Tomorrow’s Stars : Once as American as Apple Pie, Little League Baseball Over the Years Has Developed a More International Flavor as Shown by Its Annual World Series at Williamsport, Pa.

Some little boys of summer came to the green mountains and hills of north-central Pennsylvania last week to play in a real, honest-to-goodness baseball World Series. Forget that phony series played every October. How “world” can it be when 24 of the 26 teams are in the United States and the other two are from Canada?

Five of the eight teams that came to this birthplace of Little League Baseball for its 39th annual World Series last week were from foreign countries. They came from Seoul, South Korea; Al Khobar, Saudia Arabia; Maracaibo, Venezuela; Mexicali, Mexico, and Binbrook, Ontario, Canada, to play teams from such places as Morristown, Tenn., Minnetonka, Minn., and Staten Island, N. Y. That’s about as worldly as you can get.

As it has in many Olympic and amateur sports, the rest of the planet has caught up with the United States in small-fry baseball, an American invention. Only one U.S. team, Morristown, reached the semifinals here, and it got beat. The United States, in fact, couldn’t even win its own West regional tournament, which was won by Mexicali, a city on the Mexico-California border so close to U.S. leagues that it is allowed to compete with them.

A team from Seoul, representing the Far East, won the championship for the second straight year, beating Mexicali, 7-1, in the final Saturday to become the 15th foreign champion in the last 19 years. All 15 winners have been from the Far East. The Far East’s domination became so complete--Taiwan has won 10 championships and Japan three--that they and other foreign teams were kicked out of the 1975 tournament.

Foreign teams, in fact, have won more than half the World Series (17) since Montreal became the first non-U.S. team to play in the tournament in 1952. Three foreign regions, the Far East, Canada and Latin America, were included for the first time in 1958, Europe was added in 1960, and the World Series hasn’t been the same since.

Seoul Coach Seong-Yeol Kwag, who managed a different bunch of players from another league to the championship last year, said Taiwan, which the Koreans defeated, 2-1, to qualify for the World Series, was the best team his boys faced all season. Seoul also defeated Japan, Guam, Hong Kong, Indonesia and the Philippines in the playoffs.

The 28 Seoul and Mexicali players, 14 to a team, were the last survivors in the world’s largest sports elimination tournament. About 100,000 kids, ages 11 and 12, had started the playoffs six weeks ago in more than 20 countries. Twelve thousand games later, Seoul and Mexicali met for the championship on a cool, overcast afternoon.

There is virtually nothing little about Little League baseball anymore. The World Series, which, after all, is just a kids’ game, is run as efficiently and smoothly as any professional tournament. It is worth about $10 million to the economy of Williamsport. It is as nationalistic as the Olympic Games. Before the final game, the eight teams marched in a Parade of Champions. The Little League Pledge (“I trust in God. I love my country and will respect its laws. I will play fair and strive to win. But win or lose, I will always do my best.”) was recited in English, Spanish and Korean. Pins were traded by the thousands. Bands played. Flags were raised. Three anthems were sung. Tony Tenille was imported to sing one.

ABC televised the finals for the 23rd consecutive year, putting it on live this time and using such announcers as Jim McKay, Jim Palmer and Donna de Varona. The ratings, ABC said, are surprisingly good; it has been the highest-rated Wide World of Sports show in the third quarter. In the past four years it has averaged a 7.6 rating and a 21 share. More than 20 million viewers watched it last year.

Games are played in a Little League-owned stadium in a pretty setting at the foot of the Bald Eagle Mountains. Lamade Stadium has only about 10,000 seats, but 25,000 to 30,000 spectators can view the games from terraces beyond the outfield fences. It looks more like a picnic than a ballgame when the terraces are full of spectators, as they were Saturday when attendance was estimated at 35,000. No admission is charged for any of the games.

Little Leaguers play on a field scaled to their size. The bases are 60 feet apart, the mound is 46 feet from the plate and the distance to all fences is usually 200 feet. Little Leaguers today seem to be getting bigger and better and some of them had no trouble hitting the ball out of the park. Venezuela’s Alexis Labarca hit five home runs in three games and set a record for distance when he hit a 300-foot drive far up the left-field terrace. The kids use aluminum bats, wear batting gloves, sweat bands around their wrists and mitts as big as the major leaguers’.

Little Leaguers must be 11 or 12 years old to play in tournaments. Their sizes vary widely, however. Some of the players here were as small as 4-5, weighed only 63 pounds and looked as if they should be in kindergarten. It hardly seemed fair that they had to play with some who looked big enough to play high school football. The tallest was 5-10, the heaviest weighed 162. Saudi Arabia had a battery formed by a 5-9 pitcher and a 4-5 catcher.

