SMALL BOYS' DREAM COME TRUE
By Harry T. Paxton
from the May 14, 1949 issue of The Saturday Evening Post

The fastest growing thing in baseball today is the Little League setup, in which youngsters of 8 to 12 play with all the trappings of the major leagues. In three years the idea has spread from Williamsport, PA., through eleven states.

The little central Pennsylvania city of Williamsport, which once had a measure of glory as a lumber center, now has a new toe hold on fame. Williamsport has started something pretty remarkable in the way of baseball for small boys. It is known as Little League baseball, and it is a scale model of the major-league game. In the Little Leagues, teams of eight-to-twelve-year-old players compete with all the atmosphere and trappings of the big time.

Since the war, Little Leagues have been multiplying like amoebae. By 1947 the movement had spread through several Pennsylvania counties and into a couple of neighboring states. In 1948 a total of 157 Little Leagues-mostly of four teams-operated in six different states. This year, more than 300 leagues were ready to go in eleven states by April first, and others were in the process of being organized.

It is probable that the surface still has only been scratched, for the Little League idea seems to fascinate both boys and adult sponsors wherever it is introduced. Organized baseball for little fellows is not new, of course, although there is none too much of it. However, hundreds of towns and cities do have midget leagues, and some of them go so far as to provide distinctive caps and shirt emblems for the players on each team. A few even equip their teams with full-fledged uniforms.

In the Little Leagues, however, uniforms are only part of it. The original Little League field in Williamsport, which serves as the model for all the others, is a miniature big-league ballpark, tailored to the size of the players. There is a complete outfield fence, built roughly on a 180-foot arc from home plate, over which the can hit home runs. There are bleachers running the length of each foul line. There is an electronic scoreboard, on which balls, strikes, and outs are registered by a remote-control switch in the press box behind home plate.

The playing field is beautifully graded and leveled, with carefully cropped infield and outfield grass. The field has its own water system to keep its grass thick and green. There are roofed-in dugouts for the teams. As each new batter comes to the plate, his name and position are announced over a public-address system. Three umpires-qualified but unpaid volunteers-are out there running the game.

The boys themselves cultivate all the professional mannerisms, knocking the dirt off their rubber-cleated shoes, rubbing dust on their hands and then digging in a la Ted Williams or Joe DiMaggio at the plate. And they are surprisingly professional in their style of play. To be sure, most of them have a certain small-boy awkwardness. There are blind swings, bobbled grounders, and wild throws. But the throws are generally aimed at the right base. And there are pitchers who can break off authentic curves, fielders who can gather in long drives on the dead run, hitters who can lay down perfect sacrifices or pole the ball over that outfield fence. The league batting champion invariably hits over .400.

It's quite a show, and one which appeals to many people who have no interest in conventional ball games. In Williamsport, which has a population of about 50,000, the Little League crowds run from several hundred to several thousand, as during a national championship tournament last August. The Little Leaguers sometimes outdraw the professional Williamsport Tigers, who play in the Class A Eastern League.

It all sounds very elaborate, and yet it does not cost very much if enough men in a community are willing to donate enough of their time as managers, umpires, grounds keepers and the like. The standard Little League has four teams of twelve boys, each playing an eighteen game schedule, and it takes about $200 a year per team to keep them in uniforms, catcher's paraphernalia, bats and balls. The usual practice is to get a commercial firm to sponsor each team. The sponsor just pays his money into the league treasury, however; the league officials do all the buying, so that no one team can have fancier uniforms and equipment than the others. Sometimes a civic organization sponsors an entire league and puts up the whole $800. Hat passing at the games brings in additional money for miscellaneous expenses.

There is also the cost of the field, which can run quite high the first years. On one new field in Williamsport's last summer, where much of the work was done professionally, they paid out $2500-and still lack a fence and many of the other refinements. By contrast, consider the experience of Laporte, Pennsylvania, which has a population of around 200, including barely enough eight-to-twelve-year-olds to make up a team. Virtually every able-bodied man in town turned out to clear and level an old field overgrown with weeds and brambles. Then they erected a backstop and an outfield fence. One resident put up a flagpole. Another contributed a flag. A local lady painted a scoreboard, topped off with the words, "Home of the Laporte Red Sox." The total cash outlay for this field was only forty dollars.

