Little League, Big Dreams

by Charles Euchner

  Organizations like Cooperstown Dreams Park, the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU), the United States Specialty Sports Association (USSSA), and the Continental American Baseball League have created hundreds of opportunities for elite travel teams to play in tournaments all year long.

  The AAU and USSSA rank teams throughout the year, as if they’re Division 1 college basketball or football teams. And every year, Baseball America publishes a national all-star team for players in age brackets starting twelve-and-under. The 2005 “Baseball for the Ages” team included two players from the Little League World Series—Michael Memea of Hawaii and Kalen Pimentel of California. The other players on the list devoted themselves exclusively to travel teams. The Southern California Redwings, based in Claremont, often listed as the top travel team in the nation, placed three players on Baseball America’s exclusive list—Josh Anderson, Erick Cruz, and Christian Lopes.

  Travel teams operate outside the confines of leagues. Teams often hire professional coaches, conduct tryouts for kids from broad geographic areas, and play a schedule of 100 or more games over the summer. The top tournaments include Cooperstown Dreams Park and the Elite 24 World Series at Disney World in Orlando.

  “Of all the teams in the Little League World Series, maybe one or two would be competitive in Cooperstown Dreams or AAU,” says Allen Simpson. “One of the differences is in the depth of the teams, which you need to play all these games. The best teams in the Cooperstown Dreams Park tournaments have seven or eight elite pitchers, and they’re all usually better than the one or two pitchers on the best teams in the Little League World Series.”

  Rather than playing with neighborhood kids over their whole childhood, players on travel teams have started to act like major-league free agents. Some tournaments let teams recruit ringers. On an Internet chat group, someone offered this mock classified ad to make the point:

  WANTED—ANY TALENTED BASEBALL PLAYER WHOSE TEAM DID NOT QUALIFY FOR DISNEY, FOR ADDITION TO ROSTER OF QUALIFYING TEAM.

  MUST BE ABLE TO (1) ENDURE SCOWLS OF PARENTS WHOSE CHILDREN YOU WILL REPLACE, (2) DEFLECT ANY RIDICULE TOWARD TEAM MANAGER, (3) WEAR FASHIONABLE UNIFORMS OF VARYING SIZE, COLOR, AND NAME, (4) DEFEND THE HONOR AND SANCTITY OF THE ELITE 24 TOURNAMENT.

  PLEASE CALL 1-800-RINGERS FOR AN IMMEDIATE EVALUATION.

  Travel teams have metastasized so fast that the top coaches, like Lyle Gabriel of the San Diego Stars, are grumbling about a decline in the quality of play. “There are so many teams, I think it’s defeating the purpose,” Gabriel told one newspaper. “It’s just so diluted. Most of these travel teams now are not much better than a Little League all-star team.”

  Players on travel teams live in a total baseball environment twelve months a year. When they’re not playing in tournaments, they’re working out in gyms and taking hacks in batting cages.

  Families of players on traveling teams spend thousands of dollars a year to play on a team—money needed to hire coaches, buy uniforms and equipment, and travel all over the country. It costs about $1,000 a week to send kids to tournaments. It’s not unusual for families to spend $10,000 to keep their kids busy in travel ball. Some families pay as much as $20,000 a year.

  Travel baseball is part of a nationwide trend in all sports to specialize. Once upon a time in America, the best athletes played three sports— football in the fall, basketball in the winter, and baseball in the spring and summer. But many coaches tell kids to pick a sport when they are as young as ten or eleven years old. “This is an age of specialization,” says Simpson. “The parents’ mindset is that there is so much money in baseball now, there are so many opportunities for college baseball and scholarships, that the only opportunity I have for getting my kid a chance is to focus on one sport only.”

  The specter of college scholarships drives many parents to “invest” these thousands of dollars in travel teams and tournaments. The chances of getting that scholarship or pro contract are remote. Of the nation’s 455,000 high school players, about 25,000 will play some college ball. That means about 7,300 freshman roster positions open every year. So about one out of seven high schoolers can expect to find a position on a college team—but only a small fraction of those players get a scholarship. The picture is bleaker for going pro. Only about 600 college ballplayers get drafted. Overall, about one-half of 1 percent of all high school ballplayers play some pro ball.