The Saudi Arabian team was made up of 12 Americans and two Britons, the sons of fathers who work in the country. Only a few Saudi children play baseball, they said, and none was good enough to make the team. To reach the World Series as Europe’s representative, Al Khobar beat teams from Spain, Belgium and Italy.

One of the first things you notice about Little League is that the pitchers are usually the stars. “Pitching is about 80% to 85% of the game,” Minnetonka Manager Don Oster said. “And throwing strikes is 75%” On most teams pitchers are also the best hitters. They often bat cleanup. In the final game, ABC’s radar gun clocked the Mexicali pitcher, Ricardo Ponce, at 75 m.p.h. Seoul’s You-Yong Jung was mixing curves and fastballs and throwing between 55 m.p.h. and 65 m.p.h.

To Oster and other managers here, it was no surprise that the Koreans won again. In truth, the Seoul team did seem to have an advantage. Its players have been together for almost two years. U.S. teams and virtually all foreign entries are all-star teams, selected in late June from a league restricted to a community or neighborhood of a fixed population, usually not more than 20,000.

That system doesn’t work in South Korea, where there are only four leagues and less than 50 teams in the entire country. The championship Seoul team played together in one of the leagues. In the winter, said one interpreter for the team, the Koreans take “basic training.” They practice virtually every day indoors.

The population restriction is not a hard-and-fast one, said Little League President Creighton Hale. “It can’t be,” he said.

For whatever reason, the Koreans were easily the class of the tournament. They outscored their three opponents, 36-3. Their pitchers walked only one batter. They were well disciplined. Regimented might be a better word. They marched to practice, two by two, like soldiers and gave their manager absolute, total dedication. A marine sergeant could not have gotten their attention any faster. If a player made a mistake, he took off his cap and bowed to his manager.

The bow didn’t always get them off the hook. The manager, Woo Duck Kim, often shot back what Oster called “karate-chop looks” at the kids.

While such discipline might produce a winner, it did not impress Oster. “I wouldn’t work my kids that hard,” he said. “If it ain’t fun, it ain’t Little League.”

There were some memorable moments in the five-day, single-elimination tournament, which some critics perceive to be a perversion of child’s play. Pitchers shook hands with players they had just hit with a pitch. Opponents gave high-fives to players who hit home runs as they circled the bases. The Koreans, after each victory, encircled the mound, took off their caps and bowed to the spectators. After the championship game, they gathered before their supporters and sang their national anthem.

There were lots of mistakes, some displays of emotion, a little hot-dogging and some tears, not always from the little boys. “You have to remember that these are 12-year-old kids,” said Morristown Manager Steve Conway after his team had lost to Mexicali, 2-1, on two unearned runs. “I told them that the sun will still come up tomorrow.”

There really weren’t any losers last week. The most important thing to most of the kids was just getting here.

Little League baseball is played by a couple of million youngsters, virtually all boys, who make up about 100,000 teams in more than 7,000 leagues in 26 countries.

Little League Baseball, Inc., a federally chartered, nonprofit corporation with headquarters in South Williamsport, also licenses about 8,000 other leagues with more than 500,000 baseball and softball players, ages 6 to 18. But to most people, real Little League baseball is played by kids 9 to 12. Their games are the core of the program and have brought it national and international attention.

Little League has paid a high price for this popularity and scrutiny. It has been sued, criticized and vilified, leaving its president, Dr. Creighton J. Hale, mystified and wondering, “Can Little League really be that important?”

By all accounts, in a world that idolizes athletes and is obsessed with games of all kinds, it is.

Although it is played by children, Little League baseball is run by adults who, partly for their own amusement, designed the kids’ game to operate virtually like the major leagues. Talent is developed in farm systems, or minor leagues, and is drafted at player auctions. Some teams even have spring training. Players wear standardized uniforms and use safety equipment, just like the pros.

A Little League game, in fact, has little in common with the way kids once played baseball, without adult supervision or interference, in streets or vacant lots.

Little League offers some advantages, of course. Playing in neatly groomed parks with fences and warning tracks sure beats playing on concrete, asphalt and gravel, or in cow pastures. The uniforms are a nice touch, too. So are baseballs with covers, and bats that don’t break.

Still, the highly structured games have not been universally accepted and, in fact, have drawn a lot of flak from a lot of sources in Little League’s 46-year history.

To some critics, there seems to be more tension than fun in the closely supervised games. The effect of the pressure put on youngsters by this strict supervision and intense competition has been the subject of debate for years among psychiatrists and psychologists.

Many parents become more involved in Little League, and get more fun out of it, than their kids. Some critics, in fact, have said the games may be organized more for the benefit of adults than children. About 80 adults accompanied the team here from Saudi Arabia and they shed more tears than the players when the team lost its first game Wednesday.

