Little League, Big Dreams

by Charles Euchner

  The lilac bush would remain the symbol of Little League inspiration. Stotz preserved the bush for posterity. In 2005, a local artist claimed he got a piece of the bush and mixed it in with the paint he was using to create a mural depicting the influential people in Williamsport’s history. The portion of the mural depicting Carl Stotz was painted with the lilaclaced paint.

  Stotz also asked local businesses for support. As he went from business to business in Williamsport—once the center of the lumber industry, now a city in decline—he received blank stares and polite rejections. Finally, three local businesses agreed to help. Lundy Lumber Company, Lycoming Dairy, and Jumbo Pretzel Company pledged to spend a few hundred dollars to establish “midget” baseball teams.

  No one had ever organized kids that young—eight, nine, ten years old—to play in organized baseball leagues. Until then, kids couldn’t play on teams until they were in high school. Churches and boys clubs organized occasional games, but most youngsters learned baseball on the streets and in the fields. They played pickup and sandlot games. If they didn’t have money for equipment, they made bats and balls from whatever materials were available. They argued frequently over rules and calls. The bigger boys dominated the games, sometimes bullying younger kids and sometimes looking out for them. If they couldn’t get enough players for a game, they improvised.

  Adults rarely intruded on this world. A few zealous adults—like Carl Stotz—played catch or pitched to their boys. The most contact that most kids had with adults in Williamsport at this time came near Bowman Field, the home of the Williamsport Grays minor-league team. Neighborhood kids met players before and after games, and the pros gave away broken bats and played catch.

  A loose model for Little League emerged a decade before, in 1929, when a YMCA employee in Chicago named Joseph Tomlin started a football league for boys in Philadelphia. Tomlin organized the league to combat an outbreak of delinquency. Boys were breaking factory windows all over the city, and Tomlin wanted to fill their time. Since it was fall, Tomlin organized a four-team Junior Football Conference. Over time the new league set up weight classifications to make sure that kids played with their physical peers. Coaches taught the game’s basics—passing and catching, blocking and tackling—and offered special recognition to kids who did well in school. In 1934, the organizers renamed the league for Pop Warner, a college coaching legend whose players included Jim Thorpe. By 1938, 157 teams competed in Pop Warner leagues.

  Before Little League’s first season in 1939, Stotz devised new rules for baseball appropriate to small boys. He decided right away that batters shouldn’t take first base on called third strikes or take leads to steal bases. He also experimented with different field sizes before settling on a diamond two-thirds the size of a regulation field. He describes his experimentation with field sizes in his memoir, A Promise Kept:

  “After I placed the papers around the field to represent home plate and each base, I positioned the boys around the infield while I served as pitcher. From time to time, I changed the distance between the bases. I was trying to find out what distance would enable the boys to throw a runner out from third base or shortstop while still giving the batter a fair chance to beat it out, depending on where he hit the ball…Each evening I continued experimenting with the distance between bases. When I finally had what I thought was the ideal distance, I stepped it off and used a yardstick at home to measure my strides. The distance was so close to sixty feet that I set that as the distance we would use thereafter.”

  The pitcher’s rubber was placed forty-four feet from home plate; it was later moved back to forty-six feet when the shorter distance was considered too dangerous for pitchers and hitters alike.

  Stotz could not have known the long-term impact of his decision. The small field would enable little guys to play the game with ease. Over the years, the smaller field would also produce a game long on power and short on finesse. To win the Little League World Series, you have to strike out batters and hit home runs. That style of play contributed to a crisis in pitching injuries that reverberated all the way to the major leagues.

  Long before Ray Kroc franchised McDonald’s hamburger joints across the world, Carl Stotz had the idea of creating a franchise system for children’s sports.

  After Stotz started Little League Baseball in 1939, he decided to spread it as far as he could take it. He proselytized community leaders from other towns—teachers, preachers, fathers, businessmen—to start their own leagues using Little League’s rules. Stotz traveled first around central Pennsylvania, then all over the eastern United States, to preach his gospel of wholesome play for boys. He went to Sunday school classes, Lions Club meetings, school boards, YMCAs, and other organizations that gathered together boys and their fathers.

  At one point, Stotz considered adding other sports to Little League. But he decided that if he was going to grow his organization, he had to focus on the sport he knew best.

  Everywhere he went, his message was the same: Boys should be able to play in a miniature version of the major leagues, with all the trappings of the game. But the game should always be local. Dads should organize and coach teams. Neighbors should help out. Fans should pitch in with donations. Local merchants—owners of dairies, lumberyards, newspapers, hardware stores, restaurants—should sponsor teams.

  To get a Little League charter, local organizations had to abide by simple rules set by Williamsport, but otherwise they were free to administer their leagues as they saw fit. To keep the experience as local and intimate as possible, Little League required all leagues to operate in a geographic area containing a population of 20,000 people. In such a small community, everyone would know everyone. And with tryouts and drafts, the teams would have comparable talent. Unlike high school sports, which were always dominated by the biggest schools with the most dominant players, Little League would be competitive for all. The point was to get as many kids involved as possible and have fun.

