Curaçao’s Denjerick Virginia stretches his body back to prepare to hit against Guam.
Jurickson Profar looked unhittable most of the way. He struck out eleven batters in six innings. But Venezuela tied the game in the fifth inning when Richard Alvarez hit a dramatic grand slam.
The game went into extra innings and Curaçao loaded the bases in the eighth. Sorick Liberia lifted a high fly ball to left field that scored the winning run. “I thought it was a home run, but I uppercut it too much,” Liberia said.
So the Willemstad all-stars won. And a good thing, too. Because Japan demolished them in the second game of the World Series, 9–0.
The early line on the all-stars from Chiba City, a suburb of Tokyo, was: good pitch, good field, no hit.
But Japan looked like a team of Godzillas against Curaçao. The early scoring was a gift from the Caribbean team. Japan took a 3–0 lead in the first inning when Curaçao’s starter, Manuela Dienston, walked four straight batters and threw three wild pitches before leaving the game with only one out. Yusuke Taira hit a two-run homer in the fourth inning and Yuki Mizuma hit a three-run shot in the sixth.
Taira gave up only three hits and had two walks and a home run to lead Chiba City. Taira threw Japan’s patented wicked curveball all day, reducing Curaçao’s biggest hitters to futility.
After the game, the players looked loose and confident—especially considering they could have lost their first two games and been eliminated already. But their third game of pool play was against Saudi Arabia, one of the weaker teams in Williamsport. And they already saw the best that Japan had to offer.
“We’ll be ready for Japan next time,” Vernon Isabella said.
Most teams that advance to the Little League World Series spend years in training. The team from Guam was one of the most energetic teams, and they advanced to the semifinals in the International division of the tournament.
CHAPTER 6
Training to Win
JOHN BANIAGA WAS ONLY KIDDING, but he was trying to make a serious point. Baniaga was recalling the way the team from Ewa Beach marched powerfully and confidently through all of the qualifying tournaments for the Little League World Series—and then, suddenly, started to feel weak and homesick.
When the Hawaii players arrived in Williamsport, they discovered that breakfast on the mainland meant eggs, bacon, and grains. They couldn’t stand it. They hated the taste, they hated the texture, and they hated the way they felt after eating any of it. It was as if Sam I Am showed up and was trying to force green eggs and ham on the islanders.
The Hawaiians complained. “They were craving SPAM,” Baniaga, one of the truck-driving dads on the Ewa Beach team, told me. “They just weren’t right till they had their SPAM.”
So the team’s family members, thirty of them packed into an eight-room bed-and-breakfast outside of town, bought a rice cooker, a big supply of SPAM, and made the kind of breakfast the kids got back in Ewa Beach— SPAM Musubi. It’s a roll of rice, grilled SPAM, and nori seaweed. It was the official food, the fuel, of the Hawaii team.
SPAM was once the ultimate food of the postwar era. Originally sold in 1937 as the first canned meat not requiring refrigeration, SPAM has become disdained on the mainland, a symbol of suburban blandness. But SPAM has a mystical hold on Hawaiians. SPAM recipes are a favorite of Hawaiian homes, and SPAM meals are served in restaurants all over the islands. Even McDonald’s serves SPAM.
During the games in Williamsport, Baniaga and others held up signs that proclaimed the power of SPAM:
The Hawaiian families cooked SPAM for the team from Ewa Beach.
EWA BEACH ALL-STARS: POWERED BY SPAM MUSUBI
SPAM was Hawaii’s power food. SPAM calmed down the Hawaiians physically, making them stronger, so that they could then settle into their baseball routines in Williamsport and win.
Something similar happened a quarter-century before. The allstars from Taipei, Taiwan, got to Williamsport and could not handle the American food—especially cheese, milk, and other dairy foods. They had stomachaches and diarrhea and couldn’t concentrate in practices. So the team’s manager called the embassy in Washington, and the embassy’s chef came to prepare Chinese food for them. Taiwan went all the way, winning the Little League World Series with a 5–0 victory over Santa Clara, California. That was the beginning of Little League’s greatest dynasty. Teams from Taiwan won seventeen Little League championships between 1969 and 1996.
A few years later, the chef decided to move to Williamsport. Yu-Cho Yen, known as Charlie, had the option of signing on for another tour with the embassy but declined. He remembered the small town in Pennsylvania where he became a hero for his cooking. He opened Yen King Chinese Restaurant in Williamsport in 1972.
Yen King is still in business. The eighty-five-year-old Charlie Yen is retired these days, but he comes to the restaurant every day to cook for the family.
The real answer to Hawaii’s powerful play was less about diet and more about punishing work. The West Oahu Little League all-stars won because they trained hard, for two solid years. The coaches took a bunch of skinny kids and ran ’em hard, every day except Sunday, until it hurt, until they doubled over with cramps, until they vomited and begged to stop. They hardened up those soft bodies—especially the lower bodies. Those workouts made the legs strong and quick. The Hawaiian players developed explosive power. They could throw hard, hit hard, run the bases hard, and go after grounders and pop flies hard.
By the time they arrived in Williamsport, Hawaii was the strongest of all the teams in the Little League World Series.
