Stotz made Little League’s first efforts to globalize the organization. He traveled to U.S. military bases overseas to introduce Little League to the children of servicemen. The first Little League franchises overseas were set up in the Panama Canal Zone in 1950; other foreign programs soon followed in Canada, Cuba, Hawaii (then a U.S. territory), and Puerto Rico. The following year, foreign teams were competing to play in the World Series.
In 1952, U.S. Rubber wielded its power as Little League’s major corporate sponsor and engineered the appointment of a public relations executive named Peter McGovern as Little League’s president. McGovern had a corporate mindset. He helped to pack Little League’s governing board of directors with businessmen, celebrities, and other well-connected men.
The year McGovern started his twenty-one-year reign, 1,500 leagues played games in forty-four states. Ten years later, in 1962, Little League Baseball had 5,500 leagues. By 1978, it was 6,500 leagues—plus 4,150 leagues for boys in other age brackets.
With every major growth spurt, Stotz grew more uncomfortable. He argued against inviting international teams into the World Series and, in 1955, the board voted him down.
As Little League’s founder, Stotz thought he should have the major say over day-to-day management. He held the title of commissioner, which he thought gave him control over baseball operations while McGovern tended to the business operations. In fact, Stotz had a gentleman’s agreement with a U.S. Rubber official that gave him final word on issues like new league charters, game rules, and management of the office. Problem was, the U.S. Rubber official died.
At a meeting after Thanksgiving Day in 1955, Stotz confronted the board of directors. He demanded that his powers as commissioner be recognized and that McGovern be removed as president. Neither of Stotz’s motions was seconded. Stotz left the meeting an outcast from his own organization. After he departed, the board voted to remove him from his position as commissioner.
Stotz, meanwhile, got a local sheriff to padlock the Little League offices under an order from the county court official. The order shut down the offices to prevent the corporation, legally based in New York, from removing equipment from the Williamsport offices. Stotz then filed a breach-of-contract suit to take back control of Little League. By the time the 1956 season started, Stotz and the board settled out of court.
Bitterness lingered. While Little League continued to grow, Stotz supporters never forgot.
“We are fighting for an ideal,” one supporter told the New York Times in 1956. “We can see nothing ahead under the present system except numerical growth that will be followed by dissatisfaction and deterioration.” Stotz formed a rival organization that he called Original Little League. Ultimately, though, Stotz decided that he couldn’t beat the Little League heavies. He surrendered.
Before he died in 1992 at age eighty-two, Stotz and Little League reconciled. The league honored Stotz and rewrote its documents, once scrubbed like a Soviet history book, to acknowledge the old man’s authorship of Little League. Since then, Karen Stotz Myers, the founder’s daughter, has been the honored guest at all major functions of the organization.
Ask any baseball fan about a man named Creighton Hale, and you’re likely to get a blank stare. But Hale has had a greater impact on the game at all levels than many Hall of Famers. Bruce Sutter? Dave Winfield? Rollie Fingers? Please. Compared to Creighton Hale, they’re as important as the guys who put out the deli spreads in clubhouses.
Creighton Hale was an academic by training, but one of the more energetic and affable figures in youth sports. During his reign as CEO, from 1973 to 1994, Little League expanded from 10,006 to 21,711 leagues, from 90,000 to 198,347 teams, and from 370,000 to 3 million players. Little League also expanded internationally, and now includes over 100 countries.
Hale also invented the tools that have shaped the game at all levels. Many of Hale’s patents made Little League a small fortune.
A former professor from Springfield College, this conservative Nebraskan first got involved with the organization when he analyzed the physiological effects of Little League on its players. For years, Little League struggled with academic claims that games put too much stress on kids. Hale devised a study. He recorded the pulse rates of kids during and after games. He found that kids do get aroused—but the arousal quickly disappears after the game. Adults, on the other hand, took hours to restore their equilibrium.
Another study found that more batters got hit by pitches in Little League than in the major leagues. So Little League moved the mound from forty-four to forty-six feet to give batters more time to react.
Another study revealed that most injuries occur when players slide into bases that are bolted to the ground. Hale’s research shop led the effort that produced “break-away” bases that are held loosely to the ground with a grid of snaps. Research on injuries also prompted Little League to ban headfirst sliding for twelve-and-under players and to eliminate the on-deck circle.
Little League’s ubiquitous mascot, a rodent named Dugout, dances with players from Guam before a game.
Hale headed up an effort to improve the baseball helmet. The helmet that Little League mandated in 1961 had earflaps and was made of materials that protected the head. Everyone wears those helmets now.
Hale was also part of the R&D effort that produced the aluminum bat. Wood bats splintered and broke, endangering kids. They were also expensive to replace all summer long. The aluminum bat, developed with Alcoa, was first mandated for Little League use in 1971. Today, virtually every amateur league and tournament uses aluminum bats. Aluminum bats pose their own dangers—balls fly off faster, making pitchers want to blow the ball past hitters—but no one can doubt their importance.
The list goes on—the one-piece catchers mask and helmet, the chest protector with a throat guard, portable plastic outfield fences that reduced collision injuries, rubber spikes.
