My, How the World Series Has Grown

Dewey Hauser has watched Little League grow up.

This week at the side of Highway 15, Hauser served up barbecued chicken, baked beans and pasta salad dinners for $4 to a steady stream of customers driving by his makeshift stand and reminisced about the early days.

Little League back then did not draw any TV coverage or feature security and a perfectly manicured stadium that seats more people than the entire population of Williamsport. There were no hotel sellouts or Southern California-style traffic jams to and from the dusty fields where the first teams used to play.

“We just had baseball and cookouts,” said Hauser, who played Little League in 1956. “Hell, they didn’t even have real uniforms for I don’t know how long. They shared mitts and bats and just about everything else.”

Driven by a massive volunteer effort, Little League baseball has reached middle age in high style: a $14-million annual operating budget, a TV deal to die for and a state-of-the-art Web page that gets more than a million hits a day during the World Series every August.

Today’s players swing $300 aluminum bats, wear crisp new uniforms and are the darlings of the nation’s sports pages and news shows.

And while growth in the worldwide organization, which claims 3 million participants in 93 countries, has been stagnant for several years, it hardly shows during World Series week. Crowds of 40,000 or more are common at Howard J. Lamade Stadium. The cost of a hotel room--if one is available--spike to two or three times the usual rates. Endless lines of cars and buses snake through narrow residential neighborhoods near the Susquehanna River in South Williamsport, where the games are played.

The frenzy has some residents in Lycoming County wondering just how much bigger Little League can get in their modest town, where the annual household income is about $28,500 and manufacturing businesses like Shop-Vac, a vacuum maker, account for most of the industry.

“I know it’s just for a week, but we’re only just so big,” said Marti Bryant, 41, who lives near the stadium. “I don’t know how many more people we can fit.”

But most residents of Williamsport embrace the series with an enthusiasm that rivals that of the young players’ parents.

They are folks who don’t always lock their doors and rarely think twice about giving a stranger a ride home. And for one week in late August every year, when the population of their city more than doubles, they rally around the baseball games that have brought international recognition to their town.

This is the week when they plaster their streets and houses and businesses with Little League banners and turn their backyards into spillover parking lots for the stadium. They set up soft-drink machines in their frontyards and barbecues and tents in any space they can find. They offer their homes, their bathrooms, their telephones, even dinner to anyone who asks--and even some who don’t.

“This city goes wild for Little League, absolutely wild,” Mayor Steven W. Capelli said. “Every year I’m amazed at it all. It doesn’t take long for a visitor to see how great the people are here.”

Many, like Hauser with his chicken dinners, have learned to capitalize on the event. The retired Marine fires up the grill each year with his lifelong friend, Dennis Emig, and waves at the cars as they head past.

“Eat here,” he yells to them as he fans the coals. “Mmmm-mmm!”

Neither Hauser nor Emig is sure how many dinners they sell every year. Sometimes they run out of pasta salad or plates. Sometimes they quit cooking altogether and drink beer instead.

“It’s just fun to meet all the different people who come through here,” Emig said. “We’ll feed them and maybe make a few bucks. Or not. We don’t care, we’re just having fun.”

A few doors down on East Mountain Road, Marti Bryant stood on the stoop of her childhood home and marveled at the traffic on her street. Her father’s tomato stand--complete with scale, bags and money box--sat on the sidewalk out front as it has for every World Series week for the last 25 years.

In all of that time of selling the vegetables on a self-service, honor-system basis, it wasn’t until last year that someone stole the cash from the little black tin, she said.

“That was a little disappointing,” said Bryant, a kindergarten teacher. “But what do you do?”

You keep growing vegetables and wheel the cart right back out again next year, said her father, Paul Bryant.

“You wonder if things like that should be taken as a sign or something,” said Bryant, 74, whose tomatoes sell for 75 cents a pound. “But then again, you couldn’t get away with a setup like mine in many other places at all. Not for a single day.”