Months after the series, I was talking with former major league star Dante Bichette, one of the coaches of Florida’s team. He asked me about my visit to Hawaii and what the team did to prepare for Williamsport. He listened and then turned silent for a moment. “Oh, no wonder,” he said. “Of course they were so strong.” Another pause. “Really? They did all that?”
This is what the all-stars from the West Oahu Little League, from Ewa Beach, did to prepare for their run at the Little League World Series.
Six days a week, a group of men gathered at that unkempt Little League field near the old Ewa Sugar Plantation to set up machines and equipment for practice.
Located on the bottom of a fifty-foot slope off Renton Road, the plantation’s old main street, the field had a dirt infield and overgrown outfield. During the peak months of summer, the sun beat down hard, even in the late afternoon.
The men—fathers of the players in the West Oahu Little League— brought two portable backstops, two portable pitching machines, PVC pipes, bats, helmets, balls, and catcher’s gear. They unloaded the equipment from pickups and set up different stations around the field. As they worked, the first players arrived for practice, which lasted from 4:30 until the sun went down on weekdays. On Saturdays, they worked from nine in the morning until three or four in the afternoon, with a break for lunch. On Sundays, they rested.
The all-stars started their workouts in the spring, long before the allstar team was selected. In fact, every player in the league participated in the boot camp drills. The league came into being in 2004—it was created when the Ewa Beach Little League was forced to split because of a population boom in the area—and still had only two teams.
The managers of the two teams—Layton Aliviado of the Red Sox and Tyron Kitashima of the Cubs—shared the goal of reaching Williamsport and agreed to work out together all summer long. Aliviado had already managed most of the boys in the PONY League, so he knew them well. He also knew he would be the manager of the Little League’s all-star team. So he designed training drills and got the players’ families to commit to training year-round for the run to Williamsport.
Baseball boot camp started in 2004, helping Aliviado’s band of elevenyear-olds to advance to Little League’s state tournament. And then boot camp started again in 2005.
The goal was to make the players strong enough to endure a summer of daily baseball without getting ti
red. On most other teams, over the long summer of baseball, players hurt their arms, lost their focus at the plate, got lazy during games, struggled to maintain good pitching form, lost a step on the base paths or in the field, when it mattered most. The road to Williamsport was a long, grinding, tiring process.
If the kids are not strong in their lower bodies, they will weaken by the time they make it to the World Series. They start to look like the survivors of a dance marathon. But if you’re strong—especially if you have strong legs—you can last all summer long without getting tired.
Another goal was to burn good athletic technique into muscles and bones. Like other activities—driving a car, playing golf, building furniture—baseball requires doing countless actions perfectly without thinking. The goal of good training is to make those actions part of the muscle memory. Then everything becomes a matter of reacting. Thinking in a game is just a matter of getting ready, being alert, to let loose with the automatic physical movements demanded by the situation.
In the West Oahu Little League’s early training drills, players ran through rope ladders and in and around cones. Aliviado had his kids lift their legs high, running hard through the mazes until they collapsed. And then he had them do it again.
The maze began with a vertical leap. A parent would hold a bat high in the air and the player would jump up as high as he could, using his glove. Because you never know when you need to leap for a ball, in the infield or outfield.
After the leap, the players did ladder drills. Using PVC piping or ropes, Aliviado set up two rows of ladders along the ground. Players would have to run through the twenty or so rungs, about a foot and a half apart, on each ladder. Each time through the course, the players would use different footwork. Sometimes the object would be to lift the legs high. Sometimes the goal was to twist the body while running. Sometimes the object would be to move fast. Always, the goal was strength and agility in the lower body. “Sports is all footwork,” says Aliviado. “You got to always move your feet.” A drill favorite was the karaoke, in which the players advanced through the ladder by swinging one leg over the other into the next rung space.
Once the player reached the end of one ladder, he would run to the beginning of the second ladder, placed alongside the first.
After running through both ladders, the young athletes were confronted by a set of highway cones.
The players ran from cone to cone, working on the quick stop-andstart movements required on the field. After dashing to one cone, the player crouched down as if he was getting ready to field a grounder— butt down low, hands grazing the ground, head looking forward at an imaginary ground ball. Sometimes, the coaches told the player to “circle around” to the ball. When you come around on the ball, rather than coming to it directly, it’s easier to set and throw. The body’s movement provides momentum and direction to the throw.
From cone to cone, the players burned the essential movements of fielding into the memory of their muscles.
Burn, baby, burn.
In another drill, the player ran toward the cone looking over one shoulder at an imaginary line drive, then reached up to catch it. He looked over his other shoulder on the next cone. Then he ran with just a glance at the ball, ran full-speed with his eye off the ball, and then looked up again to regain his sights on the ball.
Burn, baby, burn.
After the cones, the players did long jumps—again, strengthening the whole lower body and making movements from a set position ever more explosive. Then there were lunges and duck walks (walking forward while in a crouch with the feet pointing outward). Then jumping rope.
Then they started over and did it again, two or three or even four more times.
Then they took laps and a water break.
