Take Me Out to the Ballgame : Little League’s 50 Years of Runs, Hits, Errors Dismays and Gratifies Founder, Who Walked

Fifty years ago on Tuesday, a group of neighborhood kids played an organized game of baseball on a scaled-down field in Williamsport, Pa. They called it the Little League. Today, more than 2.5 million boys and girls play on 140,000 Little League teams in the United States and 33 foreign countries. But, for all its immense popularity, the organizer of that first game is not happy about the way the Little League has turned out.

When you drive south on Route 15 in north-central Pennsylvania, just as you top the crest of Bald Eagle Mountain, pull over and cast your gaze to the valley below.

If there could be an ideal spot for the birthplace of Little League baseball, you are looking at it.

The Susquehanna River, its very name a poem, winds down from the green Allegheny hills through a town of 40,000 souls who live in clapboard houses with porch swings and shade trees, a timeless scene off a postcard labeled “America.”

Move closer. An American flag large enough to cover a small infield draws your eye to the north bank of the river. It flies proudly in front of a 45-acre complex of buildings and ball fields, the international headquarters of Little League Inc.

Little League baseball is winding up its 50th year. Boys who played in the first Little League game, on June 6, 1939, have grandchildren playing in the league today.

Still, half a century seems a relatively brief time for an activity, however appealing, to gain such astonishing popularity and earn such a solid place in the national culture. Little League ballparks have become as common as church spires in cities, villages and suburbs across the land.

Started With 3 Teams

A three-team league of 30 Williamsport boys in 1939 was the seedbed for what Little League Inc. today calls the largest sports organization in the world. Today, 2.5 million youths play on 140,000 teams in 6,000 leagues in the United States and 33 foreign countries. If all the Little Leaguers joined hands, the line would stretch from the Susquehanna to the Rocky Mountains.

“Of course, I had no idea what Little League would become,” said Carl Stotz, who founded the league in his spare time while working as a clerk in a lumber yard. “All I envisioned at the time was a neighborhood program. Some of what it has become I am not in favor of.”

Stotz still lives in Williamsport. At 79, he is a man with an incredible memory and a compulsion to keep logs and save receipts.

“It isn’t that I enjoy saving things,” he once explained when his daughter complained about the clutter. “It’s just that I can’t bear to throw anything away.”

He can show you, for example, that expenses for the first Little League season came to $174.63, that the collection taken up at the first game netted $1.42, that the first boy-sized catcher’s mask, which he still has, cost $1.67, the first dozen balls $2. The first year’s deficit was $36.72, which Stotz made up out of his own pocket as he did every year until 1943, when the league finally finished in the black.

Now Little League Inc. has assets of more than $10 million and a staff of 70 at its headquarters. It charges each of those 140,000 teams a charter fee of $14 each year and earns millions of dollars from endorsing athletic equipment and from royalties on the Little League name, which is copyrighted, and the logo, which Stotz designed. The business of Little League is unquestionably big league.

Stotz’s memory of how it all began remains vivid.

Tripped Over a Lilac Bush

One August day in 1938, he was playing catch with his two nephews, Jimmy and Harold Gehron, ages 6 and 8, in his back yard on Isabella Street. Running backward, he tripped over the jagged stump of a lilac bush and bruised his ankle. His left ankle.

“I sat on the back steps there,” he recalled, pointing, “rubbing my ankle.

“I said to the boys, ‘How would you like to play on a regular team with uniforms, a new ball for every game and bats you can really swing?’

“One of them said, ‘Uncle Tuck’--that’s what they called me--’who would we play?’

“I decided on the spot it would have to be a league of teams.”

Stotz gathered a group of neighborhood boys each evening and went to a flat field at Memorial Park where picnickers often played softball.

“I used folded newspapers for bases, threw the ball to various positions and had the boys run the bases. We tried different distances between the bases until I found what I thought would be right for them, and paced it off. It came close enough to 60 feet that I rounded it off to that.”

Through the winter Stotz worked out the details, rules, age limits and the like, which have remained essentially unchanged. He called on 57 merchants before he found the first sponsor, Lycoming Dairy.

The next spring, Little League was born.

Real Uniforms

“When Carl passed out the uniforms the day before the first game, it was one of the proudest days of my life,” Bill Bair recalled.

“It meant it was really going to happen. Some of the guys put them on, right there on the field. Maurice Reader wore his to bed that night.”