How did the Little League movement happen to start in Williamsport? It happened because Williamsport has a citizen named Carl E. Stotz. As in any new project, the sweat and energy of a great many individuals went into the making of Little League baseball. But someone had to get the ball rolling. Carl Stotz was that man. Dreaming up the idea was one thing, and getting others to pitch in on it was another. It seemed like a lot of work. It was a lot of work, but the way Carl Stotz envisioned it, it also seemed like a lot of fun.

Stotz is no hot-eyed zealot; he is an unassuming and amiable of manner and slight of build. But the hot-eyed characters have a way of burning out. Carl Stotz had the patience and persistence to stick with his dream, day in and day out, year after year, until, little by little, it became real.

It was a common enough dream. Carl Stotz had it in his own small fryhood, like millions of other little boys before and since. Whenever he played baseball, in his imagination he was a big leaguer, performing in a big-league ballpark. This took a lot of imagining, for his baseball consisted chiefly of impromptu games of "moving-up" in schoolyards or vacant lots. From time to time he would promote a regulation game with nine players on each side, but more often than not the game fell through because one of the pitchers had to stay home and do chores or the boy with the catcher's mask failed to show up.

In his early teens Stotz began trying out for his Sunday-school league team, but each year the positions would be filled by grown young men. Not until Carl was a grown young man himself did he finally get a couple of seasons of organized baseball. He finished school, went to work, got married, had a daughter. The old baseball dreams faded out of his mind. In the summer of 1938, when Carl was twenty-eight, his nephews, Jimmy and Harold (Major) Gehron, aged six and eight, got the baseball bug. Carl decided to see if he couldn't make those old dreams come true for Jimmy, Major, and the other neighborhood boys.

He would need several other men who were willing to work hard with him, and he found them. He would also have to raise some money. Carl had none of his own to spare, working as he was in a modest front-office job with a Williamsport soft drink bottling firm, and neither did any of his associates. Carl began to make the rounds of local commercial establishments, trying to interest them in sponsoring small-boy baseball teams. But the depression was still on, and none of the businessmen could be persuaded that a donation to the proposed Little League would pay for itself in advertising value.

One man after another told him no, but Carl Stotz didn't give up-not after ten unsuccessful tries, or twenty-five, or fifty. Finally, after fifty-six consecutive turndowns, he called at the Lycoming Dairy, where Floyd Mutchler, the manager, contributed thirty-five dollars. With this, Stotz bought three dozen baseball-style play suits at the five and ten to serve as uniforms for three teams. Then the Lundy Lumber Company and the Jumbo Pretzel Company came through with smaller sums, making it possible to buy some shirt emblems and some basic playing-field equipment. Lycoming Dairy and Lundy Lumber still sponsor teams in Carl Stotz's original Little League.

The first season, in 1939, was just supervised sandlot play. The fences, scoreboard, dugouts, bleachers and other trappings were still only gleams in Carl Stotz's eye. Games were scheduled at twilight, as they still are, when the team managers and other adult supervisors were home from work. The men would bolt their suppers and hustle out to the vacant lot with the home plate, pitching slab, bases, bats, and balls. But in his first year the basic principles of Little League were worked out.

The age limit was set at twelve, on the theory that if they admitted thirteen and fourteen year-olds, as so many midget leagues do, the smaller boys would all be squeezed out. To determine the proper dimensions for the field, they staged lengthy tests of how far little fellows could hit and throw effectively, and timed them at running the bases. They finally settled on a diamond two thirds the standard size, with sixty feet in between the bases, and the pitcher standing forty feet, four inches from home plate. The number of innings a pitcher could work per week was strictly limited, and the length of the games was set at six innings. Playing rules were the same as in regulation baseball, except that the runners could not leave their bases until the pitch reached home plate, and batters could not try for first on dropped third strikes.

That first year Stotz and company also worked out another of the wrinkles which make the Little Leagues so intriguingly similar to the big ones. This is a wondrously intricate system of point allotments, through which the team managers can "buy", "trade", and "sell" players.

Even in its crude early stages, Little League baseball caught the fancy of the neighborhood grownups, and hundreds of people were attending the games by the end of the first season. Thomas H. Richardson, president of the professional Eastern league, gave the cause a boost by staging a gala Little League banquet. The next year Carl Stotz had no trouble getting enough sponsors to finance a four-team league. They moved to a better playing area, on which, among other things, the men had to clear away 200 trees. In 1942 the site was taken over by a war factory, and they switched to their present field, which they have gradually developed into an outstanding little baseball plant.

