Little League, Big Dreams

by Charles Euchner

  “Coming around, I didn’t touch home base,” Seitz said. “And the coach grabbed me quick and I went back and touched it, so it did count. I know we scored a lot of runs that day. But we lost the game.”

  Dugout dances with an umpire.

  He paused for effect and raised his voice above the diner’s noise. “I know the pitcher said he didn’t get any support. Who was the pitcher?”

  The former Little Leaguers chortled, for the hundredth time. Charlie Sheaffer, that pitcher, sat silently and smiled.

  Lock Haven later played in the first championship game, losing to the Maynard Little League of Williamsport, 16–7.

  Like me, the original Little League World Series contestants loved playing the game in uniforms on a formal diamond. But playing the game away from the structure of Little League was great, too—even better in some ways.

  “We never went anywhere without a baseball,” says Gene Hammaker. “If you rode a bicycle, the baseball glove was hanging on the handlebars. When we went to Williamsport it was just another baseball game.”

  You didn’t need two teams of nine players apiece to play baseball. Variations on the game let you play with four or five players. “We called it Scrubbie,” says Bud Whitaker. “You had a pitcher and a catcher and whatever else you had.”

  “You didn’t have computers, you didn’t have the things that occupy kids’ time now,” says Frank Reidinger. “So you were playing baseball all the time—from the time you got up in the morning to the time it was too dark to play. When we played sandlot, we played with baseballs with tape around them and string coming off of them and we made our own bats.”

  The best bats came from the railroads. “If you were lucky you got a brakeman’s club,” says Sheaffer. “The brakemen would carry it with them, it was a portable thing. Brakemen would ride in the back and get up on the top to turn the wheel and put the breaks on manually. It was made out of hardwood and they were maybe thirty-six inches long. But if all we could find [was] a two-by-four, we worked with that. We used anything. And of course you had to mend your own glove.”

  For all the boys, baseball was its own country, a land with its own common-law constitution and power structure and foreign policy. As long as it was light outside, you could find refuge in baseball, whether the game was played under the rules of kids or the rules of adults.

  The refuge was especially important for a scrawny kid named Earl Stoltzfus, whose father’s alcoholism created chaos and pain in the household. The Stoltzfus family never found stability. The best the family found was an apartment near an Amish farm. Young Earl did not do well in school and did not know much about the wider world.

  “I didn’t have too much of a life when I was a kid,” he now says. “My father was an alcoholic. He died while I was in Little League. He was what you call a whiskey alcoholic. In his last years he’d work a week and then he’d go on a binge. And he was very mean when he was drunk.”

  Claude Smee, the coach of the Enola Little League team, provided what little direction and discipline Stoltzfus got as a kid.

  “He treated me well, why I don’t know,” he says. “He treated all the guys well. He was strict. I stole a lot of bases and one time I stole when I wasn’t supposed to and I sat on the bench.”

  The child of an alcoholic desperately craves consistency, reliability, and predictability—even if it comes in the form of punishment. All these years later, Stoltzfus cherishes even the scolding he got from Smee.

  As the team’s smallest player—he would not reach five feet until the year he graduated from high school—Stoltzfus had to hustle for any success on the field. That hustle was an outlet for the anger that he felt over his home life. Stoltzfus remembers slamming into infielders when he was running the bases and intimidating baserunners while playing shortstop.

  “Baseball meant a lot to me. I slept with my glove. I was Charlie Hustle, that’s it, because I didn’t have the ability that a lot of kids have. I used to go all summer and my left hand swelled up and my knuckles. And I had strawberries down both hips from sliding. That was another thing that amazed us—we saw that field in Williamsport and we said, ‘Wow, look at that field.’”

  Stoltzfus watches Little League games on ESPN and ABC. As an adult he has seen the World Series in person just once—when he was in town to work on a project at the local Sylvania plant—but he holds fast to his own memories.