Bair, who now lives in nearby Montoursville, hit .462 that year and was Little League’s first batting champion.

When Korea won the Little League World Series in 1984, you could credit Bill Bair in part. He and other Little League graduates served with the armed forces and spread Little League all across the Far East. Bair’s son, Craig, now manages a Little League team in Thailand.

Stotz recalls that late in June of the first year, some fans berated the umpire until he walked off the field.

“It was the first indication,” said Stotz, “of the problems overzealous fans can cause.”

Frank Rizzo began as a Little League umpire in 1941 and, at 78, is still conducting the organization’s umpiring school in Williamsport.

The Parent Problem

“I’ve seen some ugly things when the parents get too excited,” he said. “The kids walk off the field arm-in-arm, but I know of mothers who wouldn’t speak to each other for a month.”

It gets worse.

When umpire Charles Berryhill in Waynesburg, Pa., called a game on account of darkness, an irate mother hit him over the head with an umbrella.

In El Centro, Calif., three years ago, the last eight games of the season were canceled after a father threatened umpire Carl Ott with a knife.

In Terre Haute, Ind., a manager clubbed a rival manager with a bat and sent him to the hospital before the game even started.

Pennsylvania state police had to be called to break up a brawl at the 1972 Little League World Series in Williamsport.

Little League has had its share of critics over the years, but its very prosperity indicates to supporters that its benefits clearly outweigh its flaws.

Most parents who have sat on wooden benches on a lazy summer afternoon and watched their own and their neighbors’ kids enjoy the national pastime, however ineptly, conclude that Little League can’t be all bad.

Girls Get in the Game

This is especially true when a man sees his son let a ball go right by him in the outfield because he was preoccupied at the time blowing dandelion fuzz.

In another game, the same father watched the same son get struck out four times by a towheaded pitcher with a fastball you couldn’t believe. His son apparently harbored no ill will toward the pitcher, because 10 years later he took her to the senior prom. The Little League, after a lawsuit, began allowing girls to play in 1974.

One of Little League’s least vocal but most severe critics is, sadly, Carl Stotz himself.

“I have absolutely no animosity toward anyone working for the corporation,” he said. “Many of them are my dearest friends. But what Little League is now is not what I envisioned it to be, and I do not approve.”

Stotz feels that commercialization has blurred the neighborhood focus of the program, which he saw as its heart and its purpose.

He feels this is most evident in the annual World Series. Stotz arranged the first one, in 1947, as a rather modest “tournament” among all-star teams from three states, to draw attention to his idea in the postwar years.

He did not foresee its becoming an international event ballyhooed, televised and broadcast play-by-play to places as far away as Taipei.

Preferred Modest Scale

He felt, he said, that a county or state championship would be sufficient for youngsters, “a tournament close to home and inexpensive, financed the same way the leagues are financed, by local sponsors.”

He said he watched neighborhood volunteers replaced on his board of directors with celebrities and benefactors through the influence of national sponsors.

His critics say he was behind the times and didn’t realize Little League’s potential. His supporters say, as did one Williamsport father: “All my kid wants to do is play in the World Series. All I want him to do is play baseball and have fun.”

Because of these and other philosophical and administrative differences Stotz was eased out of the Little League in 1955. Without bitterness, he said, “I decided it was time to surrender.” He once described the organization he started as a Frankenstein’s monster.

So he left. He took with him, however, the name Original Little League--not affiliated with Little League Inc.

The Original Little League has thrived in Williamsport in the 34 years since Stotz’s ouster. About 150 children, about 25 of them girls, play on 12 teams in three age groups.

Low-Stress Games

“I think our program is a lot better than theirs,” said John White, who played in and now directs the Original Little League.

“We don’t stress winning as much as they. We seem to have a more relaxed atmosphere at our games. If adults get overly boisterous, we just tell them politely that this is for the kids.

“We play every night, Monday through Friday, and at the end of the season we play some all-star games with neighboring leagues. Carl often comes down to watch the games. The kids love him, ask for his autograph. They still call him Uncle Tuck.”

The “Originals” play on the same field where Carl Stotz set up the first newspaper bases and figured the proper distances for kids. The diamond has been improved over the years by volunteers. It has a fence and scoreboard, dugouts and a clubhouse and grandstands.

On May 4, 1974, the city of Williamsport dedicated that part of Memorial Park to its honored citizen and put up a sign: The Carl E. Stotz Field.

