Little League, Big Dreams

by Charles Euchner

  By the time teams started practices for the 2006 season, 400 Little League organizations adopted the pitch-count rule. Over the course of the year, they agreed to report regularly to researchers to determine the effect of the rule. Keener said the rule’s greatest impact would be educational.

  “What we hope it does is serve notice, tell Mom and Dad that there’s a reason for this, and one of the reasons is that if you happen to have this very gifted youngster, if you want this young person to pitch when he’s seventeen or eighteen years old, you might want to think about how often he’s pitching at a younger age.”

  Still, Keener acknowledges, the rule cannot limit a Little Leaguer’s pitching on travel teams. In fact, Little League’s pitch counts might actually make it easier to push a player harder on travel teams. But Keener is hoping that an explicit rule will send a powerful message to protect young arms. Using a pitcher for the maximum number of pitches in Little League and then using him on a travel team, Keener says, “almost borders on child abuse.” He adds, “That’s where we need to make people aware.” Education, he says, is the answer.

  But it might be the best tool Little League—or any youth baseball organization—has to protect young arms.

  Too many pitches might have cost the team from Vista, California, a chance at the Little League World Series championship. And they knew it before they ever got to Williamsport.

  They knew it because of an awful popping sound in Nathan Lewis’s left elbow in the fourth inning of the team’s West regional championship game against Tracy, California. At the time, Tracy was winning, 2–0. California’s manager, Marty Miller, wanted to keep his ace southpaw in the game, and Lewis had no intention of leaving—no matter how awful his arm hurt. So he stayed in, Vista tied the game with two runs in the bottom of the fourth, and won it with five runs in the fifth.

  Lewis went all the way. He was the guy who got mobbed on the mound when it was all over.

  But on the car trip home, he was crying in agony.

  All summer long, through the Vista’s 20–0 run to Williamsport, Nathan Lewis was the team’s clutch pitcher. Kalen Pimentel got most of the media attention with his record-setting hitting and pitching. He hit home runs until they stopped counting and on more than one occasion he struck out batters for all of his outs.

  But Lewis was the pitcher who won all the championship games. The logic of Little League tournaments is that playing in the championship game is more important than winning it—because if you don’t get there, you can’t win. So R.B.V. used the overpowering Pimentel in the semifinal and Lewis in the final. And Lewis always won—in the district, state, sectional, and regional tournaments.

  No one thought to get an MRI. The team had to get on a plane right away to travel from California to Pennsylvania.

  Nate’s father Jim remembers his son’s pain after the game.

  “I just thought he was getting tired,” Jim Lewis told me later. “But when he gets tired, he’s pretty crafty and moves the ball around. When he takes something off, he gets more movement on the ball. He felt something pop in the fourth inning but he didn’t want to give the ball up to somebody else, and he battled through it. He was in excruciating pain. He couldn’t move his arm. He never said that before. But he was gone in a day so I lost touch. The first game I saw, against Kentucky, he was only underhanding the ball from first base. It’s one of those things. How do you know?”

  Nate Lewis has no second thoughts about pitching as much as he did in the summer of 2005. “I wanted to win that game,” he told me. “I wanted to finish it. It didn’t really hurt, but my velocity went way down, five or ten miles an hour.” When I told him his dad said he was in awful pain in the car after the game, he said, “Well, I don’t know.”

  When the team got to Williamsport, Marty Miller brought Lewis to see Ludwikowski. The Little League trainer decided that Lewis needed to strengthen his arm. So he had Lewis lift light weights. After a few days, Lewis reported that his arm wasn’t getting any better. Marty Miller called his daughter Kerri, a master’s student in sports training at Utah State University. “She told me to have him lay off the weights,” he says. “She said it would be a disaster. He needed rest. So that’s what we did.”

  Lewis pitched California’s final game. Lewis looked good for the first three innings, holding Hawaii hitless. But he got tired and his motion started to wobble. Hawaii took advantage of errors and walks. Lewis left the game without retiring a batter in the fourth inning. He was charged with giving up two runs, one earned.