“We timed these and tried to get them to go faster and faster,” says Clint Tirpak, one of the team’s coaches. It was as if the efficiency expert Frederick Winslow Taylor came to Little League. The trick of Taylorism is to get the best workers to set new standards and then apply those standards to everyone. “We always told the players that in the end, it was going to come down to who was conditioned the most to make it. If the players slacked off, I would yell, ‘You’re just cheating yourselves.’”
The players accepted the routine—they had no choice, since they and their parents had accepted the T-shirts reading “One Team, One Dream”—but they were not always happy.
“Especially when we had to do it again,” Ty Tirpak says, “we would get really mad and sometimes swear. And the cousins, and Kini [Enos] especially, would be really mad. I kind of got it because my dad was explaining it to me, but some of the other kids thought it was stupid. Why do we have to do this stuff? Vonn Fe’ao would say we shouldn’t have to do it so much.”
When the players got sloppy, when they complained about the drills, they got more. Just when the workout seemed like it was over, they’d be told to run back and forth from one baseline to the other, touch the line with their glove hand—to simulate picking up a ball—shouting “We love coach!” every time. Anyone who didn’t actually touch the line would have to start over again.
“Kini would be murmuring, grumbling, and we’d say, ‘What’s that? We’ll do it again!’” says Clint Tirpak.
After two weeks of drills, Aliviado was satisfied that the players were getting strong enough to survive a long series of tournaments. Then he put them through a series of skill drills—bunting, hitting to the right side of the diamond, double steals, turning double plays, making pickoff throws, hitting the cutoff man.
The oldest and truest critique of Little League practices is that there’s a lot of standing around. Players are waiting to hit. Players are waiting for the grounders or fungoes to come to their side of the diamond. Pitchers are waiting for their turn. But not on Aliviado’s fields. He always had four, five, even six stations set up. Everyone was in a state of animation.
After basic drills, Aliviado organized simulations of game situations.
Sometimes, the players lost their concentration on specific skills and game situations. Getting tired can cause sloppiness. But getting tired is not an excuse. Anytime the team looked sluggish, Aliviado went back to basics.
“If we go into a slump, we go back a stage to the fundamentals. We have to do the skill things right. You have to concentrate on them, get each one right, before you use it in game situations.” It’s like the South Beach Diet; when you start to put the pounds back on, you return to the more restrictive Phase I of the diet.
The fundamentals always go back to the legs.
“The legs are the most important part of being in shape to play baseball,” Aliviado says. “I needed to know that they could last the whole summer. We practiced constantly. I tired them out until they weren’t tired any more. They got stronger, and so they didn’t get tired so easy.
“In anything you do, you always have to set your feet. If you don’t have good footwork, you’re not going to be good. You got to get them drilling real fast. You have to get to a point where you can do it automatically, where you can do it blindfolded. The feet are always moving. Throw the ball, catch it, set up, and throw the ball.
“You need to move quickly. Without a fast break, you’re not going to be able to get where you need to be in time to make the plays. You also have to be balanced, and you’re going to be balanced with strong legs and with a quick start.”
Aliviado teaches his players to catch with two hands. Yes, it’s true that fielders have a greater reach with one hand—and in games, they reach out with the glove hand to catch balls just barely within their reach. “But it’s important to get in the habit of catching with both hands, the oldfashioned way,” he says. “It’s about using your whole body, getting the whole body moving [toward an object].”
Before games, when they need a way to diffuse their nervousness, the Ewa Beach kids play Wiffle ball. Sometimes the coaches throw Wiffle golf balls to players with broomsticks. The kids hit off tees and do softtoss hitting, t
oo. Someone kneels before a batter and tosses balls—quickly, one after another—in front of the hitter.
It’s a system—from the grinding footwork drills to the loose Wiffle ball hitting—that makes the long summer a single, seamless experience.
When he’s teaching technique, Layton Aliviado keeps his message simple.
If you’re strong in the lower body, and if you can concentrate and count to three or four, Layton Aliviado can teach you how to hit and throw.
“If you can see the ball good, you can hit them. But to hit the ball right, you have to work on the footwork. To me it’s repetition. In beginning of the season, I do the one-two-three drills. I keep it simple for the kids. The fundamentals, don’t try to give them hard words. Everyone can count. Just count out what to do and explain by showing. Then they have it stuck in their heads: ‘One, two, three.’ I do the same thing with throwing and pitching. Every kid can count, right?”
I talked with Aliviado in the living room of his home in one of the housing developments that have made Ewa the fastest growing community in Oahu. He was surrounded by baseball and football equipment—bats and balls, helmets and shoulder pads—and by pictures of his children playing sports and hula dancing.
He jumped up to demonstrate.
“You got to keep the head down and follow through,” he says, slowly moving a bat across the zone, his head still and his eyes trained on the bat as he holds it still over the imaginary plate.
“It’s simple: set, shift, hit. The hips are leading the hands. Hips, hands. Stay on top of the ball. You’re doing a few things almost at the same time—stepping down with the forward foot, turning the hip, and moving hands into the hitting zone, with the head down on the ball.
“One: stride forward, at the same time moving the weight back.
Little League, Big Dreams Page 13