Little Leaguers Have Big Problems--Their Parents

BASEBALL is a simple game. It offers a group of individuals moderate exercise in the fresh air and an eminently fair chance to prove that by working together as a team they can play as well as or better than another group of players. Traditional rules, easily grasped by most seven-year-old American males, provide for a limit on game time, thereby assuring that the exercise won’t be too fatiguing and that the superiority of winner over loser won’t stretch to an unendurable margin.

To the professional ballplayer, baseball is a good way to make a living. To Rex Stout, a prolific writer and typically ardent fan, baseball is a test of whether or not there is justice in the world. To a million American youths — preadolescents, adolescents, and teen-agers — baseball is rapidly becoming a social status symbol replete with too much aggressiveness, competitiveness, and emphasis on winning. It is not a world the kids made.

Forty years ago, in the golden era of American sport, when Babe Ruth was murdering pitchers and Ty Cobb was cutting up second basemen, baseball was the accepted national pastime, the thing to do for all boys of all ages. When Dad arrived home from work and asked, “Where are the boys?”, Mom said, “Playing baseball, I suppose.” And life’s serenity continued, no more questions asked. For baseball is a simple game, safer than most child’s play, such as rock-throwing and street rumbles.

Today, in the golden era of Little League, baseball may be somewhat less popular a national pastime, but it is a lot more organized. Dad comes home earlier, partly because he doesn’t have to work as long at his job and partly because the boys are waiting for him to take them to their ball park. This playground, built by Dad, features carefully supervised baseball games directed by Dad and watched, with parental concern, by Mom, Sis, Aunt Tillie, and an organized cheering section rooting for their boys. Unfortunately, say some sociologists, vocational counselors, and pediatric psychoanalysts, this is too much of a good thing for the boys, and therefore Little League baseball is bad for boys. A look at the evidence might lead to a more logical conclusion — too many organizers can spoil a good sport.

Abuses of sportsmanship in Little League baseball are about as common as a good fistfight at second base, but reports of incidents are not as widely circulated as other juvenile delinquencies. The following incidents occurred during one Little League season in the suburban areas that ring Chicago, Illinois. They are considered typical by vocal detractors of kids’ baseball.

A father noisily encourages his twelve-year-old, who stands at the plate facing an eleven-year-old pitcher on the mound: “You gonna let that little -strike you out!”

A boy stands on first base, crying, as the rest of his team leaves the field. He had dropped a thrown ball, and his error lost the game. “I can’t go home! My daddy will be mad.”

Two neighbors stop speaking to each other after one of them (a volunteer umpire) had called the other’s boy out on strikes. (It was a questionable decision, but the reaction was ridiculous.)

A mother shoves her Little Leaguer into her car after the game. “You embarrassed me in front of all my friends!”

An outspoken father harasses a Little League manager: “You can’t take my boy out now. We can’t win without him.” “He’s pitched his three innings,” says the manager. “On this team every boy plays.” “You don’t want to win,” yells the father. “You’re a lousy manager!”

A riot breaks out in the stands. The stokes on the game had reached serious limits, and the various bettors, parents all, resort to first-class namecalling and third-rate punch-throwing. The game is called, of course, because gambling is not allowed at Little League games.

There appears to be a basic human conflict that upsets relations among participating organizers and interested spectators of Little League games. There are those parents who are out to win every game and who hate to see their boy or their boy’s team lose. And there are parents who, in the majority, agree with Little League leaders that every boy should have a chance to play in the games. The following dialogue of two parents fighting to reorganize a three-year-old Little League in a western Chicago suburb illustrates some of the divergent opinions of the hardheaded extremists:

“There’s only one way to play baseball — to win.”

“The guys who talk winning at all costs often don’t take time to practice. I play every boy in my games, and every boy shows up for every game. Some managers sometimes can’t field a team at game time. Kids who know they won’t play have no incentive to participate in the league.”

“You can win only if you play your best players. How can a boy make the all-star team if he doesn’t get enough chances to prove he’s the best?”

“Every boy who pays his five dollars and wears his Little League insignia should get a chance to swing the bat or throw a ball in a game.” (The Everybody Plays group forced the Winning Is All group to accept a rule that says each boy must play three innings per week and no boy can sit on the bench for more than two consecutive games.)