Demand for Little League baseball began building up in other pars of Williamsport. The war held back expansion, but when the hostilities ended, Little Leagues started springing up all over the city. Today Williamsport probably has as much organized baseball for its size as any other place in the country. Last year there were seven Little Leagues, three leagues for boys thirteen to fifteen, two for boys sixteen to eighteen, one senior league, as well as a couple of softball circuits. A total of 1200 boys and young men played on uniformed teams, under the supervision of 280 adult leaders. To coordinate this big program, a Williamsport area Association of Baseball and Softball Leagues has been set up, with Matthew M. Freeman, head of a local optical firm, as president.

But Little League baseball is no longer just a Williamsport proposition. By 1947 it had gone so far that Carl Stotz organized a championship tournament in which all-star teams from leagues in Pennsylvania, New York, and New Jersey participated. By 1948 the thing had definitely become too big for Stotz and friends to handle all by themselves on a spare-time basis. Stotz decided that the resources of some big outside organization was needed. He went to the United States Rubber Company, which was already interested to the extent of developing a special line of baseball sneakers for small-fry ballplayers. The leading bat manufacturer turns out special Little League bats, incidentally, and the biggest baseball manufacturer puts out an official Little League baseball, the same size as a regulation ball, but somewhat lighter and not quite so lively.

Anyway, the upshot was that United States Rubber backed an expanded national tournament in 1948. The company paid the traveling expenses of the teams, put them up in Williamsport's leading hotel, and awarded prizes-gold medals and statuettes for every boy on the winning team, silver medals to the runners-up, and bronze medals to the also-rans.

Little Leaguers are real ballplayers, but they are also still small boys. Carl Stotz, the founding father, can draw many incidents to illustrate this from his years of working with the youngsters. He remembers one pitcher who abruptly halted during a tense moment to watch a passing airplane, and another who called for time, strode over to the sidelines and asked his mother to please try and make baby brother stop crying. One young batsman had the habit of blowing a big bubble-gum bubble every time the pitcher delivered the ball. Opposing catchers complained. It made it look, as they said, as though two balls were coming up to the plate.

One season a couple of buddies found themselves assigned to different teams. When they played against each other, the one rode the other to the field on his bicycle. He also rode him back home-but with tears in his eyes. His chum had hit a home run against him in the last inning to win a crucial game.

Driving to the field one day in his automobile, Carl Stotz offered a lift to a young player who was proceeding there on foot. The boy obdurately declined.

"Why not?" Stotz persisted.

"Aw, I just don't want to," the lad mumbled.

Stotz was puzzled. Later, he told the boy's mother about it. She quickly cleared up the mystery. It seemed that the youngster had made an elaborate good-luck ritual out of his walk to the field. He had to touch a certain sequence of telephone poles, fence posts, and the like to insure favorable prospects for the game.

The boys want the men who coach little League teams to act like big-league managers, and the men do their best to oblige. However, Carl Stotz, who was known to many of the early Little Leaguers by his family nickname of Tuck, likes to recall one time where he apparently overdid it. In his best John McGraw manner, Stotz delivered a long, stern lecture to one of the boys at practice, ticking him off for various malfeasances. When he had finished, the boy stared at him for a long moment. "Gee, Tuck," he finally exclaimed. "You can sure shoot the bull!"

The national tournament last year had all the competitive tenseness of a world series, plus the small-boy touches that give Little League baseball its distinctive flavor. Eight teams were entered, each the cream of its own bailiwick. There were three from Pennsylvania leagues, and one each from towns in Virginia, Florida, Connecticut, New Jersey, and New York. They gave an impressive demonstration of what boys who start out young under capable coaches can do with a baseball.


Some of the Middletown CT players have fun in the dugout in Williamsport PA during the 1948 Kids National Tournament

The boys performed with the grim concentration of the pros, and none more so than eight-year-old Frank (Murph) Rybczyk of Middletown, Connecticut, the youngest-and smallest-athlete in the tourney. Murph acted as the warmup catcher and as the first-base coach, and he played these parts to a hilt. Spectators had one of their biggest bangs when Murph got into a game as a pinch hitter and, crouching over until he left the pitcher only a microscopic target, drew a base on balls. While Murph was in Williamsport, a new baby was born to the Rybczyks back home. Murph gravely passed out cigars in the lobby of the hotel.

