Little League, Big Dreams

by Charles Euchner

  All summer long, the team worked on tricks to gain an advantage in close games. On one play, called the Scoobie Doo, the baserunner at first would pretend to break for second with the bases loaded and the coach would shout out in mock panic: “Hey! Whaddaya think you’re doing?” The catcher would then rush a throw to first base, sometimes throwing it away and allowing a run to score. Darren Lewis called that play in a game against Tamaqua in the state tournament, with the score tied and Ryan Hartley on third base. Another fake-out happened when the opposition had a runner on third base. The Newtown pitcher would throw a wild pitch on purpose, causing the runner to run home. But the catcher would quickly grab the ball and throw to the pitcher covering home for an easy out.

  Whatever it takes.

  Back home, at Parkway Pizza in Levittown, crowds gathered to cheer on the Little Leaguers. Kids from Truman High School, white-collar workers and lunch-bucket types, and mothers with smaller kids all gathered to pass along their best wishes all summer long. And when the Newtown kids made it to Williamsport, the crowds swelled for their games.

  But then a superior Hawaii team beat them easily—and, in the process, Ryan Hartley broke his finger waving a bunt at a hard fastball from Hawaii’s flamethrower. He cried in agony for all of TV Land to hear.

  Against Florida, things got worse before the game even started. Bill Hartley wanted to have his injured son coach first base. Other teams used players as first base coaches, so why not? But Little League officials balked at even letting him in the dugout. He wanted to know why. Rules are rules, was the answer. The rules state that all players on the field have to play an inning in the field and have one plate appearance—and young Hartley could do neither. The Little League gendarmes were willing to let him sit on the bench, but not to coach. They argued in front of the dugout and then under the stadium.

  Hartley approached Florida’s manager, Sid Cash, and asked if he had any problem with Ryan coaching at first base. Cash was okay with Ryan coaching. When Little League officials said they’d face legal liability if Ryan got hurt, Hartley said he’d sign a waiver. But the Little League officials held their ground.

  After the game—after Florida killed Pennsylvania’s hopes with a 3–1 victory that probably turned on a missed call at second base—Hartley talked with reporters in the media room under Lamade Stadium.

  “Try to be gentle,” he said as he took a seat in front of the room.

  Then he questioned an umpire’s call at second base. Florida snuffed a Pennsylvania rally with a double play, but the shortstop never touched the bag before throwing to first base.

  Then he complained about Little League’s treatment of Ryan. “This kid worked his rear off to be here,” he said. “The kid’s a total gentleman. For them to do that to me…”

  Then he broke. The old intensity and the new heart melted together. He stood up to walk out. “Guys, I’ve had enough, I’m done. Sorry.”

  Bill Hartley was still battling his demons.

  A measure of redemption came a couple days later when Pennsylvania beat up the all-stars from Davenport, Iowa, 15–0. Under Little League’s mercy rule, the game ends early if a team leads by ten runs after four innings. Not only did Newtown pound thirteen hits and four home runs in three innings, for a .682 batting average, but Keith Terry no-hit the Iowans in the abbreviated game.

  On a perfect night—warm, with a gentle breeze, and 10,300 fans dispersed across the stadium and in the hills beyond the outfield fence— the kids from Pennsylvania found some joy on the last night of their Little League careers.

  The team from Westbrook, Maine, was not supposed to be in Williamsport. The best team in the New England regional tournament was the all-star team from Farmington, Connecticut. Maine, in fact, lost its first three games in the regionals. But Maine got hot at the right time and breezed the rest of the way to Williamsport.

  Which might explain why Maine’s team was both just happy to be in Williamsport and also nervous to the point of sickness as the games approached.

  The player who seemed to have the roughest time was Michael Mowatt, a skinny kid with a mop of brown hair who looked like he was too sick to play a single game.

  Rich Knight took Mowatt and other players to the infirmary almost nightly. “At two or three in the morning, I’d get a knock at the door,” the Maine manager said. “We were always going to the infirmary with poison ivy, sore arms, and stomachaches. The nurse would say, ‘Oh, here’s the guys from Westbrook again.’”