  He shakes his head at today’s players’ athleticism and skills. But today’s kids have advantages he could never imagine. They play on groomed fields, practice in batting cages, and shape their bodies in gyms with trainers. “These kids today would play circles around us,” he says. “Back then anyone who had a Little League team could go to Williamsport. They were looking for teams to go there.”

  It was a rougher game, but baseball was more meaningful for Little League’s early generations. When his son played Little League, Stoltzfus coached for two years. He got frustrated with the kids’ attitude.

  “An awful lot of those kids don’t want to play. Their parents made them join. They didn’t want to sleep with their gloves. We really loved the game.”

  Little League baseball has come a long way— from a game played only in small towns of Pennsylvania to a league played in thousands of American leagues and hundreds of international organizations. Guam’s Sean Manley scores in a game against Mexico.

  Many of Hawaii’s players were teammates for years before switching from PONY League to Little League—and a chance to play in the most famous tournament in youth sports.

  CHAPTER 4

  Working Class Champs from Paradise

  THE SUREST WAY TO FIND ONE OF THE FATHERS from the West Oahu Little League all stars is to look inside a truck. Those men are always in trucks. Five of them drive trucks for a living, and others use trucks in their construction or manufacturing business or their work in the Marines. As they drive around, they talk with each other on cell phones. They make plans for their kids’ sports teams, set details of the next family reunion, or discuss how to get their kids into prestigious private schools. Only a couple of them spent any time in college, but they all want their kids to go.

  I found Layton Aliviado driving in a truck. Aliviado was the manager of Hawaii’s all-star team in the Little League World Series. He was one of the people I needed to see when I visited Hawaii. I wanted to find out how this group of families built the team that won the Little League World Series in 2005.

  The morning after I arrived in Hawaii, I was eager to explore the island. But first I had to trade in my rental car, a big and boxy Chevy with huge blind spots. I was driving back to the Hertz franchise at the airport and approached a fork in the road at a traffic light. I rolled down the passenger window to ask the guy in the truck beside me if I was going the right way.

  “Hey, you’re here! When did you get in?”

  It was Aliviado, sitting high in the truck he drives for the U.S. Postal Service. He was wearing his crisp USPS uniform, hat, and sunglasses. He was driving back to the main distribution center at the end of his shift.

  As if we were old neighbors, I asked him about the weekend’s football and baseball games. He told me where to go and when. Then I asked if another dad, Jesse Aglipay, was around. “Yeah, I just talked to him a minute ago. He’s got to pick up Alaka’i but they’re going to the field later. Meet them there.”

  And then the light changed and he went one way and I went the other. I learned my first lesson about life in Hawaii. The islands are very small, and even strangers run into people they know.

  We live in a time when baseball has become dominated by two extremes—the affluent American suburbanites who spend tens of thousands of dollars on private coaches and travel teams, and the poorest of the poor in places like the Dominican Republic and Mexico and Venezuela.

  The team from Ewa Beach lives in a place that looks a lot more like the old blue-collar communities of New Jersey celebrated by Springsteen. It’s a place where people get marri
ed early, take jobs in factories and construction sites, drive trucks, and struggle to survive economically. It’s a place where sports and family milestones structure the calendar. It’s also a place where one generation is always trying to find ways for the next generation to have a better life.

  In a way, those families live in paradise. They have great weather all the time. They play sports year round. They have family reunions and parties every time their kids play in a game. When they’re not on a field outside, they’re hunting wild pigs in the mountains or surfing in the ocean. They even have their own language. Hawaiian, once a dying tongue, is a part of the everyday chatter. The way they blend fragments of Hawaiian into English—“Eh, brah, da guy wen quit his job”—both widens and tightens the circles around them.

  The most common tourist image of Hawaii is Waikiki Beach, the stretch of white sand and blue waves not far from the high-rise hotels and apartment buildings and expensive department stores in Honolulu. Waikiki is the place of surfers in buff bodies, Don Ho singing and playing the ukulele, bonfires and celebrations. That’s Hawaii’s glamour. Then there’s the other famous image of Hawaii, the underbelly seen on TV shows like Hawaii Five-O and Magnum, P.I., which show haoles— white guys, outsiders—chasing down murderers, pimps, drug dealers, money launderers, kidnappers, and other lowlifes.

