Little League, Big Dreams

by Charles Euchner

  Layton Aliviado looked at him and said, “Wow, now you really are my whitest friend.”

  Over the run to Williamsport, Tirpak looked like a Chia Pet growing hair and slowly coming to life. But once he was back with the team, he forgot about his battle with cancer and stoked the team’s emotions. While Layton Aliviado told the players what they needed to do—and the consequences if they didn’t do it—Tirpak expressed the team’s fighting spirit. He shouted in the dugout and on the field, where he coached at first base. He looked for things to use to get the players emotionally involved—another team’s nonchalance or arrogance, a player’s strength or weakness. If Aliviado was the brains and the organizer of the team, Tirpak was often its emotional soul.

  When I talked with Tirpak at his window manufacturing company, he was as jumpy as anyone I’ve seen. He was wearing one of those yellow wristbands that Lance Armstrong, another testicular cancer survivor, made into a fashion statement. He leapt up from his desk, imitated players, gestured, and leaned in to emphasize a point. A lot of energy got tamped during the chemo. And now it was still spilling over, long after the World Series was over.

  Tirpak’s explanation for his recovery is simple: “God pulled me through.”

  When he recovered, he didn’t pray as much for his health as for the team to win.

  As his friend Andy Kam said over and over, “You have to ask for the win when you pray.” Now that his life-and-death battle was over, the team needed a different kind of outside assistance.

  Sometimes, survival is less about faith and more about just learning how to solve petty problems. Even when sights are raised to the mountaintops, life still takes place mostly in the valley.

  When you live on the road with a dozen other people—whether you’re athletes or musicians or actors or evangelists—you’re going to get sick of each other once in a while. You’re going to fight. The qualities you once found endearing are going to become irritating. Jokes that were funny during the first week on the road are going to be annoying during the sixth or seventh week.

  Just ask Rick Hale.

  Months after returning home from Williamsport—where, for the second year in a row, his team lost three games in a row—Hale was trying to understand the pressures that go along with playing a boy’s game on an international stage. He reflected on the pressure to win, the need to protect the growing bodies of boys, pressures among peer groups, and how to teach abstract concepts.

  And he tried to understand what happens when the same traits that hold a group together begin to pull the group apart.

  “I try to tell the kids don’t be overwhelmed, and I was overwhelmed,” he says. “It’s a big stage, and there are a lot of people and a lot of attention, media and phone calls all the time. I’m just a guy from a small town, so I never get used to it. We got there on Monday and didn’t have a game till Saturday. I didn’t know how I’d fill the time. I’d come up with activities like they were in school. You can’t practice them to death, that’s for sure. We needed things to fill their time. It’s a carnival atmosphere.”

  Just hours before Hale’s Kentucky team played the all-stars from Lafayette, Louisiana—a game Kentucky had to win to have any chance to advance—Hale walked into the dorms and found his best starting pitcher bloodied.

  Dalton West crouched in the middle of the room full of bunk beds. The rest of the players tended to him, debating how to fix him up before the game.

  What happened?

  “The door hit him, coach.”

  “Yeah, he ran into the door, coach.”

  Hale looked at West and asked him if that was right.

  “Yes, sir.”

  Hale took West to the infirmary and got his cuts dressed. Later, a coach of the team from Saudi Arabia told him what had really happened. Kentucky shared dorm space with the Saudi team.

  One of Kentucky’s scrawny players grabbed a towel and rubbed his butt, and hit Dalton West with the towel. Then the two started to fight.

  Hale was distracted from his team’s growing tensions because “I was getting ready for a game that we have to win. We already lost once and if we lose again we’re probably going to be eliminated. All I have on my mind is baseball, baseball, baseball.”

  The players thought Hale still believed their story when he called them together.

  “I had them in a group and I told them, ‘I don’t care if you guys get into a fight in the shower and stuff happens. I don’t like it, but I can’t control everything. I just want you guys to stick together.’ Their eyes were like silver dollars. They had no idea I knew. I told them, ‘I don’t condone what you did but I love the way you stick together as a team.’”

