“I love to trade pins but I love to BS with people more,” he says. “I like to be with the volunteers. I like cars, trucks, planes, characters, and certain district pins. A lot of people want every pin out there.”
Ewers wore a red Dodge Motor Sports T-shirt, a black cap with an eight on it, and jeans. He pushed his round body into the restricted seat space of the picnic table and waited for business. He started trading pins since 1980 and has amassed a collection of 9,000 to 10,000 pins. He goes to the West Region tournament in San Bernardino, California, every year to trade pins. He went to the Little League World Series in 2001 but could not get back until 2005.
“I came a week early, went to Gettysburg and Washington, D.C., and then Atlantic City. I’m going to make a nice trip out of it,” Ewers says. “I know a whole lot of people who are here, sixty or seventy at least. Once a year I’ll get ahold of them and see what’s going on. I like to go hunting— deer—and I’m missing opening weekend of archery season to be here. We hunt every spare moment we have. It gives you a chance to be alone with nature and collect your thoughts. But this is where I want to be now.”
Every year, Ewers makes his own pins. He sketches out a rough design and sends it to a pin company. The company’s graphics people send back a design based on his illustration, he tells him what he wants changed, and the two sides go back and forth until he’s happy. Over the years, he’s made twenty-five different pins. In recent years, he has made pins in sets. “If you buy 150, it’s hard to trade them, but if people like the set they want all of them and then it becomes valuable.”
Sets usually correspond with the teams in the World Series. Snickers, the candy bar company, makes sets of sixteen pins, one for each of the teams in the tournament. One of the sets displays the teams’ names on jerseys; another uses images of baseball spikes.
In the days before games started, pin trading seemed more important for some players than the games themselves. Mitch Burns, a mopheaded kid on Canada’s team, raced around the dorms with his floppy book of pins. Every time a new team arrived, he’d gather a couple of his teammates and race over to get the team’s pins. He brought his book to the high cast-iron fence around the dorms and bargained with people outside. On the practice fields and around the complex, he chattered endlessly about pins.
Kids’ innate abilities as merchants emerge instantly under the pin tent.
“A lot of these youngsters get savvy in a couple hours,” Ewers told me. “Kids end up with better pins than most of the adults. It’s the drive they have. Kids are sometimes very hard to deal with. They want the biggest, best thing you have every time. They’re competitive. It’s like a ball game to them. Winning is getting the best pin.”
Pin trading also offers opportunities to flirt.
Miranda Alkire and Heather Higgins, both thirteen-year-olds from Rochester, New York, set up shop under the tent the first day it was open. Alkire’s grandmother lives just outside Williamsport. She and her family visit every summer. She has been trading since she was five years old. This year she invited her friend to join her in Pennsylvania.
The girls are both attractive, outgoing blondes. They attend middle school and have started to date—and each met boys on Little League teams to spend time with. “We met in the tent,” Alkire says. “One of them’s really hot.” She looks to her friend. “Both of them, actually.” The romances were destined to be short-lived, but the girls didn’t care. They were focused on the moment, with pins as just another means of starting conversations.
“Everyone in my family does it, and we make our own pins,” Alkire said. “I like geckos, monkeys. My aunt makes Pennsylvania District Five pins. I have 400 pins.”
At different times, the girls’ romantic interests showed up at the picnic tables. Ryan Bergeron from Louisiana and Cody Webster from Kentucky slid into the seats near the girls. They didn’t want to talk, though. They waited until the conversation ended and then led the girls off.
Pin trading also teaches basic lessons about marketing.
My photographer, Isabel Chenoweth, brought her two children, Walker, then ten years old, and Leila, seven years old, to Williamsport. To give them a diversion outside the games, we made our own pins before going to Williamsport. We used Isabel’s Mac to make a crude design of a character we call Star Guy—a five-pointed cartoon character wearing a baseball uniform. Crude is the operative word here.
When we got to Williamsport, we realized that most pins are more sophisticated. They have slick cartoon characters, sometimes with textured surfaces on the metal or plastic face of the pin. But our pin was good enough to trade. Or so we thought.
With bags of 400 pins, the kids got busy proposing trades. But few people wanted to trade. Traders would look at Star Guy’s rough form, wrinkle their noses, and say, uh, no thanks. A couple of older men traded with us, just to be nice. The kids got discouraged and gave up trading for a few days.
Then we had an idea. Why not just give the pins away to strangers? Leila and I walked along The Hill. I called out like a concessionaire at a ballpark: “Who needs the Star Guy pin? Get your Star Guy pin here!” Leila was embarrassed but the approach worked. Most people were so pleased to get a gift that they reached into their collections to give the kids something in return. That’s how Walker and Leila got the most sought-after souvenirs in the tournament, the pins from Hawaii and Saudi Arabia. There’s no way we could have gotten those pins any other way.
Giving away pins created demand beyond our hillside hawking. When Isabel was photographing games, kids started approaching her. “Hey, you got one of those star pins?” She kept a big supply of pins in her camera bag to accommodate the growing demand.
Marketing 101.
