Little League, Big Dreams

by Charles Euchner

  “With most little guys who want to play baseball, the focus isn’t on education, so we’re going to make sure that happens,” Senior says. “Nathan is a huge Boston fan, so they have that in common. He works with Dante three days, full days on Tuesday and Thursday. Wednesdays are kind of a half-day. It’s a project-based approach. The way we look at it, instead of teaching a lot of information, we want to teach him how to think, how to figure things out himself. They go golfing together, but Dante respects him. He calls him Mr. Sweet.”

  While his son pitched well and hit home runs and Florida won games, Dante Senior merrily chatted up the virtues of Little League as the purest example of the joy of sports. “Thirteen is probably the perfect year for something like this—it’s right before the world changes, right before puberty and other things get important. It’s the last year of innocence. [Next year,] they’re no longer on the little field, and they’re on the big field. They’re teenagers. It’s a great way to turn into a teenager and be a little man.”

  But the gooey teen talk disappears when the topic of the California-Florida game comes up.

  California’s version of the great controversy goes like this:

  Home plate umpire Don Singleton created the worst possible context for the the game. Like all of the other umpires who worked the Little League World Series, Singleton paid his own way to Williamsport from his home in Williamstown, Massachusetts. Once he got to the series, he and other umpires got precious little training on how to work a game. And he called the tightest strike zone in the series. Forget about pitches that cut the corners of the strike zone. Those were always called balls. But Singleton also called balls on pitches over the heart of the plate.

  When Singleton squeezed California’s starting pitcher, Kalen Pimentel, the result was predictable. Pimentel would get behind in the count and then have to throw the ball over the plate to force the Florida hitters to swing. By throwing to a tiny strike zone, Pimentel put extra stress on his arm at a time of year—the end of the summer, after playing in almost sixty games, with growing pressure in each game—when he could least afford it.

  Florida had a legitimate grievance about the umpires blowing a home run call in the third inning. With two men on, Florida’s Mike Tomlinson hit a drive that hit the netting near the left-field foul pole, bounced down to the top of the outfield fence and onto the field. The umpires ruled the ball a double off the wall, but replays showed the ball was a home run. Instead of a 3–2 Florida lead, the game was now tied 2–2. Still, that call was just evidence of how badly California’s pitcher got squeezed. “They make a big deal out of that call, but that ball was strike five,” Jim Lewis, a California parent, told me. “Come on! The problem was that the strike zone was impossibly small.”

  When a pitcher is confused about the strike zone, he often asks the umpire for clarification about different calls. But that didn’t work for young Kalen Pimentel in this game. “Our pitcher tried to ask him what the strike zone was, and the guy [Singleton] is just, ‘Grrrrr! Grrrrr!’” Marty Miller told me a day later. “Kalen, if he throws a bad pitch, he doesn’t beg for a strike. But Kalen makes motions out there, [so] you know something isn’t right. None of our pitchers is out there begging. They’re good enough that they don’t need to beg for strikes.”

  But the sandwich-size strike zone was not the worst handicap. The behavior of the Florida team—especially Dante Bichette, a grown man who should know better—was worse.

  Bichette played mind games with the Californians.

  “He had his son icing the hitter,” Joe Pimentel said months later, still bitter. “The hitter gets into the batter’s box and he waits and waits and waits. Dante Junior waited very long between pitches, waiting for the hitter to get jittery. Then he’d throw when they [the California hitters] were uncomfortable. I told our hitters to turn around and ask for time, but we weren’t granted time.”

  Marty Miller always tells his players not to play until they’re ready.

  “Don’t let anyone rush you, you don’t start till you’re ready,” Miller says in his clipped drawl. “They can’t play the game without you. The first thing we tell the pitcher is to play at your own pace. If the other players aren’t ready when you’re ready, turn back and relax to go at your speed. Other teams will ask for time as the pitcher goes in to the windup. But these kids know how to take charge of themselves.”