  But most life in the Pacific paradise is more ordinary than all that. For most people in Hawaii, including most of the Little League families, life is about just getting by—holding a job, making huge house payments, finding a good school for the kids, keeping kids away from the lazy ways of the beach bums and the rough ways of the street.

  When I watched the Hawaii players in the Little League World Series, I was impressed with how strong and focused they were—but also how loose they could be, too. The players knew each other and played together most of their lives, starting at age four or five. Three of them were related—two were first cousins and the other was a second cousin—but all of them might as well have been related. There was one haole and two white-collar families on the team. But such distinctions didn’t seem to matter much.

  Until 1890, Ewa Beach was nothing but a fetid swampland. It was damp and dirty and filled with disease, with no real benefits to the island’s economy or population. Then the Dole family decided to raze the nearby hills to harvest pineapples. The dirt cut out of the hills got moved to the fens. Suddenly, it was land, and it could be harvested for something.

  Then along came a railroad magnate named B. F. Dillingham who was looking for a reason to build a railroad circling Oahu. Dillingham leased land to the Ewa Sugar Plantation, knowing that a thriving plantation would create steady business for haulers. If the sugar plantations moved in, population would fill in the rest along the rail ring.

  Within a generation, the Ewa Plantation became one of the biggest in all of Hawaii. By the time of the Great Crash, the plantation produced more than 60,000 tons of sugar a year.

  At its peak, 2,500 workers labored in the fields. They came from all over the world—from China and Japan, the Philippines, and other islands of the Pacific. And they lived in workers camps segregated by nationality into three main areas—Varona, Tenney, and Renton Villages. Living in single-wall houses built by the plantation, they maintained their native customs while sharing the fields, schools, churches, and local stores with everyone in the area.

  In its own way, Ewa Beach provided one of the most compelling models anywhere for multiculturalism. If you want to see a place where American immigrants held tightly to their heritages, while at the same time lived and worked closely with people from other backgrounds, get in the time machine and go see Ewa circa 1920 or 1930.

  Like plantations everywhere, the Ewa Sugar Plantation imposed harsh conditions on its workers. Even though workers were paid substantially more than the industry standard, they gave up control of their own lives. Any sign of resting or socializing was met with physical intimidation. A Japanese worker in 1906 described the discipline in the Ewa plantation: “The luna [boss] carried a whip and rode a horse. Up until our time, if we talked too much the man swung the whip. He did not actually whip us but just swung the whip so that we would work harder.”

  Renton Road had everything a self-contained community needed— primary among them, the mill where sugar cane was processed and the warehouses where the sugar was stored before getting sent by rail to market and ports, but also to schools, churches, stores, a bicycle repair shop, and the mansion of the plantation manager.

  Plantations once covered about 20,000 acres on Oahu. But the industry declined in the years after World War II. Latin America took over the international sugar markets. Even when the federal government spent billions on subsidies for sugar industry, it didn’t help. Foreign sugar was still a bargain. When sugar prices got too high, manufacturers of soda and sweets turned to sugar substitutes. From 1941 to 1995, the number of sugar companies on the island declined from thirty-one to five.

  The Ewa Plantation ceased operations in the 1980s, long after it was sold to the Oahu Sugar Plantation. Few signs of the old sugar economy remain. But a lot of the old buildings are still there—a few churches, the Ewa Preservation Society, and the Easter Seals. The liveliest institution in the area is the Lanakila Baptist School, a Bible-based school of about 100 children in grades seven through twelve.

  A native Hawaiian named Lance Arakawa, who took piano lessons in the area in the 1960s and 1970s and waited for his ride home at the manager’s mansion, has a dream of making the road a beautiful homage to the days of the sugar plantation. Arakawa leads a group of a dozen volunteers to restore the elegant mansion to its past glory—and, some day, to restore the decaying mills and warehouses nearby.