  But even a remote chance to win the great sports lottery is enough for countless families. And so, for the love of the game and the ambition to strike it rich, thousands of the best young players go to Cooperstown.

  Lyle Gabriel, the coach of the perennial powerhouse San Diego Stars, also considers the competition at Cooperstown Dreams Park to be the best in the nation—tied, maybe, with the Disney World tournament in Orlando, Florida, that showcases twenty-four teams in early August.

  Gabriel expresses fondness for Little League. He admires the environment of Williamsport and the marketing prowess that puts dozens of games in the Little League World Series on national television. But he hastens to add that some of the weaker traveling teams could easily win the Little League World Series on a bad day.

  “There’s no comparison. The Little League World Series does not showcase much talent,” he told me. “Pitchers have nowhere near the same quality. A Little League team might have one six-foot kid pitching. My team will have four of them.”

  Traveling teams that compete in Cooperstown possess three advantages over Little League.

  First, they can recruit whatever players they want from a broad geographic area. The players on Little League all-star teams come from a geographic area of no more than 20,000 people. “My team draws from an area of two million people,” says Gabriel. Some traveling teams draw from a region that encompasses five states.

  Second, the traveling teams benefit from professional coaches. Those coaches have often played professional baseball and worked with some of the game’s best teachers. They learn their trade—understanding baseball mechanics like scientists, and then teaching what they know to kids—with as much intense dedication as a med student. And they take advantage of all the new technologies, like videos and computer imaging, in modern workout facilities.

  Coaches on travel teams usually know how to run a practice. When the Stars work out, they have ten coaches on the field working in groups of four to eight players. Each kid is working hard to master a specific technique. No one is standing around.

  Third, there is the schedule. Most Little League teams play only about a dozen games in the regular season, which ends in late June or early July. Then, all-star teams compete in tournaments until they’re eliminated. All but a handful of Little League players see their season end with two months left in the summer. Most travel teams play eighty or ninety games. Some play as many as 100, 110, 120, or even 140 games.

  “These kids want to play a lot of games over spring, summer, and fall,” says Simpson. “For Little League, if you get beat in the tournaments, baseball is over in the first week of July. That’s discouraging for a kid who wants to play baseball and get better. That’s why the travel teams have sprung up. They have a physically demanding schedule. But for kids to get better, they have to play a lot of baseball. You don’t get better by playing twelve or thirteen games over the summer. You have to be competitive over a long period—and you can’t play other sports—to become the best.”

  The awesome quality of travel ball is underscored by some of the state fairstyle contests staged at the best tournaments. One contest at Cooperstown Dreams Park times players streaking around the bases. Another contest times how quickly players can throw the ball around the field.

  Delino DeShields Jr., the son of a major leaguer and the star for Alabama’s Boys of Baseball National Travel Team, ran the bases in 12.39 seconds, the best time in 2005. (That’s about the time it takes to read the previous sentence aloud.)

  The Corona Dodgers, a California travel team, had the best time for the “Around the Horn Plus” e
vent—21.85 seconds—in which players make twelve throws around the field. The game of blitzball starts with the pitcher throwing to the catcher when the clock starts. Then the ball travels from the catcher to the third baseman, the second baseman, the first baseman, the catcher (again), the shortstop, the right fielder, the second baseman (again), the center fielder, the third baseman (again), the left fielder, and finally back to the catcher (again). (Corona performed the feat in the time it takes to read the previous two sentences aloud.) Oh, yes. Every player has to touch the nearest base or a designated spot in the outfield.

  If Little League’s only challenge came from travel teams, that would be bad enough. Little League would still have the corner on the community baseball niche. So what if the Little League World Series isn’t the best baseball? That’s not the point.