  Going back to the regional tournament, Mowatt vomited and had stomachaches. “We figured it was something he ate. We didn’t think too, too much of it. But it continued. He had one good night and two in a row when he was up. He would knock on my door at night and tell me he was feeling sick again.” Nothing settled him.

  This wasn’t the first time he had had problems. He almost quit the allstar team during the district tournament. “He’s not getting enough playing time,” his father told Knight, who asked to talk with the boy. “He’s already decided. He’s in the car now.”

  Mowatt stayed on the team but didn’t do well at the plate or in the field. He was a bench player most of the summer.

  Knight is a slender man with dark hair and the familiar New England accent. He talks softly. Knight has never had children, but he started coaching Little League twenty-five years ago as part of his company’s efforts to get employees to do volunteer work in the community. “I had to ask what I want to do. Do I want to go to nursing homes with old people?” Knight says. “Sorry, no, I want to do something else. Verizon always gave funding for the league. I liked kids, so I decided to give it a try. That’s also why I got into the Big Brothers program.”

  After several visits to the infirmary, one of the nurses pulled Knight aside and suggested that Mowatt might be homesick. Because his parents were struggling financially, they could not come to Williamsport to watch their son play in the World Series.

  Knight asked Mowatt about the nurse’s theory. “Do you want to go home?” Knight asked him. Maybe, was the answer. Knight said he would get in a car and drive Mowatt home before Maine’s next game in Williamsport.

  “It’s your choice,” Knight told Mowatt. “In the morning, if you want me to drive you back to Maine, your parents can meet us halfway.”

  In the morning, Mowatt decided to stay and play in the upcoming game against California.

  “Knowing he could go home,” Knight says, “created a sense that he could breathe again.” He became one of the best hitters in the Little League World Series. He finished with a 1.500 slugging percentage, the best in the tournament.

  “He kept saying, ‘I’m not homesick,’” says his mother Linda Mowatt. “But once Rich told him he could come home, he knew he wasn’t trapped and he had an option and it relieved Michael.” Linda Mowatt was able to watch her son play when a local Little League supporter paid for a bus.

  In their first game against Louisiana, the Mainers swung at the first thirteen pitches. Nick Finocchiaro ripped two fouls before slapping a flat fastball over the right center field fence. Mowatt also hacked away— foul, swinging strike, foul—before lining a hanging curveball fastball over the center field fence.

  “I thought I was going to strike out,” Mowatt told me later. “I mean, it was 0–2. I was looking for a pitch outside of the zone, and I got one down the middle. It was a little slow curveball. It hung…I just couldn’t believe it. I still can’t believe it.”

  Louisiana rallied for the win, but Maine achieved its first goal: avoid embarrassment.

  In the next game, down 2–0 to California, Maine took a nanosecond lead when Mowatt hit a 250-foot home run with two runners on base. “I could hardly believe how happy I felt at that time,” Knight remembers. California won the game in the next inning with a big rally that included a grand slam from manchild Kalen Pimentel.

  Maine finally won, 3–2, against Owensboro, Kentucky, in one of those everybody-chips-in games.

  Win or lose, Mowatt and
the other Mainers bopped along. No complaints about bad breaks or mean opponents. No ugly words about umpires. After the first game, manager Rich Knight acknowledged the hurt with a classic if-I-stop-laughing-I’ll-cry line: “It was Christy Matthewson who said that I learn a little from a victory and a lot from a loss.”

  There’s losing hard and there’s losing gently. The team from Lafayette, Louisiana, did both.

  After winning the first two games of pool play—with stirring comebacks against Maine and Kentucky—Louisiana clinched a spot in the next round of play. Louisiana could afford to lose the next game, against the powerful team from Vista, California. But nothing went right in a 9–3 loss. And Mike Conrad, the manager, was tense and angry after the game.

