Little League, Big Dreams

by Charles Euchner

  In the 2005 World Series, Little League had sixteen corporate sponsors. Ostensibly, these sponsors selflessly lend their support to the kids living the dream. Every product makes a tenuous “contribution” to the Little League ideal. New Era caps, Russell Athletic, and Wilson Sporting Goods? All the smart-looking gear you need to play the game. Sunkist? Nutritious snacks. Ace Hardware? Tools for fixing up the local Little League field. CapriSun? “Hydrates kids better than water.” Choice Hotels? Great for that endless summer of tournaments. Bank of America? Bryant Cooling Systems? Re/Max Real Estate? Snickers candy bars? Hmmm. The rationale does get a little strained.

  The corporate presence at the Little League World Series was strong. Companies like Ace Hardware set up games to promote their name.

  From its very first year of operation, Little League has depended on partnerships with business to help pay its expenses. Local companies sponsored Little League’s first three teams in 1939. In 1947, Little League’s founder, Carl Stotz, traveled by train to New York to request financial assistance from executives of Pepsi-Cola and U.S. Rubber. Stotz struck out with Pepsi, but succeeded with U.S. Rubber. After meetings involving a whole roster of vice presidents—including one who once helped Stotz settle a misunderstanding about his Aunt Maggie’s pension checks—the company agreed to give Little League $5,000 toward the national tournament. Stotz also convinced the company to create a new shoe with rubber cleats suitable for boys baseball.

  Before Michael Jordan revolutionized the sports shoe, Carl Stotz did the same.

  Over the years, Little League has brokered deals with manufacturers who make products exclusively for Little League, which markets to its millions of players. Strengthened by its special congressional charter, Little League has parlayed its powerful brand name into a tool for raising money and raising its profile as the premier youth sports league in America.

  The newest Little League sponsor in 2006 was Subway, a fast-food chain. Steve Keener, Little League’s CEO, called a press conference on the field of Howard Lamade Stadium to make the big announcement. On hand were the all-star teams of Montour and Mill Creek, Pennsylvania, executives from Subway, some PR people, and a few media stragglers.

  And Jared Fogel, the man with The Pants.

  The conceit for the Subway “partnership” is that Subway and Little League, together, can address the growing concern among public health professionals about childhood obesity. “Eat Smart, Play Hard” is the slogan for the three-year agreement.

  Since 2001, when an advertising guy named Hal Riney heard about his astonishing success in weight reduction, Jared Fogel has become the face of Subway.

  Riney worked for the Richard Cole Creative Agency in Chicago when he read an article in the Indianapolis Star about a college student who lost 245 pounds in less than a year by eating every meal at a Subway shop near Indiana University in Bloomington. Using Fogel in TV commercials, Riney thought, would set Subway apart from McDonald’s and Burger King in the increasingly competitive fast-food business.

  Fogel’s story is every dieter’s fantasy: eat fast food and lose hundreds of pounds at the same time.

  For years, Jared Fogel got more and more depressed as he got fatter and fatter. He ate all day long—10,000 calories a day, lots of fat and sugar—and isolated himself from other students at IU. Finally, after his weight passed 400 pounds, he decided he needed to do something. He had tried to diet before, but always failed.

  One day, eating at the Subway in the first floor of his apartment building, Fogel decided to try an experiment—only eat Subway’s healthy line of sandwiches. He ate twice a day—lunch and dinner. He allowed himself a bag of baked potato chips and Diet Cokes. But the main course was always a sub—turkey and tomato in the afternoon, veggie in the evening, always hold the mayo. During the diet, he ate 1,400 or 1,500 calories a day.

  From March 1998 to the following February, Fogel says he went from 425 to 180 pounds. His pants size went from a sixty to a fifty-eight to a fifty-six … all the way down to a size thirty-four.

  When he lost all that weight, a friend wrote about Fogel for IU’s student paper. The Indianapolis paper picked up the story and the wires rewrote the story. That’s when Hal Riney decided to give our fast-food nation a new face.