  Royce Copeland was another California pitcher to experience arm problems after the World Series.

  When Lewis got home, his arm still hurt, so he got an MRI at Tri-City Orthopedics. Dr. James Esch found a fracture and dislocation of the growth plate. Esch immobilized the shoulder and told Lewis to avoid all physical activity for three or four months.

  “If I knew he had a broken shoulder, I might have had him in a soft spot [position], but not pitcher or catcher,” Marty Miller told me later.

  I asked Nate Lewis if he had any regrets. “I just wish I wasn’t hurt in the U.S. championship game,” he said. “I wanted to show what I could do. I didn’t show who I was.”

  Nate and Jim Lewis are both optimistic about the future. “He’s throwing gas right now, just playing catch,” says Jim. “He’ll throw twenty or thirty pitches at a time. He’s stronger than ever.”

  California’s number three pitcher, Royce Copeland, also visited the doctor when he returned to California. His MRI found a light fracture in his elbow, forcing him to not pitch for a couple of months.

  “Royce pitched like crap but he wouldn’t tell me anything,” Miller grumbled.

  Copeland says he knew something was wrong with his arm in Williamsport. He went to the trainer regularly for treatment, but his arm hurt, off and on, the whole tournament. “It was a bummer my arm was hurt,” he told me. “It hurt every other day. I went to the trainer and had it frozen. He was fun to be with. He would joke around.”

  Marty Miller acknowledges that managers often feel pressure to use pitchers with sore arms, but he thinks the problem lies in the sheer number of games some teams need to play to get to the World Series. Somehow, he says, the playing schedule needs to be reduced and all the teams in Williamsport need to play the same number of games.

  “Hawaii played fourteen games to get where they were, and we played twenty. Take six games off the schedule and you have a bunch of guys who are a lot more rested. Take six games away and that’s two less games for the pitchers. Maybe Nate Lewis doesn’t hurt his shoulder. And it’s even worse with some of the other teams there. To me it’s not fair that Curaçao only had to play seven games to get there. Kalen Pimentel pitched more complete games than Curaçao played all the way. You do get burned out and tired.”

  For the record, Hawaii’s Layton Aliviado dismisses that argument. “We play ball all year, like they do,” he says. “That’s not it. We just have more guys who can pitch. Almost everyone on my team can pitch. That’s the difference.”

  For what it’s worth, Aliviado uses more pitchers in games than other teams. He starts his ace, Alaka’i Aglipay, as often as possible, but he often removes him after an inning. “The first inning is the most important,” Aliviado says. “Sometimes I just want Alaka’i to get us off to a good start.” Kind of like a closer in reverse.

  The wrecking of young arms is a morality tale that needs villains. Little League’s villains are the travel teams that have come to dominate youth baseball in America. The travel teams point the finger right back at Little League.

  Maybe they’re both right.

  Maybe the problem is the professionalization of childhood, the development of leagues and tournaments that turn sports into a full-time job before a kid grows any facial hair and hears his voice change. Little League officials regularly attack travel teams for creating the problem of sore arms.

  Little League baseball “is the only organization that recognizes the ri
sks of said injuries and proactively addresses this concern through its rules and regulations regarding the number of innings a player may pitch in a week,” says Chris Downs, one of Little League’s PR men.

  Outside Little League, he says, “there is a dangerous and reckless disregard shown by so-called ‘elite’ or ‘travel ball’ teams toward the health of its [sic] players. These programs are to blame for the increase of such injuries due to the fact that there are few, if any, regulations governing the number of games per week a player may play or how many innings a pitcher may pitch.”

  But supporters of the travel teams make an intriguing case that their approach to baseball might protect arms better than any rules and regulations promulgated by the potentates who are in charge of Little League. Their laissez-faire approach says that when people are allowed to pursue their self-interest, without archaic or unnecessary rules, they will protect themselves.