  A reporter asked Mike Conrad, Louisiana’s manager, what he expected from California.

  “Not a 9–3 loss,” Conrad says, eyes glaring, lips pursed, voice clipped.

  An ugly pause.

  “You can’t hang pitches up in the middle of the strike zone to any of these kids here.”

  “I am very disappointed in the way that we ran the bases tonight.”

  “The hitting—even though we out-hit them, 11–10, was just totally untimely. We left [runners on] second and third a couple times with two outs, we left [runners on] first and second with two outs.”

  “We basically choked it off at the plate. You can’t let a team like this group get any kind of momentum whatsoever.”

  Jace Conrad made his father Mike Conrad, the manager of the team from Lafayette, Louisiana, proud in pitching a one-hitter against Hawaii.

  “It’s just a matter of being patient at the plate. We are not being patient…For some reason, I don’t know if it’s 10,000 people in the stands, we’re not very patient. We’re not being smart offensively.”

  “Whether you’re seven or you’re twelve [years old], you just hit that spot. I don’t care if it’s high, if it’s low. You can’t leave it belt high when you’re asking for an outside pitch. And I went out and told Ryan [Bergeron] that. Especially against a West Coast team that plays 365 days a year. These guys are outstanding hitters from top to bottom, and they’re very well coached. It’s like vultures, once they start feeding on you it’s going to get ugly quick.”

  Any other questions?

  It was up to Conrad’s son, Jace, to change the mood. Louisiana lost its next game, against Hawaii, 2–0. But it’s hard to imagine anyone losing any better. Jace Conrad walked one batter and gave up a home run, but otherwise he was as perfect as anyone ever gets in kidball.

  No one has ever shut down Hawaii’s hitters, but Jace Conrad baffled them as completely as if he had asked them to calculate pi. The foot movement on the rubber didn’t seem part of the same motion as the arm whipping forward, and the Hawaii guys got confused and their timing was off. Conrad pitched them inside, where other teams were too scared to throw the ball. For his age, young Conrad looked as clever as Greg Maddux. Even when he gave up the home run, he remained steady. He just got ready for the next batter.

  After the game, Mike Conrad was subdued but positive as if he were absorbing a new lesson about losing. “I’m real proud of my son,” he said softly. “He had good stuff tonight…He wanted it more. He’s a tough kid, he’s a competitor, and he felt he had to try to redeem himself tonight. The baseball gods just weren’t with us tonight…I have said from the get-go that this was such a special group of kids who work so hard. You hate to see it end like this, but this is a lesson in life, too. Sometimes you don’t have enough to finish that job.”

  Somehow, a moment of grace in losing wiped everything else away.

  And so the Cajun kids, once the tournament’s masters of comebacks with their first two victories, experienced a comeback of temper.

  Then they returned home to see their lives change completely. As the World Series drew to a close, Hurricane Katrina raged toward the Gulf Coast. In days, the city of New Orleans was almost wiped off the map. As the people of that city fled, 50,000 went to Lafayette. A couple months later, I asked Mike Conrad how the Gulf Coast region was holding up. “We’re going to get through this,” he said. “It makes the other stuff look less important, doesn’t it?”

  As I looked back on the Little League World Series—hard losses and redemptive wins, stoic losers and surprise heroes—I kept coming back to that bitter matchup between California and Florida. Months later, the two sides still argued about what happened in that semifinal game for the American championship.

  After it was over, the two sides agreed on only one matter: the better team won. “If we played them ten times, we’d win two at most,” said Sid Cash, the rotund bank executive with the thick Southern drawl who has coached Little League for three decades. “They are without question the better team. But that happened to be one of the nights we might have won.”

  Florida came into the game with a 2–1 record. The Maitland all-stars took advantage of their opponents’ weaknesses, using trick plays, outhustling them, and taking advantage of bad umpiring calls. They also rode their budding superhero Dante Bichette Jr., the son of the former major leaguer. Florida beat the all-stars from Davenport, Iowa, 7–3, and Newtown, Pennsylvania, 3–1. Then they lost to Hawaii, 10–0.