  When tournament games were broadcast on ESPN—the championship game of the regional tournament, and then six games in the World Series in Williamsport—the mansion became a gathering place. Arakawa set up a big flat-screen TV and neighbors and friends watched games in the neighborhood where the team’s journey began.

  Layton Aliviado, the man in the truck, put together the first pieces of his Little League World Series team almost eight years before.

  Layton Aliviado is a small man—five feet, four inches—but powerfully built. During the run to Williamsport, he was forty-one years old, with two grown children and a twelve-year-old, but he looked like he could be thirty.

  He has brown skin and a thick mass of hair as black as newspaper ink. Outside, where he spends almost all of his days, he shields his eyes behind sunglasses. He speaks in a staccato voice, his words sometimes rising to a squeak as they tumble out, quickly, in short phrases. He gets embarrassed when he has to talk publicly. “I’m not a speaker,” he told me. “I’m just a local guy who speaks Pidgin.”

  Aliviado works the night shift—from 1 until 9:30 in the morning—so he can be available to coach baseball and football in the afternoons. After he gets home—sharing family news with his wife, grabbing a bite to eat—he naps until the early afternoon. Then he gets ready to coach. He’s lucky if he puts together five hours of sleep every twenty-four hours. “Hey, you do what you gotta do, you know?” he says.

  The time in the truck gives Aliviado plenty of opportunity to plot his moves on the field. He talks on the cell phone with other coaches and parents about the best way to train kids, how to teach pitching and hitting motions, the best lineups, the recruitment of players for the team and league. For years, Aliviado’s truck talk has focused on how to create a team that could win the Little League World Series. He and the other dads studied tapes of past World Series championship games, and then they talked about what they saw. What did they do to win? Can we do it too?

  When Aliviado’s son was four years old and his two cousins were five, they played T-ball together. The cousins had to battle to win infield positions. But once they got inside the diamond, they were there to stay. His son Layson, usually known by his Hawaiian name of Kaeo, was the smallest of the three cousins but he was also lefthanded, so
he played first base. Myron Enos Jr.—known as Kini—was the swiftest and the most athletic, so he became the shortstop. Sheyne Baniaga—nicknamed “Bubbles” by his mother because of the shape of his ample posterior— was the strongest, so he became the second baseman.

  That first T-ball team was awful. The kids lost game after game. But the cousins kept playing together, Tinkers and Evers and Chance, and developed together. Because they were relatives, they saw each other all the time. They developed a pattern of caring for each other. When Hawaiian families gather, everyone takes off their shoes at the door as they’re entering a house. Denise Baniaga, Sheyne’s mother, remembers Kaeo gathering his cousins’ shoes so they wouldn’t have to search for them at the end of the evening.

  With the core set, the team added one or two players every year until it was one of the best for its age group on the island.

  As the team grew, the families grew closer as well. After every game— and many practices—the team held potluck dinners and stayed an hour or more socializing and analyzing the game. Each time, a different family was responsible for bringing chicken and rice, vegetables, beer and soda, cookies—and the island’s favorite delicacy, SPAM. If you don’t go, you’re considered suspect.

  “It’s a big social thing, and if you don’t participate people are like, ‘What’s your problem?’” says Mark Milton, a New Jersey transplant who coaches youth sports and paid the airfare and lodging costs for many of the team’s families to travel to Williamsport. “It’s a bonding thing. People love the game and their kids. They want to savor the experience. That’s what the potluck is about.”

  Over the years, the families decided that the kids were good enough to compete in national tournaments. At first, the core of the team played in the younger age brackets of the PONY League. Over time, the PONY allstar team from Waipio (near Ewa) developed into a powerhouse. The families also formed “weekend” or travel teams, and they played for a year in the Cal Ripken League. In 2003, the PONY League team won the Hawaii state tournament with a surprise victory over Mililani, which had long been the best league in the state.