  It’s Little League, with its elaborate tangle of regulations, that causes the most problems.

  The argument has two parts.

  First, Little League’s catchment area of 20,000 people is too small to harvest enough pitchers needed for competitive games. Travel teams— and some other community leagues, like Cal Ripken Baseball—allow teams to recruit players from broader geographic areas. If you’re forming an AAU team in Florida, you can draw from the whole state for players. So you’re going to find lots of good strong arms, and you’re not going to depend on one or two arms in must-win games and tournaments.

  Second, the small footprint of the Little League field creates a power contest between pitchers intent on strikeouts and batters intent on close-your-eyes-and-swing home runs. Especially at critical stages in big games, pitchers reach back for something extra. They put too much of their bodies on the line to get the big out.

  Because the outfield dimensions are short—200 or 205 feet to all fields—hitters swing for the fences. Other leagues have broader outfield expanses. The Cal Ripken World Series, for example, takes place on a field that extends 260 feet to center field. And the left-field wall reaches to a height of sixteen feet, so balls that reach the wall often stay in play. The bigger the field, the more pitchers are willing to let the hitters put their bat on the ball. Pitchers don’t always try to blow the ball past hitters. That means fewer arm-straining fastballs and fewer curveballs, too.

  Les Abato, the manager of the PONY League’s powerhouse Mililani team in Hawaii, says the bigger field dimensions completely transform the game. “It affects all kinds of things about the game—the outfielder’s speed, his arm, his positioning—and baserunning, too. There’s just a lot more that happens with the bigger field. It’s not just strikeouts and home runs, but the complete game—real baseball.”

  If Little League is looking for an effective rule change, it might consider increasing the distance between its bases from sixty to seventy feet and moving the fences back twenty or forty feet. (The outfield fences will go back twenty feet in the 2006 World Series, but not for any other tournaments or league play.)

  For Little League, the answer seems to be one part regulation (pitch counts) and one part jawboning (attacking travel teams). Will that make a difference?

  Most of the coaches and players I talked with like the idea of pitch counts. The possibility always exists for manipulation of the rule. If the umpires don’t call a big strike zone, batters will do everything they can to go deep into the count and drive ace pitchers out of games early.

  But if umpires do call a generous strike zone, pitchers will be less obsessed with strikeouts and batters will swing away and put the ball into play. And most teams will work to develop deeper staffs. “With pitch counts, teams are going to have to go to their third, fourth, and even fifth pitcher,” says Don Copeland, father of a California pitcher. “That’s what we thought our advantage was—we were four or five deep. But even we got tired by the end.”

  Jawboning, though, won’t work. Lyle Gabriel is the coach of the San Diego Stars, one of the nation’s best travel team organizations. He says that travel teams’ broader geographic reach means they can bring more good pitchers onto a team. Most good travel teams, he says, have eight or more players who can pitch, so no one pitcher throws too much. Just as important, he says, is that coaches for travel teams know how to teach their kids. And he resents the charge that travel teams are the only culprits.

  “There are too many stupid coaches wrecking kids’ arms,” he says. “That’s the real problem.”

  Wanna trade? Outside of baseball, one of the major diversions at the Little League World Series is pin trading.

  CHAPTER 8

  Hustling

  NO MATTER WHAT ATHLETES WEAR OR USE THESE DAYS, chances are it’s stamped with the logo of a corporation. Every hat, helmet, uniform, wristband, and undergarment, every pair of socks and shoes, every pair of sunglasses, every bat, ball, and glove— everything is branded with a corporate logo.

  And everywhere the players and coaches went during the Little League World Series—even when they ventured outside Little League’s village— they were approached by corporate hucksters looking to give away their products. And get them on TV.

  It’s called “product placement.” Advertisers for just about every consumer product in the U.S. today—computers, beer and soda, cereals, clothing, shoes—try to place their product in movies, TV shows, sporting events, festivals, and any place consumers’ eyeballs can be found. PQ Media, a research company on media issues, estimates that product placement generated $3.45 billion in advertising revenues in 2004.