  California was even better. After going 20–0 in the qualifying tournaments, the Vista all-stars went 3–0 in Williamsport. The star was Kalen Pimentel, who got strikeouts for all eighteen outs in the opener against Owensboro, Kentucky. Pimentel also hit grand slams in California’s 7–3 win over Maine and its 9–3 win over Louisiana.

  But if California was so good, so dominant, why did the victory over Florida feel so lousy?

  Dante Bichette Jr., son of the former major leaguer, was the star for Florida’s team all summer.

  At the center of the controversy was Dante Bichette Sr., a big—six feet, three inches, 225 pounds—and strong former major league star. In thirteen years playing for five teams, Bichette hit a total of 274 home runs with a lifetime average just eight hits shy of the magic .300 mark. All summer long, Bichette told and retold his heartwarming story of fatherhood—how he quit the Los Angeles Dodgers’ training camp in 2002 when he heard that his son Dante Junior hit his first Little League home run. “I was wavering anyway, but that was the final straw. If I was still going strong and still had the passion, I would have probably kept playing.” But he decided to come home to Florida and teach his kid how to play baseball.

  From the time his kid understood anything about baseball, he wanted to play in the Little League World Series. In 2004, Bichette created a travel team called the Maitland Pride to train the local Little League allstars for a run at Williamsport. The team played other travel teams in tournaments and exhibitions, winning twenty-four of thirty-one games. Playing tough games against better teams, the Pride came together as a team. Every one of the Little League’s all-stars played for the Pride from December 2004 until July 2005—just a couple weeks before the Little League tournaments started.

  When he played in the big leagues, Bichette had a strange reputation. Charlie Metro, a longtime coach and scout, summarized it perfectly: “He’s got a pixie disposition. He’s got a delightful arrogance. He’s a hard-nosed type of ballplayer.” In short, a playful toughie. Most players liked Bichette, but he didn’t completely avoid controversy. In 1998, a Denver Post writer found androstenidione, a steroid variant, in his locker. Toward the end of his career, after he lost his starting position in spring training, he was part of a cabal that got Boston Red Sox manager Jimy Williams fired.

  The big pixie was one of the happier campers during the Little League World Series. He reveled in the opportunity to proclaim the virtues of the event. Afterward, he told me he learned lessons in Williamsport that he wished he had understood before. “I learned so much more about teamwork as a coach than as a player,” he says. “I wish I had my career to do over again now that I’ve had these kids. I’m going to have Dante coach younger kids, because what you’re talking about is teamwork. In pro ball, yo
u miss it. It’s more about the individual.”

  Bichette taught baseball as if his Little Leaguers were high school players. Every practice, every game, he dissected hitting, pitching, fielding, and baserunning.

  “We broke everything down to fundamentals—why it’s so tough to hit, what you have to do to field or pitch,” Bichette says. “The true measure of a master is the absence of wasted motion. So I taught them why you have to have a short swing, because you don’t have much time. It really is a simple game. What it comes down to is ‘I got to get to the ball quick.’ We turned the pitching machine up and we did it and did it and did it. And you have to teach kids different ways. Some are visual, some are audial, some have to just do it to understand. I made them understand why we have to field a ball at shortstop quick, [that] taking one extra step helps the runner have one extra step too.”

  Like James Mill preparing his son for life as an intellectual or John Huston teaching his daughter Anjelica the art of acting, Dante Senior has made a project out of Dante Junior. He won’t say it, but the goal is the major leagues. Bichette built a batting cage in his garage and the Pride players came over for swings. When the Little League season started, the Pride continued to play, so Bichette never lost control of his charges. In Williamsport, the two Bichettes were seen walking down to the cages together, apart from the others on the team, to take some extra swings in the cages.

  Dante is homeschooled by his former fifth-grade teacher, a six-foot-six giant from Boston named Nathan Sweet. The plan is for Dante Junior to work at home for three years before enrolling in high school.