All one old guy wanted to hustle was a ticket to one of the final games. The last three games of the Series—the U.S. and international championship games, and the World Series title game—require tickets. But Little League gets enough requests that it takes a raffle to pass out the 10,000 ducats (minus tickets for VIPs and team families) fairly.
But Phil Gowdy, a seventy-seven-year-old retired construction worker, didn’t send in an application. And now he’s here to plead his case in person. He’s waiting at a picnic bench like Dorothy outside Oz.
Gowdy has lived his whole life in Williamsport. His pink face looks out from a straw hat. He’s missing most of his teeth. His lumpy body fills a gray T-shirt, loose pants, and orthopedic shoes. He holds a cane. He’s been going to World Series games since they took place at the Classic Little League field across the river. You’d think they’d give the guy a lifetime pass.
While he waited for his meeting, he watched coaches and players and parents move back and forth between the dorms and the top of the hill overlooking Lamade Stadium. “Hey, where you from?” he asks. “You gonna hit a home run?” He spots someone else: “Hey, you play shortstop? Yeah? Good luck.”
Between greetings—he wants to strike up a conversation, but no one wants more than perfunctory contact—he talked about how the Little League World Series has changed. “The locals don’t come anymore,” he says. “It’s all outsiders. There are maybe 1,000 [locals who come to the tournament] and you can pick ’em out. It’s because they moved it.”
Gowdy’s a supporter of Carl Stotz in the long-ago civil war that set purists against expansionists. “The big shots trampled all over him. They wanted to go international.”
He chuckled and shook his head as he watched the Saudi players climb the steps. “How many steps are there?” he wondered aloud. One player ran down to count and came back with the answer: fifty-nine. “That’s a lot of exercise,” the old man said. The players noded and moved forward.
Three hours later, Gowdy walked out of the Little League administration building. He got his tickets. Now he was a happy old guy.
Johnny Dee, whose father Donnie Dee coordinates college chapters of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes in California, was at the center of Rancho Buena Vista’s faith community.
CHAPTER 9
Faith and Survival
THROUGHOUT THE LITTLE LEAGUE WORLD SERIES, you couldn’t help hearing earnest professions of faith. Wherever you looked—in the dugouts, on the field, in their dorm rooms, in tents pitched on the edge of International Grove—you saw players and coaches praying and praising the Lord for this great opportunity to honor His name by playing baseball.
Sid Cash, the bank executive who manages the all-stars from Maitland, Florida, talked about the “miracle” of his presence in Williamsport. “I had kidney stones and found a spot on my liver this summer and it’s a miracle I’m here,” he told me as his players took cuts in the batting cages. “After all we’ve been through, it’s not my time…yet. I had to have a chance to see it through.” After one win, he thanked “the good Lord, our savior Jesus Christ.”
After he hit a home run, Vonn Fe’ao of Hawaii’s Ewa Beach all-stars looked to the sky and made a sign of the cross as he approached home plate and pointed toward the heavens. That gesture has become commonplace in sports, and Fe’ao was following the example of pros like Sammy Sosa. But he was also making a connection to two of the most important people in his life—an uncle who died a month before he was born, and another uncle who died just the year before.
Fe’ao’s teammates and their families grew closer and more committed to prayer as the long summer of baseball drew to a close. The Hawaiians believed they were destined to win.
“I felt like nobody could stop them,” Denise Baniaga, the mother of infielder Sheyne Baniaga, told me. “It was a spiritual something. We all go to church. Even though we’re different religions, we still say the prayers every night and before every game. We knew that He was going to take care of everything. Prayer is so natural for them. It calms them down. They would be less nervous, they know that God is with them. Whatever happens, happens. The adults were more excited. We all cried. My auntie from California cried like somebody passed away. She made this bawling sound. She cried and cried and cried, and she’s still crying.”
The Hawaiians crossed a line that no other team dared to admit crossing. Here’s how one father told me the team prayed: “Lord, we ask for a victory because you always told us, if you want it, you have to ask for it.”
The Russian all-stars—the team from the former Soviet Union, which embraced atheism as a state religion—also prayed. On their day off, they went to Holy Cross Orthodox Church in nearby Loyalsock Township. When they walked into the church, the kids took off their hats, crossed themselves, and hushed. Take that, Karl.
And then there were the Californians. Led by a player whose father does missionary work on college campuses for the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, the Rancho Buena Vista all-stars made faith a central part of their personal training. They huddled on the field, stooped down on the mound before the first pitch of a game, and invited in a preacher to hold services before the American championship game.
What’s the connection between faith and sports?
I have always been a little cynical about that question. Most of the vocal Christian athletes are the ones who have to develop a paint-bynumbers morality to recover from drug rehab (think Darryl Strawberry) or privileged players who use religion to give their impossibly wealthy lives structure and meaning (think Curt Schilling).
Some of the jocks’ ideas about God and Christ are laughable. Norm Evans of the Miami Dolphins wrote in his book, On God’s Squad: “I guarantee you Christ would be the toughest guy who ever played the game. If He were alive today, I would picture a six-foot, six-inch, 280-pound defensive tackle who would always make the big plays and would be hard to keep out of the backfield for offensive linemen like myself. The game is 90 percent desire, and His desire was perhaps His greatest attribute.” Jesus as goon.