  After test commercials aired in 2000 in Chicago, Subway decided to build its advertising campaign around Jared Fogel. In the spots, Fogel looks into the camera, holds up his size sixty jeans, and talks about how great he feels after losing all those pounds. He has also made appearances on Today, Oprah, and other TV shows.

  Sales in Subway franchise increased from $3.8 billion to $4.5 billion from 2000 to 2001.

  Fogel is a pleasant looking man, now thirty-four years old. Six feet, two inches, he now weights between 190 and 195 pounds, up from his postdiet low of 180. At the press event for the Little League partnership, he wore khakis and a Subway golf shirt. He approaches strangers with a midwesterner’s modesty and ease. Given his past, he feels no need to get into perfect shape anytime soon. He jiggles a little when he moves. “It’s very difficult to have a routine while traveling,” he says. “Maybe down the road I’ll get into real shape, once this dies down some.”

  Since becoming Subway’s spokesman, he has spent 200 days a year on the road. He won’t reveal his salary, but he says he’s now comfortable for life. He’s planning an “inspirational” book about his journey. He and his wife just bought a house in a suburb of Indianapolis, where he plans to settle when his run as spokesman ends.

  “Activities like Little League can help get them out of the house and watching less TV and playing less video games,” he says genially as he poses with his old pants and cameras click.

  After all of the presentations—highlighted by Fogel hiding behind his old pants—it was time for the photo op. Fogel gathered the Little Leaguers for some exercise. “Let’s start with some stretching exercises, just to show how easy it is,” he told his young charges. The kids did ten toe-touches—toe reaches, really. Then it was fifteen jumping jacks. “Now what do we do?” he asked.

  “Hey, can we run around the field?” a kid yelled.

  “Yeah! Can we run around the field?” another cried.

  Claudia Quintero, the PR woman, looked startled. Quickly, she corralled the boys. “Hey, you guys have worked up an appetite!” she said. “Time for sandwiches!” She brought a box to the right field line and got the kids to pose holding sandwiches forward. Then she shooed them off the field.

  ABC and ESPN broadcast twenty-nine games of the Little League World Series. Broadcasters Bob Ryan and Harold Reynolds provide pre-game analysis before a game between California and Florida.

  Any time Curaçao played on TV, the ESPN and ABC announcers talked about all the loot they got for winning the Little League World Series in 2004. All of the teams in Williamsport got free bats, hats, helmets, gloves, shirts, video games, candy, and more. The complex is like a rich kid’s birthday party. But the winners really make out. In 2004, each player got, among other things, computers, printers, scanners, digital cameras, watches, rings, KFC for a year, McDonald’s for a year, fifty-two six-packs of Pepsi, haircuts, and a savings account with the equivalent of $600.

  This year’s teams, vying for the championship, know about these prizes and are eager to find out what they get. “I’m waiting for someone to give us computers,” said Layton Aliviado, Hawaii’s manager.

  Brent Musberger, the ancient broadcaster working the games for ABC, says that the gifts could jeopardize the players’ amateur status. “Heh heh heh,” he chortles. “Just kidding, folks.”

  Little League has ended one form of hustling. The organization successfully squelched online gambling on the World Series in 2005. Nevada state law forbids betting on the Little League World Series. The Nevada Gambling Commission’s Regulation 22.120 (a) bans betting on “any amateur non-collegiate sporting or athletic event.” But the rise of the Internet has multiplied the opportunities for betting beyond legal gambling establishm
ents in Las Vegas and Atlantic City and illegal bookies. Surveys have found 1,800 gambling websites in operation.

  In 2003, some offshore websites accepted bets on the Little League World Series. “One might be interested (and one might be bothered) to know Japan was a four and a half-run favorite to beat Mexico on Thursday in a Little League World Series game,” USA Today’s Jeff Zillgitt reported. “The over/under [a measure of odds] was nine. Must have been some big sticks in those lineups. Massachusetts was a two-run favorite to beat Texas. The over/under was five and a half. Must have been two great pitchers on the mound.”