  Even as they were losing and struggling to control their frayed nerves, they also stood together when two players got into trouble for missing practice. Only after Hale sent someone up to retrieve the boys from the game room did they show up on the field.

  After practice, Hale made the boys call their parents to report their misdeed and propose a punishment. They decided that since they got to the practice field fifteen minutes late, their punishment should be fifteen minutes running wind sprints.

  The next day, the other players asked what the punishment would be, and Hale told them.

  Bryce Morrow had an idea. “Well, if we’re a team, and they have to run,” he said, “we all have to run as a team.”

  And they did.

  “I was standing there trying to hide from the kids that I had goosebumps,” he said. “I didn’t know what to say.”

  Most teams struggled with pushy parents.

  Bill Hartley, the manager of the team from Newtown, Pennsylvania, struggled with a couple parents throughout the summer.

  “I had a couple parents constantly complaining about not enough playing time,” he says. “They don’t understand all the things I’m thinking about when I take one kid out and put another in. In the last game of the series—after we were eliminated—I’m trying to make sure every kid gets a chance for a hit. I got a call on my cell phone from a father letting me know that I embarrassed his kid because I took him off on national TV. How many millions of kids would love to be there? Are these guys crazy or something?”

  Rick Hale, the manager of the all-stars from Owensboro, Kentucky, had a different problem with parents.

  Parents of two players roomed with each other in hotels all summer long, as the boys advanced through the sectional, state, and regional tournaments. All the time, they were best of friends. They sat together, ate together, joked together, visited with their kids together. “But in Williamsport, they got into a fight and they haven’t spoken since,” Hale says months later. “Kids get over it in no time, but the parents are still mad at each other.”

  Losing requires a salve.

  When Pennsylvania defeated the all-stars from Davenport, Iowa—a 15–0, four-inning no-hitter—a few Little League officials scrambled for a way to cheer up the kids from the Midwest. Jeff Mallonee, Iowa’s manager, took the edge off with comic bursts of bravado in the dugout. “We got ’em right where we want ’em!” he said.

  After the game, trainer Mike Ludwikowski approached coach Ed Grothus.

  “Ever been to Yankee Stadium?” Ludwikowski asked. “Want to get a bus and go?”

  Soon a bus was booked. Calls went to Mike Mussina, an all-star pitcher for the Yankees who is also a Williamsport native and member of Little League’s board of directors.

  Within a day, the Iowa kids were brought to the Bronx for a game. They got Yankee hats and shirts and got to spend time on the field and in the dugout.

  One of the enduring traditions of the Little League World Series is sneaking the kids into Lamade Stadium to fill baggies with dirt from the infield.

  People who have worked at the series for years—team hosts, trainers, security people, groundskeepers, and gofers—told me that giving players a small sample of the infield dirt from Lamade Stadium makes it easier to get over losing.

  “We’re not suppo
sed to do it, but I’ve sneaked the kids in, two or three at a time, so they can go home with some dirt,” says Tom Lyons, a deputy fire chief in Clifton, New Jersey, who volunteers every summer to work security at the Little League World Series. “You go when no one else is there and it cheers the kids up.”

  Taking dirt home has become a sanctioned activity. Groundskeepers now collect dirt in a wheelbarrow and invite whole teams to come and get their samples. They provide zip-lock bags and plastic cups.

  “They can tell their friends back home that they made it to the biggest stage in baseball—the World Series,” says Mike Ludwikowski, Little League’s trainer. “They’re bringing home something sacred.”

  One of the best teams in Williamsport in 2005—and one of the most serious—was the all-star squad from Vista, California.

  Kalen Pimentel managed to beat Florida to advance to the U.S. championship game, but a small strike zone made it the hardest game of the year for both teams.