“It’s common knowledge that a boy would rather sit on the bench of a winning team than play every game for a loser.” (One peculiar Little League rule provides that an eleven-year-old who sits on the bench most of one season will probably play the following year, because holdovers automatically make the team.)

“Kids should want to win — try to win if they can. You can’t let them get away with a lot of foolishness. Sometimes you have to step on them, but they know what you mean. They’re all good boys.”

“Pollyannas don’t belong in baseball.” (The “Pollyanna” of this little discourse finished second in his league’s play.)

THERE are some two dozen local and national programs devoted to telling boys aged seven to eighteen how to play baseball. The biggest, bestorganized, and most widely criticized of these programs is that of Little League Baseball, Inc. The seeds of this fructifying structure were sown in 1939 with a three-team league. It now has more than 5800 branches, and the pollen is still falling on every urban and suburban area that has a population of at least 15,000.

The international headquarters of Little League Baseball, Inc., is at Williamsport, Pennsylvania, where the administrative affairs of the organization have become so complex that it takes a fifteenman board of directors, three actively operating committees, and a nonprofit foundation to run things. Little League Foundation has fifteen trustees, including Walter O’Malley of the Los Angeles Dodgers and Dan Topping of the New York Yankees. What’s good enough for them should be good enough for baseball. The magnitude of the operation is enough to confound the author, who as a twelve-year-old played most of his baseball in an unused portion of a cemetery where the most practical limitation of the daily game was the headstone of the nearest grave two hundred and fifty feet from home plate.

Over the years Little League Baseball, Inc., has operated under close-knit, tightly organized policies. They, in turn, have developed certain tendencies toward exclusiveness that have alienated youth leaders and youth groups who may dispute the righteousness of Little League gospel, and therefore have a tough time getting a Little League charter. One Little League rule says that no boy who plays in any other organized program should be considered as a candidate for Little League. By executive sanction, then, boys’ baseball will be Little League baseball. Certification of all Little League players rests with Little League headquarters in Williamsport, and failure of a franchised league to comply with Little League policies subjects the league to revocation of its Little League charter. Fathers who as boys had to play with “nickel rockets” — old baseballs covered with electrician’s tape — now find their sons’ right to play sometimes hampered by tape of a different color.

Despite, or perhaps because of, the unilateral control exercised by Williamsport headquarters, dissension among local Little League leaders and regional directors has been fostered. And occasionally festers. One youth-group leader of a competing program, PONY League, views Little League problems with humorous alarm. “They have trouble getting along with each other. In one recent New York meeting the four regional directors stayed in four different hotels!” Sportsmanship was not an issue at that time.

The problems of local Little League administrators range from the simply practical to the practically impossible. “In our system,” says one Little League president, “the problem is money. We get five dollars from each kid, but it costs us seven dollars to put him on the field.”

Team sponsors put up part of the capital, but the rest of the money is raised, in a great measure, by the Little League Ladies Auxiliary. “Women,” according to one Little League director, “are good for food handling, fund raising, and general usefulness.” “Don’t forget transportation,” added a Little League mother. “I should have a card in the Teamsters Union, considering all the kids, equipment, and refreshments I truck back and forth each season.”

The population explosion adds to the local director’s troubles. “Every kid thinks he has to play Little League to ‘belong.’ We keep expanding to accommodate him.”

MOST Little Leagues are divided into the major league and one or more minor leagues. No given area is allowed more than eight major league teams of fifteen players each, but there may be many more boys able and willing to play. In one system there are three times as many boys in the minor leagues as there are in the majors. “As far as I’m concerned,” says the president of that system, “everybody in the system is Little League, but the fathers don’t think so. Some of them, at least, think that only the major leaguers are Little Leaguers. The rest are bushers. Williamsport doesn’t help any.” (According to a Little League directive, “It should be kept in mind that for the most part the minor league is the training area for the local league.”) Parents who regard their children as articles of personal adornment want their Little Leaguers to shine as brightly as possible. Every child exposed to parental anxiety finds this a serious handicap to his development, especially in right field, where two hands are plenty when it is time to catch a fly ball.