Under Hale’s leadership, Little League’s research established an extensive database to safeguard the safety of players.
Then there was Hale’s empire-building. In 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed Public Law 88–378, which gave Little League a congressional charter of federal incorporation. Other organizations with the charter include the Red Cross, 4-H Clubs, the Boy Scouts of America, and the Boys and Girls Clubs of America.
Little League created a thriving business in memorabilia—hats, Tshirts, uniforms, publications, videos. Little League expanded its roster of official sponsors (it was sixteen in 2005).
In 1959, Hale opened a massive international headquarters in South Williamsport (which was expanded in 2001), as well as regional headquarters in California, Florida, and Canada (other regional headquarters would follow in Connecticut, Indiana, and Texas, as well as overseas). The regional headquarters brought the organization impressive real estate holdings at almost no cost.
When Creighton Hale retired in 1998, a longtime Little League employee from the nearby town of Lock Haven took over as CEO. Steve Keener has spent his whole adult life at Little League, starting with a summer internship when he was a student at Westminster College in 1980. He worked his way up through the media relations department. For five years, Creighton Hale groomed Keener to take over as CEO.
Keener, a boyish looking forty-eight years old, has strived to keep Little League the dominant youth sports organization in the nation. Keener takes two approaches, which sometimes work at cross-purposes. Keener works to strengthen programs to train coaches, mandate greater playing time, initiate programs for handicapped children, and adopt programs to protect player safety. “There is no other sports organization that can compare” with Little League’s advocacy of safety and open participation, Keener says.
At the same time, he has aggressively expanded Little League’s television presence, which critics say feeds the competitive frenzy that makes Little League more than just a kid’s game.
From the second year of its World Series, Little League has used the dominant media
to broadcast at least the championship games across the U.S. and the world. The media blitz started in 1948 with newsreels of the championship game between Lock Haven, Pennsylvania, and St. Petersburg, Florida, which were eventually seen by eighty million moviegoers.
Little League CEO Steve Keener awards participants in the Challenger Game for handicapped children.
For years, ABC’s Wide World of Sports aired the championship game of the Little League World Series. The event became a late-summer ritual. Old ballplayers like Mickey Mantle, Sandy Koufax, and Jim Palmer provided the color commentary for the games. Grown Little League alumni relived their own days playing ball on sixty-foot bases. More than anything else, the game was an exercise in anthropology. Viewers would get exposure to the way baseball got played someplace else in the world— usually Asia, since Taiwan and Japan dominated the event for more than two decades.
The Little League World Series got on TV not because it was the best brand of baseball— it wasn’t—but because it was a small sample of the “constant variety of sports.” That’s what Wide World was all about, providing a broad buffet of sporting events you don’t ordinarily watch. It was TV’s original “reality” programming. Anything that could be turned into contest—not only minor sports like ski jumping and gymnastics, but also contrived events like Evel Knievel’s motorcycle jumps or climbers scaling the Eiffel Tower. So why not broadcast kids’ baseball?
Over the years, the broadcasts expanded. In 1984, an upstart cable network called ESPN started to televise the two semifinal games. Year after year, ESPN expanded its Little League lineup. By 2000, ESPN broadcast twelve games from the World Series. By the 2005 event, ESPN and ESPN2 carried all eight U.S. regional championship games and twenty-seven World Series games, while ABC carried the U.S. and World Series championship games. Hundreds of hours of Little League games are shown on TV.
Year after year, the ratings for the Little League games are high. Most championship games attract bigger audiences than many major-league and National Hockey League games. The highest rating was a ten, which translates to almost ten million households. More typical ratings are five or six for the championship games broadcast on ABC.
In America, once you have a chance to be on TV, everything changes. The stakes get higher. When you’re on TV, you become a celebrity. People shower you with gifts and adulation. People ask for autographs and invite you to big-league parks and resorts. You actually hear people say, “Your money’s no good here.”
Wander around the practice fields at the Little League complex, chat up the kids while they’re waiting for their turn in the batting cages. Find them in the pin-trading tent or on The Hill. Ask them why they have worked so hard to be in the Little League World Series.
“To be on TV.”
“ESPN!”
“I want to be on SportsCenter!”
Everywhere you go at the Little League complex, people mug for the TV cameras. At one game, a girl brought a huge piece of cardboard marked up and colored to look like a TV. The middle—the screen—was cut out so she could put her face inside. “Put Me On TV,” the sign beseeched. When SportsCenter set up a temporary booth on top of The Hill, hundreds of kids gathered. Like ancients drawn to statues of idols given mystical powers, players are drawn to the power of the televised image.
Not like the TV people were ever going to give the players any distance. Everywhere, ESPN and ABC crews followed players and put their cameras just feet or even inches from their faces. They arranged the players and fans to dance and jump and cheer. Live, from TV Nation . . .
I asked Little League CEO Steve Keener whether televising all those games might be overkill.
“No,” he said quickly. “Overkill for who? Overkill for what? If it’s overkill, then one [game]’s too many. You either object to it being televised or you don’t.”