  CHAPTER 10

  It’s Not Whether You Win or Lose …

  EVEN WHEN THEY WERE STILL VERY MUCH ALIVE—in fact, at a moment of great triumph and possibility—the recriminations started for the all-stars of the Rancho Buena Vista Little League.

  Marty Miller, the manager of the team from Vista, California, was leaning on a bat as he watched his players take batting practice for the umpteenth time. Later that day, before a national television audience on ABC’s Wide World of Sports, the Californians would play in the U.S. championship game against the all-stars from Ewa Beach, Hawaii.

  But Miller could not get past the events of two days before. That’s when his team beat the all-stars from Maitland, Florida. But even though R.B.V. won that game, 6–2, Miller was angry. As he watched his players take cuts in the cage—clank, clank, clank—Miller complained about the umpiring and the intimidation tactics of Florida’s coaches.

  “I’m a big conspiracy theorist,” Miller told me, his white handlebar mustache dancing on his red face. “I don’t think they wanted us in the final.” By “they,” Miller means the Walt Disney Company, which owns the ESPN and ABC television networks that broadcast the Little League World Series.

  “During that game, 75 percent of the camera time was on the Florida team, and 25 percent was on us. ‘Florida this, Florida that. Oh, by the way, California…’ There was really one-sided coverage. I just have to sit here and ask why.”

  Miller then complained about the umpiring in that game against Florida. “I’ve never seen a strike called that way,” Miller says. “Five pitches in a row—ball, ball, ball, ball, ball—right down the middle of the plate.” Miller pauses, exhales. “It’s okay,” he says. “The best team won. The evil team lost.”

  Miller, fifty-six years old, is a pear-shaped owner of a construction company in Vista. Miller devotes most of his waking hours, outside of his business, to sports. He played men’s baseball until he put on too much weight to continue, and then he played in hard-core softball leagues. He has been coaching boys baseball since his son started playing a decade and a half ago.

  I asked Miller if he ever gets too much baseball. “Yeah, right now,” he says. “You go from January to July, that’s half the year, and then all this to get to Williamsport,” Miller tells me. “Every day, it’s all baseball. When my kid played, we played year round. They played 115 games of travel ball and a full PONY schedule at the same time, so that’s 150, plus another fifteen or twenty games of winter ball, so they play a lot of baseball.” His daughter was also an athlete in high school. “But she got tired of it, burned out,” Miller says.

  When California beat Florida in a battle of the teams’ aces, I thought Marty Miller and his players would be jubilant. They advanced to the U.S. championship game and had a chance to win the Little League World Series. But everyone’s faces looked grim, tight—on the field, in the press conference, and around the complex. During the Florida game, I circulated on the California side of the stands, and it was tense. I walked out to a pavilion where a high-definition TV was showing the game, and Jim Lewis paced around complaining about the umpire’s strike zone. And now, at BP, the kids were quiet, like they were doing a job.

  Hey, I thought, you guys are winning! You have a chance to go all the way! What gives?

  Partly, they were upset. But they were also grim by design, as Joe Pimentel told me. No coach works harder with players than Pimentel. He’s smart and dedicated, and he wants to teach the kids life lessons as well as hitting lessons.

  “There are lots of peaks and valleys,” he said. “You might hit the ball hard four times and go 0 for 4. What you’re trying to do, not just in baseball, is turn the peaks and valleys closer together. You should not be so high when you homer. As soon as you touch home plate, that at-bat is done, and you need to focus on the next challenge. You can’t fly as high as a kite or else you don’t get a hit after a home run. Once it’s over, you focus on the moment.”

  That’s why the Californians never celebrated like the other teams. The Hawaiians hit a home run, and the guys were jumping up and down. The Mainers rallied and total joy filled their faces. The Japanese just did an infield practice, and they wore open, smiling faces.

  The California kids were all business.

  Before I went to Williamsport, I talked with a number of experts on youth sports. Most said events like the Little League World Series took the fun out of the game.