However, Middletown was eliminated in the first round by a fast outfit from St. Petersburg, Florida. Meanwhile, a team from the Loyalsock district of Williamsport defeated a Harrisburg entry; Lock Haven, PA put out Alexandria, VA; and Hammonton, NJ won over Corning, NY.

In the big leagues, pitching is generally rated as a good 70% of the battle, and it is at least that in Little League baseball. In the semifinals, two good twelve-year-old pitchers hooked up-Lock Haven's Chubby Schiavo and Loyalsock's Fred Stahl. The first round games had all been one-sided, but this one was tighter than a new shoe. Each pitcher had speed, control, and a definite curve and an uncommon amount of poise. They allowed three hits apiece; Stahl struck out six and walked only three; Schiavo had seven strikeouts and no walks.

For four and a half innings, neither team could get a man past second base. Then, in the last half of the fifth, Gary Kelly, the left fielder, led off for Lock Haven with a double. Pitcher Stahl fanned the next batter, but Joe Cardamone moved Kelly to third with a ground single. Harry Kuntz, who followed, only got a small piece of the ball, but it was enough. He dribbled a slow roller towards third base. Pitcher Stahl charged over, but by the time he reached the ball, the runner from third was almost at home plate. Most kid pitchers-and quite a few adult ones-would have thrown the ball away in a futile attempt to catch the man at home. Stahl didn't. He calmly wheeled and pegged the batter out at first base. He got out of the inning at the cost of only the one run.

But that was one more run than Loyalsock had been able to score. Loyalsock came up for its sixth and final try. Lock Haven's Chubby Schiavo retired the first two men, then Stahl struck a blow in his own behalf-a solid single. That brought up the Loyalsock cleanup hitter, Paul Shirey. A home run would pull the game out of the fire, and Shirey very nearly did it, belting a long ball to left. But Gary Kelly took off and pulled the ball down with a leaping catch, just a few feet short of the fence.

The final game was another thriller, with Lock Haven meeting the lads from St. Petersburg, FL, who had turned back Hammonton, NJ in the other semifinal. The crowd was estimated at 4000. A full house at Yankee Stadium runs twenty times that high-but New York's population runs 150 times as high as Williamsport's.

Don Eberle and Ralph Patton banged out home runs off Lock Haven pitcher Gary Kelly-the left field hero of the day before-to give St. Petersburg a 3-0 lead in the 1st inning. But Lock Haven came back with a couple of one-run innings and took a 6-3 lead with a four run 4th inning. St. Petersburg pulled up to 6-4 in the 5th. In the last inning, the Florida boys made it 6-5, and got the potential tying and winning runs on base. Then Kelly fanned slugger Eberle for the tournament's final out.

Little League was not developed as a junior-reform measure, although good sportsmanship is stressed, but Williamsport's mayor Leo C. Williamson and police chief John G. Good enthusiastically endorse it as a wholesome influence for small boys. Although Williamsport is a basically stable and law-abiding community, there were 182 juvenile arrests in 1944, and 190 in 1945. Then in 1946, the year the Little League movement began spreading all over town, the figure dropped to 120, and in 1947, it was at 103. City officials look for an expansion of the intermediate leagues, for boys thirteen to fifteen, to reduce the number still further.

But the Little League's chief mission in life is to give a lot of pleasure to a lot of little boys. With its realistic simulation of big-league playing conditions, with its cheering crowds, it is a small boy's baseball dream come true. For the adult supervisors, who must devote virtually all their summer spare time to the project, there is the same sort of vicarious reward. A man running a Little League team from a dugout can easily imagine that he is a Joe McCarthy or a Billy Southworth, manipulating a major-league pennant contender. Already the idea has captivated thousands of boys and men in hundreds of communities. This is probably only the beginning.

from the May 14, 1949 issue of The Saturday Evening Post

   

Bottom Photo: Turning the tables, members of Hartford CT pro ball team ask for autographs from the kids of the 1948 Middletown South Farms team.

 

Left Photo: Eight-year-old Frank (Murph) Rybczyk of Middletown, Connecticut, the youngest-and smallest-athlete in the tourney. Murph acted as the warmup catcher and as the first-base coach, and he played these parts to a hilt, and became the fan's favorite at the 1948 Kids National Tournament.

Once again, thanks to
Ed Wilcox
for his research


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