  For years, Carl Stotz worked on his own time. He was lucky to have bosses who appreciated his league, so he left work early and took long summer vacations. In 1949, Little League’s first major sponsor, U.S. Rubber, gave Stotz a ten-year contract to work full-time for Little League.

  With its franchise model, Little League grew fast. By 1947, Little League had seventeen leagues in Pennsylvania and New Jersey.

  In 1947, Little League’s board of directors decided to hold a tournament to determine a “national” champion. The tournament gave Little League a spotlight that eventually helped it to become the biggest youth sports organization in the world.

  Newsreels produced by the maker of the classic film Lost Horizon carried an account of the second tournament in 1948. Eighty million Americans saw the newsreel. A feature in the Saturday Evening Post in 1949 brought hundreds of requests for information on forming leagues. An article in Reader’s Digest in 1951 produced another avalanche of inquiries. In 1953, CBS televised a tape of the World Series championship game and ABC broadcast a radio account with a young play-byplay man named Howard Cosell.

  By 1952, the organization had 1,500 leagues. The league attracted the effusive praise of notables all over. Former president Herbert Hoover called Little League “one of the greatest stimulants of constructive joy in the world.” The other Hoover, J. Edgar, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, called Little League “the greatest deterrent to crime that America has ever seen.” Arthur Daley, a sports columnist for the New York Times, said Little League was “the biggest thing in the sport since Abner Doubleday outlined his baseball diamond in Cooperstown in 1839.”

  Little League helped to define the emotional geography of American suburbia. As G.I.s returned from World War II and Korea, they settled in housing tracts and shopping malls rising on the crabgrass frontier.

  The affluence of the postwar era created new opportunities for learning and play—and more often than not, these new opportunities took on a structured form. As succeeding rings of suburbs filled
with single-family homes and “pods” of activity centers—clusters of separate activities, like office parks, shopping centers, schools, theaters and arts centers, playgrounds—children’s activities operated with formal rules and organization. As consumerism spread into every crevice of everyday life, people paid for goods and services that they once made for themselves. Little League was at the leading edge of this new age of organized play.

  Over the years, Little League expanded beyond its early program— boys eight to twelve years old—to offer programs for boys and girls of all ages. Partly to head off the drive to allow girls to play baseball, Little League created two softball programs in 1974. Over the years, Little League added baseball programs for thirteen- to fifteen-year-olds in a Senior League (1961) and sixteen- to eighteen-year olds in a Big League (1968). In 1979, Little League created a Junior League program for thirteen-year-olds.

  Little League provided the perfect vehicle for keeping kids busy under watchful eyes of dads and other trusted adults. In fact, if a smalltown man like Carl Stotz did not invent Little League, someone like William Levitt or Ray Kroc would have had to do it.

  Like the rest of America, Little League struggled to confront the major social challenges facing the United States. On two issues—race and gender—Little League attempted to avoid the bitterness of the struggles.

  The 2005 Little League World Series closed a sorry chapter on racial exclusion. Before the game between Florida and Iowa, an all-black team from Charleston was proclaimed the South Carolina state champion. Six of the surviving players from the 1955 Charleston team walked onto the field, lined up along the first-base line, and accepted a plaque and banner celebrating the team’s achievement.

  On the field, they wore the kinds of broad smiles that you usually see after the tournament is over. When they walked off the field, they were surrounded by TV reporters who wanted to know what it felt like to be champions.

  In 1955, the year Rosa Parks refused to move to the back of the bus in Montgomery, Alabama, racial politics created a deep split in Little League.

  South Carolina in those days had sixty-two Little League organizations—all but one of them all white. Rather than playing in a tournament with the black team from Charleston, the Cannon Street YMCA all-stars, the white leagues boycotted the tournament. Little League executives wouldn’t intervene, so South Carolina got shut out of a possible berth in the World Series. Little League’s split-the-baby solution was to allow the Charlestown kids to stay in Williamsport dorms while other teams played in the tournament. Just as segregationists established private academies rather than enroll their kids in integrated schools, they also created a new league. Hundreds of leagues dropped out of Little League and formed Dixie Youth Baseball.

  The saga of the Cannon Street YMCA all-stars is vintage Little League. Since its earliest days, Little League has avoided controversy. A smalltown organization that targeted its growth efforts to suburban communities, Little League was not going to get into the middle of a growing crisis over race relations and civil rights. Little League’s executives were not going to try to force white teams to play with black teams or to award the black team a forfeit victory in the state tournament.

  But at the same time, to its credit, Little League did not endorse the bigotry of South Carolina’s all-white leagues.

  Blacks have never had a huge presence in Little League’s biggest stage. Over the years, few black teams have competed in the Little League World Series. The best team came from Gary, Indiana, in 1971. Led by a future major-leaguer named Lloyd McClendon, Gary took Taiwan beyond the regulation six innings in the championship game before losing in the ninth inning. The other successful black team came from Harlem in 2002.

