey coach, those guys from Newtown are playing in the Little League tournament? How come they’re allowed to play in Little League and Sports on the Beach, and we aren’t?

  In fact, eight players on the Newtown Dawgs travel team also played for the Council Rock Little League all-stars.

  Bill Hartley, the manager of both Newtown teams, doesn’t apologize for having players on both teams. “If anyone tells you they’re just playing Little League,” he told me, “they’re lying.”

  And he’s right. The best players in the U.S. usually want to play on travel teams, and many of them also want a shot at the Little League World Series. Little League officialdom resents travel teams, but wants at least some of the best travel-team players involved in its World Series tournaments.

  “There are a lot of gray areas,” Little League CEO Steve Keener admits. “What the rules say is the local Little League in whatever town cannot sanction, finance, or support Little League participation in a non-sanctioned Little League activity,” he told me later. “But the rule is full of loopholes, and this is what the team from Pennsylvania—the way they did it is the way you have to do it to beat the rule. It’s the same people, the same coaches, the same kids, but Little League is not paying the insurance, it’s not paying the fees, it’s done separately. It’s how you beat the system.”

  At times, Little League all-stars play simultaneously on travel teams. The Peccole Little League, winners of the Nevada state title, allowed six players to play for the Las Vegas Coyotes in the prestigious Cooperstown Dreams Park tournament during the week of June 25.

  “Half of the team went to Cooperstown during all-star practice,” said Bobby Burns, the Little League’s manager. “It wasn’t the best players and they didn’t do very well. But it shows that travel teams have become a very important part of Little League.”

  It’s probably not a stretch to say that the best teams in the Little League World Series are made up of ringers from travel teams.

  The teams from Hawaii, California, Florida, Louisiana, Pennsylvania, and Kentucky all play on travel teams. Every single player on the Maitland Little League all-stars also played for a travel team called the Maitland Pride. Dante Bichette Sr. formed the Maitland Pride the previous year for the sole purpose of getting ready for a run at Williamsport.

  Sid Cash, the manager of Maitland’s Little League all-stars, told me that “we still honored the Little League because we picked a kid who wasn’t on the travel team.” That player turned down the all-star spot, to Cash’s regret. “He was a black kid named Jason Billy,” Cash says. “He was rough but he could run. If we could have had him on the team, he could have put down a bunt and made it every time. He comes from a split family and spent the rest of the summer in Houston. We would have paid for him to fly in for games.”

  The all-stars from Vista, California, were mostly the same kids who played for the Team Easton, a travel team sponsored by the sportinggoods company. The all-stars from Hawaii also played on a Cal Ripken Baseball team and a travel team called the Paina Boyz. The all-stars from Lafayette, Louisiana, play in off-season as the Lafayette Renegades. And, of course, the all-stars from Pennsylvania played on the Newtown Blue Dawgs. All but two of the Owensboro, Kentucky, players competed on travel teams when they went to the World Series in 2004, and four of the players were on travel teams in 2005 before playing in that year’s Little League World Series.

  Steve Keener doesn’t like the term “ringers” to describe the travel team players that dominate the Little League World Series. Technically, Keener says, ringers are players who play in a tournament despite not playing for a team all year. Fair enough
. But the fact remains that Sunbelt teams often get built around travel-team players who work out for years in preparation for the run to Williamsport.

  Somehow, that’s not quite fair to the teams from Davenport, Iowa, and Westbrook, Maine.

  Most of the Iowa kids play other sports in the winter—wrestling, basketball—and don’t have the time or facilities to play baseball. “You don’t do a lot of winter workouts in baseball in Iowa,” Ed Grothus told me. “Once a week maybe. Our kids are doing other stuff. It’s not all baseball, all the time.”

  The dominance of the Little League World Series by travel-team players troubles Steve Keener, but he says the courts prevent any effective response. “I don’t like it, but there’s nothing I can do about it,” Keener told me. In the 1980s, in a case brought by the Amateur Softball Association, state courts rejected Little League’s right to restrict outside participation.

  Speaking of Frostbelt teams like Davenport, which do not have opportunities to play all year long, Keener said, “I feel badly for those kids because they’re probably at a competitive disadvantage. But [the Midwest and other northern regions] have been at a competitive disadvantage in this World Series since competition began in 1947.”

  Little League needs to figure out some way to address the phenomenon of travel teams. Some community leagues have experimented with creating teams for both Little League and elite tournament play. The White Marsh Baseball of Perry Hall, Maryland, for example, provides programs for community leagues similar to Little League and PONY baseball, as well as travel teams. Like weight classes in wrestling and youth football, the separation allows kids to compete against their real athletic peers. “Our major goal is teaching the game and having some fun,” says Bob Palmer, the head of the program. “There are some kids who want something more. It’s the parents who want something more, actually, so they can brag about their kids. But we have programs for them, too. That way we can provide something for everyone.”