Religion on the ball fields is nothing new. The nineteenth-century idea of “Muscular Christianity” promoted the belief that physical exertion on playing fields could be part of a higher calling. Corinthians 6:20 says: “Glorify and bear God in your body.” By using your body well, you paid homage to the one who gave you that body. As the world became urbanized, young men had fewer opportunities to prove themselves physically—and no one around home to guide them. The factories pulled families off farms and men away from their homes. Sports became an arena for training in manhood and the display of manhood.
Muscular Christianity originated with a British reformer named Charles Kingsley who disdained what he considered to be the effeminate ways of the Catholic Church. The Catholics were so intent on salvation that they did not revel in their physical being. But God gave us bodies, which could express the capacity for joy every bit as much as the loveliest hymn, the most profound sermon, and the most selfless service.
At the turn of the century, the YMCA provided a place for young people to participate in a wide range of sports under an explicitly Christian value system. Leaders like Theodore Roosevelt argued that the physical tests of sports helped to build character, which was essential to promote American interests in the world. Roosevelt captured the spiritual essence of sports when he went to the Dakota Territory to live the vigorous life of a cowboy—his way of recovering from his young wife’s death.
For many people of faith, sports is an ideal activity to transform the spirit. Religion has always been a central tenet of youth organizations like Boy Scouts and Little League. The Little League pledge, recited before games, begins with the words: “I trust in God.”
Over the years, Jews and Muslims, atheists and agnostics, have complained about the Christian content of Boy Scouts and other organizations. These organizations make official statements expressing openness to all faiths and backgrounds, but the Christian content of their rhetoric remains.
But something is new. Religion once provided a moral prod for striving classes. Religious leaders embraced sports as a place to teach discipline, sacrifice, acceptance of pain, and learning how to win and lose. But in the last generation, religion has also been a way to fill the empty spaces of modern life. And nowhere are these problems more evident than sports.
The privileges and riches that sports offer have created a degraded world apart—a world of drug and alcohol abuse and sexual aggression, physical and emotional abuse, raunchiness and prejudice, excuses and blaming.
The culture of professional sports ripples down to the privileged and unaccountable lives of big-time college sports, down to the high schools and youth leagues. Everywhere, the ability to do something with the body confers special status. Exploiters lurk everywhere. Living in the bubble of youth sports can be disorienting as well as corrupting. Faith can provide an essential moral check.
Parents and preachers also feel a need to create a place apart to protect their children from the degradations of modern life found on the Internet, shock-jock radio, popular music, films, and video games.
Religion can teach athletes to control their egos and understand that their athletic gifts are just that—gifts—and not evidence of superiority.
At the center of the R.B.V. faith community is Donnie Dee, the father of outfielder Johnny Dee and a former National Football League player. Dee gave his life over to Christ while he was a freshman at the University of Tulsa. He has devoted his life to bringing faith to athletes ever since.
Dee is the regional director for the Fellowship of Christian Athletes in southern California. The FCA is one of a handful of organizations created in the last half-century to use the glamour and visibility of sports to spread the gospel. Since athletes have become some of the best-known figures in American life, role models for people of all ages, they can become potent missionaries for the Lord.
Not only do athletes have the ability to reach broad audiences, but they are looking for some kind of meaning in their own lives.
Dee grew up in a sports-crazy household. His father Don played a season for the Indiana Pacers of the old American Basketball Association. He was part of the 1968 U.S. Olympic team—along with future NBA stars Spencer Haywood and Jo
Jo White—that won a gold medal in Mexico City. The Dee household was full of enthusiasm for sports—and constant pressure to do well on the field.
Soon after arriving at Tulsa, the freshman players were subject to ritualistic hazing—eating gross food, drinking too much, taking mean dares. When Dee was approached by some upperclass players, who asked him to embrace Christianity, he thought it was part of the initiation rituals—getting sucked into sweet talk about Jesus, only to be exposed as a sissy before a horde of tough jocks.
But he decided that maybe Christianity offered something he was missing.
“For these guys, football was not the biggest thing in their lives, and that was new to me,” Dee says. “I didn’t have a clue what it meant to be a Christian, but I knew that they had something that I didn’t have. So I said a little prayer, asked Christ to come into my life.
“There was a peace about them, about the way they held themselves. There was one guy who was going through some personal adversity and yet his whole world was not falling down around him. Ninety percent of the team was treating me like a rookie and abusing me in freshman initiation. I thought it was a setup, acting like they cared because they were getting ready to pull the rug out from under me, a big joke. But that never happened. That was new to me—their openness and generosity and willingness to walk with me.”
The older players prayed together every day and taught him scripture. They answered his questions and helped him to see the connection between faith and the physical aggression he would need on the grid.
After graduating, Dee married his college sweetheart and played for the Indianapolis Colts and Seattle Seahawks. After leaving the NFL, he started working for the Fellowship of Christian Athletes. Dee’s campaign has increased the number of college campuses with FCA chapters from twenty to over 200.
Little League, Big Dreams Page 19