  Starting in the second or third inning, Dante Senior started to bait the California team. Bench-jockeying is a time-honored practice in the big leagues, but it’s supposed to be verboten in Little League. But Bichette barked away, yelling that the California team was stealing signs. Bichette yelled at Nathan Lewis, the California catcher. He barked at Kalen Pimentel, the pitcher. He complained to the umpires, who, impressed with his celebrity status, warned the California bench.

  ESPN wires the managers to capture their words of encouragement and instruction to players during the game. Wiring the managers also helps to enforce basic manners on the field. But Bichette was only a coach, so he wasn’t wired. He was free to snipe all game long without getting recorded.

  And who was Bichette to complain about stealing signals? He spent the whole game trying to steal the signs that Joe Pimentel relayed to Nate Lewis behind the plate. Bichette even admitted stealing signs! Bichette paced up and down the Florida bench, looking for a good angle to see the senior Pimentel’s signs. Luckily, Pimentel was able to use a door as a barrier. That just got Bichette angrier. So he sent a couple players outside the dugout to get a better angle—until umpires told them to get back in the dugout where they belonged.

  In the sixth inning, Dante Bichette Jr. hit Kalen Pimentel with a pitch. Dante Senior told Miller and Pimentel the pitch was retribution for the sign stealing.

  “When Kalen was going to first [after getting hit], Dante Senior was yelling at him,” Joe Pimentel says. “After they hit him, Royce [Copeland] came up and he hit the ball off the fence and Kalen scored from first. I yelled out, ‘Hey, hit another guy!’ When Kalen took the mound, Dante was screaming and yelling at him, and Kalen’s laughing at him.”

  The final insults came after the game. With the TV cameras recording the Rockwellian scene of the two teams lining up on the field to congratulate each other, Dante Senior approached Marty Miller with a smile on his face.

  “He smiled and called us names,” Miller says. “‘Cheaters!’ he says. ‘Is this the way you got here—cheating and stealing signs?’ I don’t know if he called us a son of a bitch or what, but he did it with a nice smile on his face.”

  That’s California’s version of the tale. Here’s Florida’s:

  Home plate umpire Don Singleton called a tight strike zone, all right. But that tight zone affected both pitchers—not just Kalen Pimentel. Dante Junior also had lots of strikes called balls. So both sides played with a disadvantage.

  “That’s Little League umpires,” says Sid Cash. “If you don’t pay professional umpires, you’re going to get something like that. He didn’t call some strikes for us and for them…Normally Little League umpires call a bigger zone. But this was a big game—Florida and against California, on national TV—and [the umpire] tightened up some.”

  But, really, that tight zone didn’t affect much. Sure, Kalen Pimentel threw more pitches than usual. But that was because the Florida hitters showed discipline at the plate. Pimentel overwhelmed Kentucky, but so what! Kentucky lost all six of its games in Williamsport in 2004 and 2005! The Florida hitters—schooled for a year by Dante Bichette Sr.—made Pimentel work deep into the count. Take Florida’s first batter, Max Moroff. He forced Pimentel to throw ten pitches before popping up to shortstop.

  “If you look at the tapes of the game, there were only five pitches that were over the plate and got called balls,” Cash says. “Again, somebody wants to talk about five strikes for them, but that doesn’t equal a run.”

  The real problem was that California’s hitters stole signs—blatantly, throughout the World Series. Florida
’s manager and coaches decided they weren’t going to let the Californians cheat against them. Not when they had a chance to advance to the American championship game.

  “Their kids looked back at home plate to get the [catcher’s] signs,” Cash said. “They taught their kids to raise their hand—like they were asking for time out—so they could see the position of the catcher’s glove. That tells you what pitch is coming. An inside pitch was not going to be a curveball, got that? They cheated [in an earlier game against Maine]. From the get-go, we were not going to let it happen to us.”

  What’s a Little League team going to do when the other side steals signs?

  One recourse is for the catcher to fool the hitter after he steals his sign. Big-league catchers do it all the time. Set up in one place, let the hitter look back, then shift when the pitcher rocks into his motion. “That’s one too many demands to make,” says Cash. “Our kid was eleven years old!”