  When Clint Tirpak took his family to McDonald’s, a representative from Easton Sporting Goods approached his son Ty, a player on the Hawaii team. “They’re not really supposed to do that. You’re at McDonalds and they’re coming up to you,” Ty says. The older Tirpak told the corporate pusher to take a hike.

  “The Easton people were everywhere, giving us bats, asking us to use bats in games,” says Joe Daugherty, the father of a Kentucky player. “If we got a dent in the bat, they’d take it back and give us a new one right away. As long as we used the bats in games, that’s all they wanted.”

  Near the batting cages, where all the teams went for refuge and for swings, the Easton representatives came bearing aluminum as well. Easton’s drones approached Kaeo Aliviado as he waited for his turn with his Hawaii teammates. “No thanks,” he sniffed. “That’s not the bat we like. We use the DeMarini.”

  (Ah, Wilson’s DeMarini, everyone’s favorite bat in Williamsport. At BP, Guam’s manager Shon Muna caught Sean Manley, the team’s big hitter, trying to sneak the team’s sacred DeMarini F-2, a weapon reserved for official games, into the batting cages. “What makes you think you can use that bat now?” he asked. “I asked and you didn’t say anything,” Manley answers, lamely. Muna paused for Socratic effect. “If I had $1,000 and you asked and I didn’t say anything, would you think you could take it?” Muna asked. “No,” Manley said. “Me either,” Muna said. Busted.)

  All over the Little League complex, players wore colorful long-sleeve undershirts from Reebok called UnderArmor. These synthetic shirts accent the thinness of even the strongest players’ arms, but, somehow, they look cool. And feel cool, too, even in the hottest sun. The body moves like a woman’s leg in hose. So the Little Leaguers wore colorcoordinated shirts under their jerseys for all the world to see.

  The Wilson people, meanwhile, pushed a line of glove prototypes. Wilson hauled a rainbow of leather to Williamsport, hoping to get one or two on TV. They got to Dalton West, a player for the all-stars from Owensboro, Kentucky. He agreed to give it a try. Before the games started he approached the supervisor of umpires to ask if it was okay for him to use a blue Wilson prototype in a game. The ump looked it over as if he were asked to throw a slab of spoiled meat on the grill. He wrinkled his nose, looked straight forward, and said no, pushing the glove away.

  Don’t blame Wilson for trying. Two years before, getting kids to wear Wilson helmets instantly transf
ormed that market. Batting helmets have always been the least glamorous part of hardball haberdashery. Helmets represent fear, protectiveness, and constraint. Little League helmets, traditionally, are grotesque. One size does not fit all, the colors are awful, and the foam inside gets rancid and crumbles with the accumulated sweat of a season. Then, in the 2003 Little League World Series, Wilson gave players prototypes of a new helmet with an ergonomically modern design, with curves and air vents. The helmet was adjustable, so one size did fit all. And most important, stylistically anyway, the helmet’s metallic colors—scarlet, royal, silver, forest green, navy, yellow, cardinal, and gold—almost looked custom made for any team’s colors.

  Every summer the “ice cream guys” travel from California to work the Little League World Series.

  Fifteen of the sixteen teams in Williamsport wore the helmets on TV, and ABC and ESPN used the helmets as the transitional “bumpers” between commercials and the game. When one player happily skipped to first base after getting plunked in the head, broadcasters Brent Musberger and Harold Reynolds gushed about the lids. Wilson’s phone lines lit up with requests. Wilson originally hoped to sell 20,000 helmets; before the end of the year, sales exceeded 100,000.

  Not only did Wilson grab a bigger than expected share of an existing market, but the helmets created a whole new market. Time was when only teams bought helmets, about four or five at a time. Now, with the sleek looks and manageable price (about $20), every kid playing ball is a potential customer. Ka-ching.

  Corporations do not just try to get players to use their products. They do everything they can to ride Little League’s Norman Rockwell image.