  Little League officials protested. CEO Steve Keener said he’d ask lawenforcement agencies—beginning with the Justice Department—to shut down the kiddie gaming shops. One of the websites that took bets on the LLWS, pinnaclesports.com, decided against taking wagers in 2005.

  But other websites say betting is perfectly okay, as long as it’s dressed up to look like trading in the futures market.

  Intrade.com, a web firm based in Dublin, offers a brokering service for people who want to trade “contracts” on outcomes of all kinds of events—in politics, business, entertainment, weather, and even Little League World Series games. Mike Knesevitch, a partner at Intrade, says it’s like trading futures on the New York Stock Exchange. Since it started in 2001, Intrade has brokered close to $1 billion in “trades.”

  Someone trading on the Little League World Series might learn, for example, that other traders, collectively, have estimated that Curaçao has a 62 percent chance of beating Japan. If you “buy” the “contract” for Curaçao, you stand to make 38 cents for every dollar’s worth of contract you buy. That 38 cents represents the 100-percent chance that Curaçao has established by winning and the cost of the contract that you bought. Minus, of course, Intrade’s fees.

  Intrade accepts trades of contracts as games progress. “Say it’s the bottom of the fifth inning and you have a runner on with no outs. There’s a probability of scoring .9 runs,” Knesevitch says. “But if you get him to second base, the probability goes to 1.24 runs. People buy and sell contracts as the event is going on.”

  Intrade didn’t take any “trades” for the Little League World Series in 2005. But the site takes “trades” for all kinds of amateur sporting events. And there’s no reason why the company would avoid Little League “trading” in the future. If demand calls, supply will respond.

  The Little League brand doesn’t have the cache of the New York Yankees or Manchester United. But it’s the ultimate symbol of youth sports in America. Like Coca-Cola and Band-Aids, Little League has become a generic term as well as a brand name. Little League officials know the importance of their brand, and they do everything to promote and protect it. To excess.

  Getting press credentials took some effort. When I first called asking for access to the press area, I was told to deal with the marketing people. But I’m just a writer, I said. Well, there might be some fees associated with any book I might want to write. After all, Little League is a federally chartered organization with its right to protect its trademark. But I didn’t want to use Little League’s logo or trademark. I just wanted to cover the event as a journalist.

  Little League gives out 600 to 700 credentials a year. Most of the reporters cover hometown teams. A few, like the New York Times, do broader pieces about the whole experience. All I wanted, I said, was the same credentials as Times or Williamsport Sun-Gazette reporters. Nothing more, nothing less.

  I got it, but grew increasingly intrigued by the secretive approach that Little League took about its events. Getting even basic information out of the organization proved difficult. You’d think I was asking the Yankees for their scouting reports.

  A reporter from the San Diego Union-Tribune named Kevin Gemmell asked Little League officials for a copy of the rulebook. He was told, no, you can’t have that. He pressed for three days. Finally, he published a note in the paper about Little League’s withholding behavior, which quoted a flak’s explanation: “Because you could distribute them. Then everyone would know the rules.” He finally got what he wanted, and the information contained no top-secret information. Was that so hard?

  A few months after the World Series, I emailed Lance Van Auken, Little League’s communications czar, a question about how leagues conduct player drafts. The draft shapes the league’s approach to all-star tournaments. In most leagues serious about the Little League World Series, teams draft players just once and then keep their players for as long as they’re eligible. In many leagues, the core of the all-star team plays together on the same team. The league champion’s manager usually manages the all-star teams, too.

  But Van Auken wouldn’t answer my question. “The draft options (which cover several pages of a copyrighted publication) have no bearing on the Little League Baseball World Series, or the teams that play in it,” he wrote in an email.

  Then Van Auken warned me about using Little League’s trademark: “Keep in mind as well, that any use of the federally-registered trademarks ‘Little League,’ ‘Little League World Series,’ ‘Little League Baseball World Series,’ etc., as the subject for a book, television program, movie, etc., require the written approval of Little League International.”

  Here we go again. This is what the self-help books call “controlling behavior.”