Uncle Tuck still has that.

Honors for Founder

Another honor came to Carl Stotz on Oct. 8, 1988. The Original Little League gave a testimonial dinner to celebrate its 50th anniversary.

That was last year.

“Our first season was in 1939,” said Stotz, his penchant for accuracy unremitting. “So we celebrated our 10th anniversary at the end of the 1948 season, not 1949. Count it up. Use your fingers.

“In 1948, I put out a 25-page, 6-by-9 booklet with pictures of all the boys. It brought in, let’s see here, $200.59 in contributions in excess of printing costs. This year’s 50th anniversary of their Little League is a year late.”

In Carl Stotz’s back yard is a garage-size building which he built himself to preserve what he calls “my display.”

If you drop by, he will show you the first Little League bat. You will see snapshots of the first three Little League teams, no different in composition than the Polaroids that decorate refrigerator doors in kitchens across the land today.

You will see handwritten batting records, noted in pencil instead of ballpoint.

You will see an original base. It was made of white canvas stitched together and stuffed with wood shavings by Stotz’s sister, Laurabelle, the mother of his two nephews who wondered whom they would play. That mother was the first of the 750,000 yearly volunteers who make it all work.

You will see the first Little League home plate, cut out of a piece of rubber Stotz found in his father’s basement--and, of all things, the pocketknife he used to cut it.

“I had in mind a traveling display,” Stotz said, “something to take around the country so Little League kids could take a look at their roots.”

Speaking of roots, you will also find in Carl Stotz’s display the brittle remains of the lilac bush that tripped him up in his back yard and set him to dreaming of a better way. It was a dream that became Little League.

“That lilac stump? Well, after a couple of years I went and looked and discovered it was still there. So I dug it up.

“Yeah,” Stotz said, “I guess that’s one thing I saved on purpose.”

FIFTY YEARS OF LITTLE LEAGUE BASEBALL Major Milestones: 1939: Little League begins as a three-team league for players 8-12 in Williamsport, PA. 1947: First World Series game 1950: There are 307 leagues 1951: First foreign league begins in British Columbia, Canada 1957: Monterey, Mexico is first foreign team to win World Series 1960: There are 27,000 teams in 5500 Little Leagues worldwide 1974: First girl plays 1989: More than 2.5 million youths ages 6-18 play on 140,000 Little League teams worldwide AT-A-GLANCE Programs and Age Requirements Little League, ages 8-18 Senior League, ages 13-15 Big League, 16-18 Little League softball, ages 8-12 Senior League softball, ages 13-15 Big League softball, ages 16-18 Season Depends on the region. Generally a three-month period from the end of the school term to the beginning of the next. LITTLE LEAGUE COMPARED TO MAJOR LEAGUE FIELDS LITTLE LEAGUE Distance from home plate to pitcher’s mound is 46 feet. Distance between bases is 60 feet. MAJOR LEAGUE Distance from home plate to pitcher’s mound is 60.5 feet. Distance between bases is 90 feet. BATS LITTLE LEAGUE Wood or approved non-wood; 33” max. in length. MAJOR LEAGUE Wood only; 42 “in length. BALL Little League specifications are the same as major league: the ball weighs not less than five nor more than five and one-fourth ounces and measures not less than nine nor more than nine and one-fourth inches in circumference.

LITTLE LEAGUE MAJOR LEAGUE Innings 6, regulation 9, regulation 3 1/2 or 4 after 4 1/2 or 5 Double header not permitted permitted Designated hitter Not permitted Permitted in American League Base lead by runner Not until ball May leave anytime reaches batter Dropped third strike Batter is out Batter may run to first base Player re-entry Permitted once Not permitted Field Condition Both managers Home team determine if field manager determines is playable if field is playable

WORLD SERIES WINNERS SINCE 1979 1988 Tai-Ping L.L., Taiwan 1987 Hua Lian L.L., Taiwan 1986 Tainan Park L.L., Taiwan 1985 Seoul Nat. L.L., S. Korea 1984 Seoul Nat. L.L., S. Korea 1983 East Marietta L.L., Georgia 1982 Kirkland Nat. L.L., Wash. 1981 Tai-Ping L.L., Taiwan 1980 Long Kuong L.L., Taiwan 1979 Pu-TZU Town L.L., Taiwan Source: Little League Baseball Inc.