  But in fact, Little League faces a tough challenge from other communitybased leagues. Cal Ripken Baseball, affiliated with the Babe Ruth League, now involves 600,000 kids in the twelve-and-under division and stages a World Series with all the fanfare of the Little League World Series. Dixie Youth Baseball, once a segregationist alternative to Little League in the old Confederacy, now has 400,000 players. The PONY League, long an alternative for more serious baseball because it has a bigger field, involves almost 300,000 kids and also ends in a World Series.

  Cal Ripken is the only community-based program that’s growing every year. Within a few years, Ripken Baseball hopes to have one million players.

  More important than the numbers, Ripken has a mission.

  In every possible way, Cal Ripken Jr. is leveraging the value of his name—priceless because of his stunning 2,632 consecutive games streak and the baseball family values embodied in his father Cal Senior and mother Val. His book Play Baseball the Ripken Way has become the standard operating manual for many coaches. Ripken has also produced instructional videos. The Ripken complex is home to summer baseball camps and tournaments—all of which will grow as the complex fills out in the coming years. Ripken heads a consulting firm that offers guidance on stadium design and marketing strategy. He also endorses a number of products and hosts a weekly talk show on XM Satellite Radio.

  Ripken leagues offer a comfortable middle ground between Little League and travel ball. In many parts of the country, Ripken leagues play three seasons a year. Ripken teams are drawn from broader areas, allowing teams to have better athletes and especially more pitchers—a major plus at a time when arm injuries have become the most pressing challenge facing youth ball.

  Ripken’s complex will match anything that Little League has to offer. Ripken inaugurated Cal Senior’s Yard in 2005 to rave reviews. The Yard’s dimensions—210 feet to the left-field wall, 260 feet to center field, and 205 feet to right field—produce a more athletic brand of baseball than Little League’s 205-feet all around. With more room for fielders to roam, pitchers don’t gun for strikeouts. Their goal is to get grounders and fly balls, which puts greater demands on both fielders and baserunners. (Little League announced that it would set back the fences twenty feet starting with the 2006 Little League World Series.)

  Cal Senior’s Yard, modeled after Oriole Park at Camden Yards in Baltimore, is just one of four classic stadiums planned for the Ripken Baseball Center. Other stadium designs mimic Fenway Park, Wrigley Field, and Memorial Stadium (the Orioles’ park before moving to Camden Yards in 1991). The Ripken complex—planned to rise on a 110-acre site—will also include practice fields, training facilities, a baseball museum, and hotel, office, and shopping areas. Nearby, the Aberdeen IronBirds of the Class A New York-Penn League play at Ripken Stadium, one of the most celebrated minor-league parks in America.

  In 2006, Ripken Baseball opened a new front in the war for dominance in youth baseball. At a $24-million baseball complex in Myrtle Beach, Ripken Baseball holds tournaments close to golf courses and the beach. The idea is that while a family’s young baseball players play tournament games all week, the parents and siblings can have their own structured vacations. The South Carolina facility began operations with nine playing fields and a “training island” with cages, mounds, bunting fields, and practice infields—and plans to expand in coming years.

  With his growing portfolio of fields and facilities, Ripken is following the model of golfers like Jack Nicklaus, who has shaped the game long after his prime playing days by designing facilities all across the nation.

  When I visited Cooperstown in the summer of 2005, the tournament’s top two seeds in Week Six—the South Oakland A’s and the North Tampa Yankees—were getting ready to play for the championship.

  At the time, the A’s were ranked first of all twelve-and-under teams across the United States. Going into the title game, the A’s had a season record of ninety-four wins and three losses. The A’s already had won eleven of the thirteen tournaments they entered in 2005. Like all the best teams, the A’s were deep in pitching—they had three pitchers capable of throwing the equivalent of ninety-five-miles-an-hour fastballs and mixing the heat with well-placed junk pitches—and they were strong in the game’s fundamentals. And they could hit. They won the first six games in Cooperstown with an earned-run average just over one.