Sociologist Jonathan Brower once suggested that Little League baseball seemed more like exploitative child labor than wholesome fun. But some behavioral scientists have supported the games, saying that the pressure and competition are good for the kids. One Little League fan, the former FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, said he believed the sport was a deterrent to crime. Hoover served on the organization’s board of directors.

Many critics of Little League argue that children are not ready physically and emotionally for such highly organized competition.

“I’m not against competition,” said Carole Oglesby, a Temple University sports psychologist. “I think that sports has two faces; it can do a great amount of good for a child, but it can be extremely destructive as well. What happens when a kid drops the ball or makes the last out, as someone must, while having the weight of representing their country? I don’t think children can benefit from a losing experience.”

Novelist James Michener has been an outspoken critic of all highly organized kids’ games. In his book, “Sports in America,” he wrote:

“The evil always begins with adults who desperately want to win championships which were denied them when they were boys. They use children, often not their own, to achieve this dream, and in doing so, pervert the normal experiences of youth. With shocking frequency they destroy the child’s interest in further sports, and the outcome of their overly ambitious programs is apt to be a cynical realization by the children that they have been misused.”

Bill Veeck, to illustrate this parental ambition, once told a story of a father, a pitcher so mean he would knock down his mother--”but only if she was digging in at the plate”--who wanted his son to be a Little League star. One day the father took the boy out for batting practice and the kid dug in and hit the first pitch all the way to the fence. The next pitch knocked the boy down and the father said, “What was I supposed to do? The little bastard hit my curveball.”

As a result of its popularity, Little League has been subjected to more cynical attention than other organized children’s games, such as Pop Warner football, youth soccer and PeeWee hockey. Much of the criticism and unfavorable publicity, in Michener’s view, is deserved.

“The scandals that overtook Little League baseball were two-fold,” the novelist said. “Parents with ordinary common sense began looking with a critical eye at what was happening to their sons. They started going to games and saw the paranoia, the coaches screaming at 12-year-olds, fathers belting their sons for striking out, little boys ruining their arms trying to pitch like big leaguers before their bone ends hardened. They saw mothers behaving insanely, and boys falling into despair because of an error for which their parents abused them.”

Hale believes Michener’s research was faulty. He invited the novelist to come here to review it. The novelist declined.

After studying 28 kids’ teams for 10 months and talking to hundreds of players, managers and parents at 70 games, sociologist Brower concluded: “Laws exist to protect children at work and school, but their ‘play’ as governed by adults goes unchecked.”

Little League officials took the criticism seriously. Hale, in fact, was brought here 30 years ago to study the effects of pressure and competition on young players. He was an educator--a professor of physiology at Springfield College in Massachusetts--and a research specialist. “I took a year-and-a-half leave of absence and I’m still on it,” he said.

What Hale and his associates learned was: “The kids are not nearly as stimulated (by the pressure) as the adults. The public was concerned about the kids. I was worried about the parents.”

Hale said he found some parents who were so involved in the games that “they had symptoms of appendicitis or heart attacks.”

Hale once took the blood pressure and pulse rate of a player who had just pitched a perfect game. “He had a pulse rate increase of only 50%,” Hale said. “His manager had one over 100%. Fifteen minutes later, the pitcher had a normal rate, but the manager still had an elevated rate five hours after the game.”

Hale said his studies were done because: “We were concerned about youngsters playing in a tournament at this level.”

Hale is amused at the idea that today people want girls to have the same experience as boys. “At one time, they didn’t even want boys to have it,” he said.

The Little League game is not all bad, of course. Since Joey Jay, a pitcher from Middletown, Conn., became the first Little League graduate to reach the major leagues in 1953, 2,500 have gotten jobs as professionals. Today about 450 major league players, out of 650, are former Little Leaguers. Manager Bobby Valentine of the Texas Rangers also is a Little League graduate.

Children can still have fun in Little League--if they have gentle and understanding managers who are not unduly concerned with won-lost records, and parents who conceal their disappointment when their children have a bad game.

Dr. Arthur A. Esslinger, a former member of the Little League board of directors, once studied the manager’s role and responsibility and concluded:

“The heart of Little League baseball is what happens between the manager and player. It is your manager who makes your program a success or failure. We have seen managers who exerted a wonderful influence upon their players. Unfortunately, we have also observed a few managers who were a menace to children. Many managers are untrained in youth leadership . . . and have done harm to their players and have given critics an opportunity to blast our program.”

Little League managers are restricted to the dugout during games. Players serve as coaches. A manager must get permission from an umpire to go as far as the foul line to talk to his pitcher.