  “In pro ball, you take care of it then and there,” says Dante Bichette Sr., “and the runner at second base has to answer too.”

  Cash is more direct. “In the big leagues, [if] you look back at the catcher, you get pitches near the head,” Cash says. “You can’t do that in Little League.”

  Since the beanball was out, Florida’s response was to ride California’s players—yell at them, rattle them, and intimidate them. Bichette makes no apologies for yelling at Kalen Pimentel and Nathan Lewis. He says they were looking back at signs so blatantly that someone needed to call them on it. If he could shake up the youngsters, so much the better.

  “This was Little League, so you can’t drill the kid,” says Bichette. “So I yelled at them.”

  The underlying explanation for the ongoing signs-stealing controversy might go back to the creation of Little League by Carl Stotz in 1939.

  From the beginning, Stotz’s idea was to provide kids with a small-scale imitation of the big leagues. By giving players uniforms, groomed fields, scoreboards, umpires, scoresheets, statistics, and writeups in local newspapers, Stotz encouraged boys to imitate their heroes in the major leagues.

  Everywhere Little League is played, kids mimic the star players. Curaçao players imitate native Andruw Jones’s method of catching the ball by the side of their bodies. Other players, like Saudi Arabia’s Alexander Robinett, imitate Gary Sheffield’s extreme bat wagging while waiting for the pitcher to deliver the ball. A couple of players—like Raysheldon Carolina of Curaçao—imitate Ichiro Suzuki’s hop-step in the batter’s box as the pitcher delivers the ball. Japan’s pitchers imitate Hideo Nomo’s hesitation kick and powerful thrust forward to the plate.

  It has always been thus. The comic Billy Crystal remembers mimicking Mickey Mantle’s labored limp to the plate.

  “Jetering” is the most common mimic in all of youth baseball today.

  The New York Yankees’ shortstop, Derek Jeter, has made a habit of holding his right hand in the umpire’s face when he digs into the batter’s box. Ostensibly, he’s asking for time. More importantly, he’s taking symbolic control of the plate.

  One possibility is that the California hitters were just Jetering. They held up their arms to take control of the game’s tempo, just like the Yankees’ captain does. But Dante Bichette doesn’t buy it.

  “They didn’t peek back, they looked back,” he says. “It was blatant. There’s a difference between Jetering and looking back, staring blatantly at the signals.”

  Bichette acknowledges most of the coaches in the World Series stole signs. “Hawaii had our signals till the second inning and then we noticed and changed them. We had Hawaii’s signals the whole game, but they were so good it didn’t matter.”

  So what’s wrong if California’s players were stealing signals, too? It’s part of the game. Everybody does it.

  Bichette says it’s okay for the coaches to steal signals, but not the players.

  “Baseball’s facing cheating right now in a big way,” he says, referring to the steroids scandal that shadows stars like Barry Bonds, Sammy Sosa, and Rafael Palmiero. “If coaches steal signals, that’s one thing, but you shouldn’t get the kids stealing signals. It’s teaching them the wrong thing.”

  When the emotions swirl, ethical arguments can get mixed up. The coaches and parents claimed a certain right to steal signals, argue with each other, argue with umpires, and taunt the other side.

  The players themselves claimed no such rights. Only the adults.

  After getting eliminated, many teams pad down to the stadiums to gather samples of dirt for souvenirs.

  The best players in amateur baseball compete on travel teams in tournaments across the country—but the allure of television causes many travel-ball players to also compete for the Little League World Series.

  CHAPTER 11

  The Future Is Here

  THE WARMTH OF UPSTATE NEW YORK’S SUMMER along the Otsego Lake snapped cold when the sun went down. The parents and brothers and sisters of the players scurried to their SUVs and campers parked along the edge of the eighteen-acre baseball complex to retrieve sweatshirts and blankets. The players themselves didn’t bother. They played all week in shirtsleeves, and they wore a cake of dirt and sweat to keep themselves warm.