  The manager of the A’s, based in Madison Heights, Michigan, is Buster Sunde. A top pitcher at Western Michigan University, where he made the Mid-American Conference all-star team in 1982, Sunde was a promising prospect in the Chicago White Sox organization. He had a 10–2 record in Class A ball before a torn rotator cuff ended his career. He has been coaching boys baseball for more than a decade.

  Before the championship game, Cooperstown Dreams Park’s founder, Louis Presutti III, inducted new members into its American Youth Baseball Hall of Fame. All 937 of them. It took forever. But it was a shrewd part of Presutti’s master plan to make Cooperstown Dreams Park the center of the youth baseball world.

  Teams lined up just outside the field while their coaches lined up on the third-base line. Each coach took a cordless microphone for about two minutes and read a list of his players. The players trotted through a gaudy arch decorated with images from the Cooperstown Dreams Park tournaments, usually tipping their caps, and then ran on to the field to get a handshake and a ring from Presutti. As each coach completed his list, one of Presutti’s employees read the coach’s name into the list of immortals.

  Before they play the championship game every week, the players and spectators are treated to a fireworks display over the lake. A booming sound system plays patriotic songs—“God Bless America” (Kate Smith version), “Stars and Stripes Forever,” “I’m Glad to Be an American”— and then standards from the disco era. Then the players for the championship game are announced, and they line up along the bases like major leaguers do before all-star games. The six umpires are introduced. Then a dignitary throws the first pitch.

  This happens week after week. But it works. Just as the Little League World Series taps into the mythology of the American small town, Cooperstown Dreams Park taps into the ethos of American power and patriotic sentimentality. When I visited, some parents were close to tears in the pregame ceremonies. Staff members linked arms and swayed back and forth for “America the Beautiful.” On the sidelines, as the PA system blares, an umpire sings “I’m Proud to Be an American” out loud.

  Finally, after the week’s 385 games and countless ceremonies, the championship game began.

  Lou Presutti started planning Cooperstown Dreams Park in 1975, when he visited Cooperstown with his father and grandfather. The three Presuttis had been going to the Hall of Fame since 1947—coincidentally, the year of the first Little League World Series. Year after year, grandfather Lou, father Lou Junior, and Lou III came to look at the plaques of Babe Ruth and Ty Cobb and baseball’s other immortals.

  In 1975, caught in the emotional undertow of the moment, Lou I made a pronouncement and and a request. The pronouncement: Every kid in America should see this place. The request: Do something to make it happen.

  When Lou III grew up, he bec
ame a demographer. His life revolved around the numbers that paint portraits of different population groups. He got to know the buying habits, recreational patterns, and attitudes of every age group from every ZIP code. In his spare time, he coached youth baseball. Eventually, he analyzed the potential for a new baseball park and tournament, where the love of the game would intersect profitably with the disposable income of middle-class American families.

  “Everything pointed to the twelve-and-under age group,” he told me. Something about that age group—the impressionability of the group, the influence over family decisions, the desirability for marketers— makes it a natural target for recreational programs.

  The twelve-and-under age group happens to be the same group that plays in the Little League World Series in Williamsport. Presutti started to gather investors for what he calls “the total baseball experience.” That experience includes the historic allure of Cooperstown, the pageantry of a Fourth of July celebration, and baseball, baseball, baseball.

  I asked Presutti what he thinks of Little League and he looked like he just ate a lemon. I mean, he looked really pained. I might as well have asked him whether Cooperstown Dreams Park might start a hopscotch tournament some day. I pushed a little and he wouldn’t answer. “Look, we have the best baseball anywhere,” he says. “Little League isn’t even close. What’s the point?”

  Cooperstown Dreams Park is in the midst of expanding exponentially. The number of teams playing at the park will increase from eighty to ninety-six starting in 2006. Close to 1,000 different teams come to Cooperstown every summer, but the waiting list is much longer than that. So Presutti plans to open two more parks in the U.S. in the next five years. He won’t say where the parks will be located, since he’s in negotiations with local governments over zoning, infrastructure, and taxes. He expects one of the new parks to open in 2007 or 2008 and both of the new ones to be in business by 2010.