  The underrepresentation of black kids in Little League is mirrored at higher levels. Only about 9 percent of major leaguers today are black, down from a high of 23 percent in 1984. Only 6.1 percent of Division I college baseball players are black. Many inner-city neighborhoods don’t even have Little League or other youth baseball leagues. Blacks have come to favor football and basketball.

  After Little League confronted the race problem—or at least put the problem aside—the question of the rights of girls moved to the fore.

  Girls were always excluded from Little League for the same reason they were excluded from Boy Scouts. It was just assumed that baseball was a boys’ game, period. A girl named Kathryn Johnston became the first girl to play in Little League in 1950 when she dressed up as a boy and called herself Tubby. But most leagues banned girls, and most girls didn’t care enough to fight.

  By the 1970s, though, girls started to demand to play Little League. In 1973, Maria Pepe played three games in the Hoboken Little League before Williamsport intervened to bar her from the league. Essex County’s branch of the National Organization for Women (NOW) took the case to New Jersey’s Civil Rights Division, which ruled in her favor. At the urging of officials in Williamsport, most of the state’s 2,000 leagues postponed registration to avoid complying with the ruling.

  “The girl is more likely to get hurt,” Little League’s CEO Creighton Hale argued. “From the time boys are six years old, they have more muscle fiber than girls.” The controversy, Hale sighed, was political. “Most girls can play softball and I think more girls can benefit from a good softball program. Too much emphasis is placed on the game itself rather than what you get out of the game.”

  The New Jersey Superior Court supported the state’s ruling. Seeing that it had lost its fight, Little League dropped its resistance. President Gerald R. Ford signed a 1974 law rewriting Little League’s special federal charter by changing the word “boys” to “young people.” In 1975, Amy Dickenson became the first girl drafted for a Little League team in New Jersey. She became a minor celebrity, appearing on Wonderama and sitting in the Mets dugout.

  The controversy never disappeared. Girls have always had to deal with isolation on the team and stupid indignities like being ordered to wear a cup (it happened in Michigan’s Romulus Little League in 1974). But there have been triumphs. Twelve girls have played in the Little League World Series. In 2004, two girls pitched against each other in a friendship game at the Little League World Series—and, Little League flak Chris Downs says, “one of them was actually a legitimate player.” In 2005, when a girl named Katie Brownell pitched a perfect game in upstate New York, it was big news. She was everywhere in the media, met President George W. Bush, and had her jersey displayed at the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown.

  Over the years, Little League faced a number of critics. But the biggest critic turned out to be Carl Stotz, the founder of the organization.

  From the beginning, educators worried that Little League put too much pressure on kids.

  Charles Bucher, professor of education at New York University, thought Little League rushed boys out of their special dream world.

  “The drive to win is traditional in America and must be preserved,” Bucher wrote in 1952. “But a boy will absorb that lesson soon enough in high school. In his grammar school years it is more important that his recreation is guided toward other objectives: the fun of playing rather than winning, the child rather than the game, the many rather than the few, informal activity rather than the formal, the development of skills in many activities rather than specialization.”

  Others endorsed Little League as long as it stayed true to its roots, but resisted the national tournament and corporate sponsorship. “There’s nothing wrong with Little League Baseball as long as it is confined to local competition and as long as exploitation and commercialism are avoided,” said George Maksim, chairman of the school health committee of the American Academy of Pediatrics. “Competition is part of the growing child that should be recognized, accepted, and directed.”

  The criticism that Little League professionalized childhood would be heard more insistently over the years. When the Little League World Series became a major event—with days upon days of television coverage, parades, an
d scholarships and thousands of dollars worth of booty for the champions—Little League would become the target of stinging critiques from psychologists and educators.

  By the 1990s and 2000s, it wasn’t just Little League that seemed to pose such troubling questions. In other youth sports—soccer, basketball, football, lacrosse, hockey, gymnastics, and a dozen other sports— parents pushed their kids hard. Parents wanted the kids to qualify for competitive tournaments, win scholarships, and even get pro contracts. Cheerleading, once an innocent realm for boosters of sports, became so competitive that parents started gaming the system. One notorious Houston mother conspired to kill one of her daughter’s classmates to ease the way for her child to make the squad.

  Whatever you think about organizing kids to compete for glory, Little League was the model that everyone else followed. The uniforms, standings and stats, the adult supervision, the thick nest of rules, the drafts and trades, the international tournaments, the media glare—all were pioneered by Carl Stotz, who had this idea about creating a game where kids would dress up and act like adults.

  Like all charismatic visionaries, Carl Stotz got caught between his desires to keep his organization small and under his own control, and his dreams to make Little League big.

  Stotz loved the national attention and corporate support of the Little League World Series, but he also worried about Little League losing its local character. Coaches were starting to pay so much attention to building a national-caliber team that they neglected their lesser players. Stotz also feared that coaches intent on winning the championship would be tempted to cheat or bend the rules to win.

  With its World Series as a headline event, Little League boomed. By 1948, the organization had ninety-four leagues; the next year it was 309 leagues. In 1950, Little League incorporated as a nonprofit organization.