Little League Chroniclers Don’t Quite Hit It Out of the Park

Playing catch with his nephews one afternoon in 1938, Carl E. Stotz tripped over a lilac bush in his backyard and scraped his knee. Limping away, he was seized by an idea that would change childhood forever.

“How would you like to play on a regular team,” he asked his nephews, “with uniforms, a new ball for every game and bats you could really swing?”

The next spring, Stotz started the first Little League in his hometown of Williamsport, Penn. For the subsequent 16 years, he served as the Johnny Appleseed of Earth’s largest youth sports program, which today boasts 2.9 million players in 104 countries. But despite his efforts, in 1955, one of the corporate sponsors he attracted--its representatives unable to get along with Stotz--maneuvered him out of the program, removed his name from official accounts of the founding and even used the courts to prevent his original league from using the trademark name Little League.

“Play Ball!” is the first published attempt at a history of Little League. And though this survey of 63 years of youth baseball often leaves the reader wanting more detail and analysis, it represents an honorable attempt to resuscitate Stotz’s story and redeem his legacy.

As history, the book, by Little League director of communications Lance Van Auken and his wife, Robin, benefits from the considerable access the authors received to the archives of the notoriously secretive Little League Inc. But their material does not offer much in the way of critical analysis.

Such an analysis is needed, perhaps never more so than now, with President Bush hosting Little League games on the White House lawn as evidence of his love of children. The program’s impact extends far beyond baseball. Little League all but launched the sporting goods industry, provided an early model of franchising and literally shaped the landscape of thousands of cities. (The Earth has more Little League diamonds than Burger Kings, a fact not noted in this book).

No nonprofit institution, with the possible exception of Scouts, has done more to shape American preadolescence. And if the Battle of Waterloo was “won on the playing fields of Eton,” as the duke of Wellington once claimed, what marks--or scars--has Little League left on today’s adults?

Readers who want those sorts of questions answered will have to content themselves with the book’s scrupulous reportage on Little League’s bitter relationship with Stotz. In spite of Little League propaganda, the Van Aukens acknowledge the role of the lumberyard clerk, without sons of his own, as the game’s true founder.

Stotz devised Little League’s miniature field and most of its rules, but in retrospect his insistence on an exclusively volunteer organization was his most fateful decision. Stotz understood that adults were his target audience. Coaching, he quickly figured out, was a powerful narcotic that few men could resist.

At first, he also embraced corporate America, arranging for the Little League World Series--a worldwide tournament of all-star teams of 11- and 12-year-old boys--to be backed by U.S. Rubber. That company, which produced a kid-sized rubber cleat, liked the publicity so much that it took seats on Little League’s board and sent a domineering New York public relations executive, Peter McGovern, to Pennsylvania to work with Stotz.

They immediately quarreled. McGovern wanted to expand play and promotion; Stotz opposed such measures as play on Sundays and grew concerned about the hyper-competitive World Series. In June 1955, Stotz returned from a European tour to find his secretary had been fired and his mail opened, the Van Aukens report.

The ensuing court fight forced Stotz’s exile from the program. A judge, ruling against Stotz’s bid to retain control, delivered what might have been his epitaph: “I believe many people that have heard of Little League have never heard of Carl Stotz.” Little League compounded the insult by opening a museum in 1982 in Williamsport that made only a passing reference to Stotz.

After chronicling Stotz’s departure, “Play Ball” loses its focus and any critical edge and is content to celebrate the spread of Little League across the world. The book never deals with Little League’s relevance to the larger world or with creeping professionalism in the program. (Some top Eastern programs have built year-round training facilities to prepare themselves for the World Series.) It mentions only in passing the program’s difficulty in rooting out child abusers from the ranks of its programs. And it never raises questions--or looks at research--into the negative impact that Little League can have on children; failure at Little League is an experience millions of men have in common.

The program’s founder, for one, never got over his own bitterness with Little League. In 1959, four years after Stotz’s split with Little League, the program built a new headquarters and stadium just three miles from his home.

Stotz died in 1992 without ever visiting it.