The methods of selecting Little League players have some of the sordidness and much of the fascination of the business operations of professional athletic clubs. The major league team of an established Little League selects its new players from the minor league system on either the “draft” or the “auction” basis.

Under the draft system, the team that finished last in the previous season gets first pick of the new material; the seventh-place team gets second choice, and so forth. The quality of the new players is customarily judged at the annual minor league all-star game, a showcase which the major league managers attend en masse. The boys are under considerable pressure to do well.

In the auction system, those boys eligible for selection have a price set on them, and managers bid for them in a closed meeting. “At no time shall players be told their price tag” — or so it is implied in Section xviii of the Little League manual. Somehow that seems unreasonable and discriminatory. Moreover, it hardly prepares the boy for the future, when he is called upon to sell his own services to a college or professional team. Putting a price on a boy’s ability to play is obviously serious, adult business. It seems to indicate that the decline of the amateur spirit has reached the lowest level — excluding baby beauty contests.

Tryouts are held for free agents — those who have not been spoken for or who have not yet had a chance to show their ability — at least twelve days before the first scheduled game of the new season. At that time, team rosters are selected by the managers.

“Tryouts are usually chaos and confusion, though,” say many Little League managers. “Besides, who wants the free agents? The only reason they’re free is because they’re no good. All the boys who can help you win are up for draft or auction, anyway.”

In the first year of operation, Little League tryouts are as fair for the boys as they are for the managers. Still, one bright and aggressive manager of a Chicago North Shore team found a way to beat those odds. Having bird-dogged the available talent and preselected the best to be had, he invited those worthies to the movies on the day of the tryouts. His team won the championship hands down, and his method of operation became widely known as the Wilmette Gambit. It is frowned upon by the organization at Williamsport.

Criticism of Little League by parents and adults who do not participate in the program is often marked by disinterest and vague contempt. An executive of a Pittsburgh glass company said, “I’m happy to give ten bucks to the guy who finds a place for the kids to play. All the corner lots seem to have supermarkets on them. But let’s find them a field, make it theirs, tell them about it, and then leave them alone. ‘Go play, you little monsters!’ They don’t want me around when they’re playing ball!”

Another successful businessman says, “The people who run Little League and PONY League and all the rest of them are usually on the lowest part of the sociological curve, guys who can’t quite make it in their business, married, or social life. So they take it out on the kids of everybody else.”

The experience of one research-minded health critic indicates that the emphasis on winning affects adults more than it does Little Leaguers. The blood pressure of the boy who pitched a nohitter in a championship game was checked immediately after the game. The blood pressure of the boy’s coach was checked at the same time. The boy’s was normal; the coach’s had soared to the shock level — which served him right for making a serious business out of child’s play.

Parental interference is considered the main impediment to realizing the aims of Little League, PONY League, and other organized programs of this type. Some efforts have been made by local and national organizations to change or improve the attitudes of parents who work out their own personal problems through their children. In Denver’s Old-Timer’s League, a boys’ program similar to Little League, the sobering influence of certain parents was exercised, vigilante fashion, on grandstand coaches and spectator critics. “Stay in the stands and off the field or we’ll make you a coach!”

A national conference of youth-group leaders was held in Chicago in the spring of 1961. Attending were representatives from most national organizations — Little League Baseball, Inc., PONY and COLT baseball, the American Amateur Baseball Congress, and even the American Academy of Pediatrics. Attempts were made to re-evaluate the purposes and the roles of the volunteer leaders of youth athletic programs. In Little League, especially, a change of pace seems to be most desirable. Preadolescents are immature and can’t be expected to live up to the physical and emotional guidelines of older children — parents included. Winning games should not be given the importance that belongs, in the Little League age group, to playing games.

There should be no quarrel with the desire of parents to teach boys how to play baseball, how to play together, and how to enjoy the experience. Boys — all children — must be taught the fundamentals of any useful activity; but then they must be encouraged to set their own tasks, work for themselves, and get along with their associates. Having learned the true core of sportsmanship, they won’t be defeated easily in any game.