Little League baseball is relatively safe. Metal spikes are banned and batting helmets and other safety equipment are mandatory. Pitchers cannot work consecutive games.

The batting helmet used in baseball everywhere today was developed here 20 years ago by Hale, a consultant to the U.S. military on head protection.

In 1956, Little League batters were getting hurt by pitches too often to suit officials, who wondered if 44 feet was the proper distance from home plate for the pitcher’s mound. Hale did a study and discovered that Little Leaguers were more apt to get hit by pitches than major leaguers. The word went out to 5,000 leagues: Dig up your mounds and move them back two feet. Injuries soon declined.

Some critics say that even more injuries could be prevented if the curveball was banned. “I cannot think of a single legitimate excuse for having a Little League pitcher throwing curveballs,” former major league star Al Rosen said in his book, “Baseball and Your Boy.”

“Youngsters should not throw curveballs until the growth centers of their arms are fused. This does not occur until age 14 or 15.”

Robin Roberts, former star pitcher with the Philadelphia Phillies, once said he would never allow his sons to throw curves when they were 8 or 9 years old. “My father encouraged me to take it easy, and at 18 I had my arm prepared for the strain of real pitching,” he said.

While studying for his doctorate, Mike Marshall, a kinesiologist and former Dodger relief pitcher, X-rayed the arms of youngsters and found that elbows can be permanently damaged by excessive pitching at such a young age. Marshall didn’t pitch until he was 18. No pitcher, many orthopedists say, should throw a curveball until he is at least 15.

Don Oster, manager of the Minnetonka, Minn., team, disagreed with those theories. His pitchers throw a breaking ball, he said. Saudi Arabia Manager Dean Stroman said he did not allow his pitchers to throw curves during the regular season but gave them permission to throw them in tournaments.

Virtually all the pitchers here last week threw curves, or at least tried to. After pitching a no-hit game for 5 innings and beating Minnetonka, 5-1, Richie Conway, Morristown’s No. 1 pitcher, said he threw curveballs about 70% of the time. “And when I face a really good hitting team, I throw them 80% of the time,” he said.

Stories of bizarre parental behavior at Little League games abound. Some disputes end up in court.

For example, a pitcher’s mother was convicted in Texarkana, Ark., of assault, disorderly conduct, resisting arrest and making “terrorist threats” after she pulled a knife on two women during an argument at a game. The boy’s father was found guilty of disorderly conduct. Reportedly, the women who were threatened had made derogatory comments about the pitcher.

Little League got off to a modest start here in the summer of 1939. Its founder, Carl E. Stotz, formed a league for young boys and recruited three teams that played a total of 24 games. Slowed at first by World War II, Stotz’s game expanded rapidly in the late 1940s, growing from 60 teams in 1947 to 416 in 1948.

The first World Series here in 1947, however, was neither international, nor even national. A Williamsport team won it, in fact. But in 1957, a bunch of kids from Monterrey, Mexico, won the series and became Little League’s most popular champions. They would not be the last foreigners to dominate the American game.

Monterrey won again in 1958 and teams from Japan took the 1967 and 1968 series.

Then, starting in 1969, the championship virtually became the private property of Taiwan. The Chinese won 10 tournaments in 13 years, including five in a row starting in 1977.

In 1973, the Chinese won games by scores of 18-0 and 27-0. Their pitchers threw three no-hit games, one a perfect one. U.S. teams were outscored, 57-0, and outhit, 43-0. In 1974, Taiwan won again by scores of 16-0, 11-0 and 12-1.

In nine games over three years, the Republic of China outscored the United States, 120-2, and kindled an argument that grew into Little League’s most serious controversy. Michener called it a scandal.

Were the Chinese teams cheating? Many angry Americans thought so, and in the wake of their complaints, Little League Chairman Peter J. McGovern, kicked out all the foreigners, leaving four U.S. teams to compete in what was hardly a World Series in 1975.

“We took an awful beating,” Hale said. Editorial writers and other critics, in fact, clobbered McGovern, who had replaced Stotz as chief executive in 1955.

Hale said the decision had been made by the board of directors because tournament play had gotten out of focus. “Our philosophy of play had gotten lost in an Olympic fervor,” he said. “It became too nationalistic. That was not Little League.”

A Little League game he watched in Maracaibo, Venezuela, was like a professional soccer game, Hale said.

If the Chinese had been cheating, they could have been lying about the ages of their players, using professional coaches or sending all-star teams rather than teams from one area with a population of no more than 20,000.

Investigators dispatched to Taiwan could not find any rules being broken, Hale said. On Dec. 30, 1975, McGovern lifted the ban, and the tournament became a real World Series again in 1976--and was won by a Japanese team.