  Later, I wanted to talk to the people who play Dugout, Little League’s official mascot. Dugout is a brown rodent designed by the Disney Company in 1980. Over the course of the World Series, Dugout dances with players and fans, poses for pictures, hurls T-shirts and other giveaways into the stands, and wanders around the complex. Dugout wears a series of costumes for between-innings antics—there’s Dugout as a cowboy, as Elvis, as a disco dancer, as Uncle Sam, and, of course, as a Little Leaguer.

  I wanted to talk with the bodies inside the costume to see what they could tell me about the kids’ experience of the World Series. But when I left a phone message with one of the people inside the rodent, a Little League official called to tell me the mascot was off-limits. After answering a few basic questions, he told me that “we’re not comfortable” with any other questions. Goodness. What’s going on between Dugout and the fans that is such a secret?

  From their first moments in Williamsport, PR officials stage-manage the teams, arranging photo shoots, uniform fittings, parade buses, eating schedules. They screen emails that come into Little League headquarters and pass along the acceptable messages to managers. And they lecture the teams about the dangers of talking to media. “There will be occasions when members of the media ask for interviews. All interviews should be cleared with the manager, coaches, and/or the parents,” says Chris Downs.

  Fair enough. Kids need to be protected against pushy reporters. Most coaches and parents were thrilled to have their kids talk to reporters. It was part of the “big league” environment of the event. And no reporter I saw was trying to tar a kid with scandal.

  The media people who were intrusive came from the Disney Company, which pays Little League $1.25 million a year. ABC and ESPN cameras were often one or two feet from the players’ faces—before, during, and after the games. During one difficult loss, the kids from Curaçao sat on the edge of the dugout. (That, by the way was illegal; they’re supposed to be inside the dugout. Where’s my walkie-talkie?) The kids were crying, fearing they might not have a chance to repeat as champions. About a foot away was a TV camera, following the tracks of their tears.

  “Wanna trade?”

  The hustling spirit surfaces earlier than you might think.

  A six-year-old girl marched up to a teenaged boy and initiated a transaction. The boy responded as if they were peers.

  “Yeah, okay, what do you want? What do you have?”

  “I’m looking for cartoon characters. You can have anything in my book except the Snickers. I’m looking for a set of the Snickers jerseys.”

  At the farthest section of the plaza near Howard J. Lamade Stadium stood a white tent with e
ighteen picnic tables, lined up in six rows of three. At any given time, from 100 to 400 people shuffled around looking for market opportunities. Many of them carried large floppy notebooks specially produced for the occasion; the pages in the books are cloth and enable users to attach the pins easily.

  Kids aged seven to fifteen years dominated the tent. But the rulers of the tent were older men and women, anywhere from thirty to fifty years of age. While the kids moved around from table to table, the adults sat at their stations and waited for traders to come to them.

  Pin trading is the most enduring tradition of the Little League World Series. The only rule governing tent transactions is that no money may exchange hands. Most teams coming to Williamsport create small lapel pins—usually about the size of a quarter, sometimes as wide as a golf ball or even bigger—to commemorate their teams and districts. Players arrive in town with floppy books, fat with the pins they got during the summer’s tournaments. Pin trading offers an outlet for players to interact with each other, with other kids on hand for the tournament, and with adults. Some adults travel across the country to trade in the pin tent.

  Pin trading started at the Olympic Games and has carried over to Little League and other youth tournaments. But it’s probably bigger in Williamsport than anywhere else. The languorous pace of the tournament provides lots of opportunities to mill around the complex, wander over to the pin tent, and make some trades.

  Pin trading has become a passion that brings people to Williamsport year after year.

  Harold Ewers, a forty-fouryear-old man with a bushy red beard and balding head, travels from his home in Stockton, California, as many years as possible to trade pins in Williamsport. A yard foreman at Bambacigno Steel Company for the last eleven years, Ewers looks more like a gentle motorcycle gang member than a baseball fan. He’s married with kids, used to coach Little League, and considers pin trading the ultimate way of meeting new people.