  Bob Bigelow, a former NBA player and author of Just Let the Kids Play, was critical of the impact that TV has as on the tendency for adults to run teams like army sergeants and do anything to win. “The child’s need to play is trumped by the adult’s need to win,” he said. “And they practice too much. I hear about teams on the field for five hours of practice. Come on! If you can keep them interested in practice for an hour and a half, you’re doing a hell of a job.”

  Bigelow didn’t play competitive basketball until he was fourteen. But that’s the age when kids now strut their stuff at summer tournaments. LeBron James was already a household name in basketball circles at that tender age. “It’s just too much,” Bigelow says, “and it’s happening in all sports.”

  Jay Coakley, a University of Colorado sociologist whose Little League team almost made it to Williamsport in 1955, worries that parents “use their kids’ success for their own purposes” and “look at their kids’ games with an investment mentality.”

  Coakley grew up in a Peanuts world. “When I was a kid,” Coakley told me, “we played pickup games, with different rules every time we played. We were making decisions outside an authority structure, settling disputes on our own. We were playing outside a pre-fab model of games made by someone else. I don’t want to romanticize that, but it’s important. I worry about the pressure cooker, where kids don’t have any room to do things on their own.”

  Virginia Tech’s Richard Stratton worries that players get so serious that “they’re unable to separate their on-field personalities from who they are away from the game.” When kids start to believe their press clippings— that they’re the best around, that they epitomize all the motherhoodand-apple-pie virtues of hard work and sacrifice—they could lose sight of their limitations as kids. Past participants in the Little League World Series have gotten miffed when they did not star on other teams when they got home. “The reality will strike when they start to play PONY or American Legion ball,” he said.

  There’s nothing inherently good or bad about sports. What matters— in sports, in school, at camp, and in the neighborhood—is whether kids have the opportunity to explore and play as well as work with discipline toward a goal.

  When I arrived at the Little League World Series, I wanted to see which teams looked like they were having fun and which ones took losing—and winning—hard.

  One of the first people I met in Williamsport was Bill Hartley, the owner of a pizzeria outside Philadelphia and manager of the Council Rock Little League’s all-stars. Hartley was bursting with hope—not only for his team, but also for hi
s own ability to keep the game in perspective. He was like an AA member who had just reached another milestone.

  Five years before, on a gray and cold January day, Hartley lost four members of his family in a house fire. His sister Dale Connor, her husband Don, their daughter Colleen, and her daughter Kacie, all died in a fire apparently caused by a faulty bathroom light switch. The Bucks County coroner said the four died of smoke inhalation and carbon monoxide poisoning.

  Bill Hartley’s always been an intense man. In the years of coaching his children in Little League and guiding them through other sports—like wrestling—he’s always demanded the greatest physical effort and the greatest mental focus. And when they did not deliver, he sometimes responded with sharp words. In his own words, he was “intense” and “hard-nosed.” Everyone in the family played sports for generations, and the purpose of playing was to win. Even more importantly, the purpose was to do the little things right.

  But the awful fire changed something in Bill Hartley. His eyes still burned deeply and he still cared about the coaching lessons of his father and his college coach, and he still wanted to win. But he decided that he had to show more love when he coached, react less to what happened whether it was good or bad. He worked hard to corral his emotions, and to teach his youngest son Ryan—a twelve-year-old who plays shortstop for the Newtown team—how to win without the old tensions he used to bring to the field.

  “I decided that I had to make baseball more of a game, and less of that intense passion,” Hartley says. “Now it’s back to being a game. That hardnosed passion is still there, but with that loving stuff behind it now.”

  When Newtown made it to the World Series—when the team used its discipline to beat great fields of teams in Pennsylvania and then in the Mid-Atlantic tournament—it looked like Hartley and his kids were writing a story of healing and inspiration, faith and redemption. What they lacked in physical ability, they would compensate with cleverness.