But televising more games creates the incentive for hundreds of teams to push aggressively in the state and regional tournaments. The more games are televised, the more teams do whatever it takes to win. “There may be that desire to be on TV, and obviously everyone enjoys being on TV,” Keener acknowledges.
The bottom line, Keener says, is that “TV is very important because the World Series is really the strongest marketing vehicle we have. I’m not denying there are problems from time to time, but 95 percent of what comes out on TV is very positive and that’s a great marketing vehicle for our program.”
What would happen to Little League if its TV coverage disappeared?
It’s reasonable to expect that many of the best players would leave Little League to compete exclusively on travel teams. For the kids still interested in playing in community leagues, the Cal Ripken and PONY leagues would be more attractive. The Little League World Series would be just another tournament in a beautiful rural setting. Not much hoopla, just pretty good baseball.
Actually, it’s not hard to imagine the Little League World Series without TV. Because it happens every summer.
Little League runs international tournaments in three other age divisions. Ever hear much about the Junior League World Series, Little League’s tournament for thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds, in Taylor, Michigan? Or the Senior League World Series, the tournament for fourteen- to sixteen-year-olds, in Bangor, Maine? Or the Big League World Series, for sixteen- to eighteen-year-olds, in Easley, South Carolina?
Didn’t think so. No one pays much attention to these events. ESPN2 broadcast the final game of the Junior League’s tournament, on a tapedelay basis. But besides that, TV ignores the organization’s other baseball tournaments. And the rest of the media follow. The New York Times never sends anyone. The teams’ hometown papers occasionally give them a few paragraphs, but not the hundreds of column inches and commemorative sections that local teams get for advancing to Williamsport. The Little League organization itself does little to publicize its other divisions. Go to Little League’s website, and you find a vast trove of current and historical information about the Little League tournament in Williamsport—but almost nothing about the competition in its other divisions.
In the classic Calvin and Hobbes comic strip, Calvin tells his pet tiger that no reality exists outside of TV. He might have been talking about the impact of TV on the Little League World Series.
To understand the soul of Little League—and all sports—you have to go back to its early days. By looking at before and after pictures, you get a sense of what Little League has done for baseball in America—and what has gotten lost in the process.
To do just that, I met with a group of retired men who were present at the creation of the Little League World Series.
About two dozen players from the first Little League World Series— then called the Keds Little League National Tournament—gather every month for breakfast at the Summervale Diner in Enola, eighty-two miles south of Williamsport. A couple days before the start of the 2005 World Series, I joined the group as a guest.
The diner—a squat, faux-stone building nudged between an Advantage Auto Parts and a Quality Inn—lies along Route 15/11, about a two-hour drive from Williamsport.
To get there, you meander on a road along the Susquehanna River. The road tells the story of small town America’s rise and fall. Route 15/11 is flat and nondescript, with gas stations and adult video shacks, fireworks outlets and car dealers, malls and motels. Homemade quilts and furniture hang on the railings of a porch on an old house. An Amish woman in a bonnet rides on a horse-drawn carriage. Old farms survive along some stretches; signs beseech motorists to stop to buy fresh corn. Occasionally an old village center—like Liverpool—rises up from below. Even more spectacularly, the Allegheny Mountains and the Susquehanna River come into view when the road bends.
Little League was still new in Perry County when these men played the game back in ’47. Teams didn’t play in preliminary tournaments to qualify for the Little League Baseball National Tournament. The coaches picked all-star teams, the boys practiced for a few days, and then they travel
ed to Williamsport.
The players occupied a much smaller, more isolated world in those days. TV did not bring the rest of the world home and chain stores did not equip households with the same basic goods. In fact, Little League was one of the first organizations that provided the same recreational activities to communities across the country. Others were the YMCA, 4-H, and Pop Warner.
“That was the first time I was ever away from home,” says Dick Cullen.
“I remember when our coach, Claude Smee, asked me if I wanted to go to Williamsport to play,” says Bill Seitz. “I asked my parents and they said, ‘Why do you want to do that? You can play right here in the back of the church. You don’t have to go way up there to play ball.’ We had no idea.”
Uniforms have always been part of the Little League’s appeal. “We had woolen suits and they were scratchy and hot,” says Jack Wagner. “But it didn’t matter because we were just so pumped up about playing baseball.” Earl Stoltzfus says he was so small that he had to fold the uniform in the shoulders and legs so he could avoid tripping on his trousers while playing.
Those early players might as well have been wearing armor for all their discomfort and restricted movement. But wearing the uniforms made them bigger than the game. They represented their hometowns when they wore the scratchy threads.
The events of those early games remain fresh on the players’ minds. The players recount the game life like golfers fresh off the links, detail for detail.
In 1947, the team from Perry County took an early lead against Lock Haven. Perry led by 5–0 going into the bottom of the third inning, but Lock Haven scored twice in the third, twice in the fourth, and four times in the fifth.
Bill Seitz contributed to Perry County’s attack with a home run that almost didn’t count.
Little League, Big Dreams Page 7