  A couple days later, Ryne Sandberg and Wade Boggs would be inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown Village. The area around the historic town would be overwhelmed with baseball fans wearing Cubs and Red Sox jerseys and hats. Throngs would gather for the induction ceremonies, tearing up as the brand new immortals thanked the people who made their glorious careers possible. Baseball’s greatest players would relive their past glories and decry the modern corruption of money and steroids.

  But at the Cooperstown Dreams Park, four miles away from the Hall of Fame, baseball remains a present-tense game played by twelve-year-old kids.

  All the experts on youth baseball told me that I’d find the best baseball in the country at one of the Cooperstown Dreams Park tournaments.

  Allen Simpson probably knows as much about youth baseball as anyone. A former executive with the legendary Alaska Goldpanners and the Montreal Expos, Simpson is the founder and publisher of a trade publication called Baseball America. In an era when major leaguers make an average of $2.5 million a year, baseball people at all levels need reliable information about the game’s up-and-coming players. Simpson’s publication, a baseball version of Variety or Billboard, uses a thick network of writers and stringers, scouts and coaches, to cover baseball’s vast landscape.

  “Every one of the best players in the country, at some time, goes through Cooperstown,” Simpson said. “It’s where you’ll see every great player in the country.”

  Over eleven weeks every summer, about 10,000 twelve-year-old boys participate in tournaments at Dreams Park. Each week’s tournament involves eighty teams, each with twelve or thirteen players. They play from early in the morning until late at night. The tournaments begin on Sunday mornings and end Thursday nights. The championship game starts around 9:30 p.m. A few thousand people fill the stands to watch the game, which lasts until around midnight.

  After ten weeks of these tournaments, each week’s winners are invited to participate in a tournament of champions that concludes just before Labor Day Weekend.

  To get to the sprawling baseball encampment, you travel about eleven miles north along a twisting, turning State Highway 28, which juts off Interstate 88 about sixty miles west of Albany. You pass farms and office parks and malls before getting to Lake Otsego on the edge of the timeless little village of Cooperstown.

  Once, the name of Cooperstown could be taken literally. It was a town of skilled carpenters, as well as a farming community. That past gets gentle nods from the Fenimore Art Museum and the Farmer’s Museum. But for more than a half century, Cooperstown has been synonymous with baseball. Cooperstown is where, according to the long-disproved myth, Abner Doubleday invented baseball. Over the years, baseball has overwhelmed other activities in the village. The old brick
and woodframed buildings along Main Street are mostly the same. But in place of old hardware stores and coffee shops, insurance and law offices, now stand baseball-themed restaurants and memorabilia stores and hat and T-shirt stores. Baseball’s mythology is Cooperstown’s biggest business.

  The game of baseball—as opposed to the memory and mythology of baseball—takes place at the address of 4550 State Highway 28, four miles up the road in Milford, New York. Beyond a cast-iron archway announcing the complex, kids frolic in T-shirts and shorts and uniforms. They throw baseballs, endlessly, in twos and threes, usually from long distances. The arcs of balls frame the lawn sloping down to the complex’s main baseball field. That field is a simple diamond, enclosed inside a wooden green outfield fence and aluminum stands along the first and third base lines. At a distance, it looks like the old Huntington Avenue Grounds in Boston, original home of the Red Sox.

  Cooperstown Dreams Park is on the leading edge of a nationwide transformation of youth baseball.

  Not long ago, youth baseball was a community affair. When you played organized baseball, you signed up for a local league. If it wasn’t Little League, it was PONY or Babe Ruth or Dixie Baseball. Fathers coached teams and neighbors umpired games. Most teams played a dozen games or so through June, when the all-star teams were picked. Virtually everyone was finished playing ball by early July, then took the rest of the summer off for family vacations.

  But in the last decade or so, youth baseball has become a serious business. Community leagues are not the only option. Upwards of 35,000 travel teams have sprung up across the country. Kids can not only play all summer long, but all year long. Some of the best players play in Little League, but it’s more of a sidelight than their main focus.