We're Going to the Little League World Series? Not So Fast.

Following an extremely difficult 11-year-old season in 1994 - one that went along with the year in general being an absolute disaster for me almost from start to finish thanks primarily to health reasons - one of my main hopes in my final season of Little League eligibility was to make it on the 12-year-old District All-Star Team. Even though our league in Ridgefield was still relatively small in the mid-90s, competition for the two all-star squads was always fierce given that baseball was still the primary spring sport at that time and state tournaments had not expanded to include an 11-U level. The local paper used to make a big deal out of player selections, running an annual feature with a head shot and brief blurb about each kid, and I really wanted to be in that issue. Since I was small of stature and had the kind of skillset that tends to be overlooked at all levels of baseball (high OBP without power, slick fielding without a rocket arm, smart baserunning without blazing speed), it was hardly a given that I would be selected.

2003 Upper Deck Vintage
Sean Burroughs

With only one player from each team making it from player voting and our squad having a clear-cut top player, Erik, it was clear that he would deservedly get the nod. That left my fate in the hands of the league's coaches, which would have normally filled me with a good amount of confidence - until my team's coach started to bench all of our club's 12-year-olds for portions of the final handful of games in an effort to "develop" the younger players for next year. Given that the drafted players who were exclusively friends of our coach's son helped the club again miss the playoffs in 1996 after being the primary reason that our team was largely noncompetitive in 1995, it definitely seems like burning the final Little League games of our small number of 12s was totally worth it. I felt particularly bad for Erik, who had been on the team for three years and whose father was our one coach who made a real effort to provide instruction, as he did not deserve to be sitting on the bench for anyone after carrying the team and maturing a great deal over the course of the season.

Fortunately, my fears that other coaches would view our team's bizarre substitution patterns as indictments against our players proved to be unnecessary, as I was elated to get the phone call that I had been selected for the National League All-Star Team. Within a few days, I, along with my mom and the rest of the parents/players from the league's two all-star squads, met at the town's community center for the submission of documentation and a briefing on the tournament itself. For those who are unfamiliar, the Little League World Series proper is the culmination of 12-U tournaments around the world that begin on the district level. In order to reach the LLWS at that point, our team would have had to outlast somewhere between 12 and 16 other teams in the District 1 tourney, win a five-team round robin tournament in Section 1, win a best-of-three state championship series, and then come out ahead of 11 other state championships in the East Regionals (there are now two separate regions in the northeast, with Connecticut's representative competing against five other state champs in the New England Regional).

Despite this being an incredibly daunting path, what I recall being the crux of the discussion at this meeting was how things were going to handled when one of our two teams reached the LLWS later that summer. No joke, multiple minutes were spent regaling the players with the plethora of on-site food options available to kids on the LLWS teams, with the claim that there is a kitchen on-call for players at all hours of the night a la the White House [spoiler: there is not] leading to a bevy of follow-up questions in which kids wanted to know exactly what flavors of ice cream were available and if they could ask for twenty tacos. This focus on literally everything except baseball proved to be incredibly appropriate for what was to come in the tournament itself. Our team tallied maybe five hits over two games, scored one run, and were swiftly eliminated. We were not going to the Little League World Series.

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It is definitely fair to say that a primary reason that I got into coaching was in hopes of amending the mistakes that I viewed many of my own coaches as having made and I am not sure if I was ever on a team as ill-equipped to play on a high level as was my 12-year-old District team. The unfortunate aspect of this dynamic was that I truly enjoyed our head coach, Fran, as a person. Fran had a zeal for the game and used a wide array of colorful phrases that I had never previously heard, comments made all the more entertaining when uttered in his thick accent. "No balloons, kiddo!" following any looping throw made during outfield practice became one of my favorite go-to references for quite a while. When I umpired Majors games in the years that followed, Fran was always very nice to me and was one of the few coaches who did not try to actively take advantage of youth umpires, a fact for which I always respected him.

However, while Fran was terrific at entertaining us, he and his main assistant, Mike, did not do much in the way of worthwhile instruction. Their regular season team, NAPA, was a veritable wrecking machine that easily led the league in homeruns and was the lone club against which my team was not competitive. Most expected them to cruise to the title, only for NAPA to be swept in the town championship series by a Lions squad that my rather ungood team had twice taken to extra innings (and beat in a 12-inning game). While NAPA provided three of the most talented members of our all-star team, it quickly became apparent why that team had fallen short against a team largely devoid of imposing players, yet strong in baseball IQ and execution. It was not rare to have arguments between players pop up at practice, which quickly served to divide the team and very little was ever said to the kids who took delight in mocking the ability of their teammates. Over the course of the next two weeks, which included daily practices in the summer heat, we did take a single round of batting practice against a live arm. No coach-thrown BP, no scrimmages in which our pitchers faced live hitters. Not one live pitch was thrown to a hitter until our tournament opener against Wilton, which seemed like a less than ideal strategy.

In place of actual BP, our coaches cranked up pitching machines to extreme velocities and pumped balls toward the plate in what they claimed was to simulate the higher velocity that we were to see in the tournament. These machines merely shot balls out of a slot rather than throwing them with mechanical arms, which was a dynamic that was always truly disorienting for me - particularly given that the balls tended to jam and shoot out late, destroying any semblance of rhythm one would have as a hitter. To no surprise, I hit poorly in practices and soon found myself sharing the second base position with a player who was a lesser fielder, but was good at hitting off of pitching machines. Frustrated in having his role as a team's third coach become the lone real instructor for the second straight season, Erik's dad began to stay after practices to throw live BP to the two of us, which I truly appreciated.

Unfortunately, that was not nearly enough to prevent our stint in the tournament from being an extremely short one. After ostensibly having been prepared to hit gas, we opened play at home against neighboring Wilton by running into a junkball-tossing redheaded kid who had our team off-balance all day long. The lone run that we tallied came on an ill-advised double steal with runners on the corners and our team down 3-0, as the throw through to second was momentarily bobbled, allowing our slowest player to score from third on a play that could have resulted in two outs. Strong pitching kept the score 3-1, but we looked like a team that had never seen a curveball. Mostly because we had not.

As fortune would have it, our opponent in the loser's bracket was Ridgefield American, which had fallen in a tough battle against a loaded Springdale squad. Knowing that my good friend, Tully, was starting and threw a higher percentage of curves than any LL pitcher I have still ever seen, I cautiously asked Coach Mike if we would be working on that in practice. He dismissed that request and the results spoke for themselves. Tully absolutely worked us, allowing only two hits in a dominant complete game shutout effort. The most glaring evidence of our team's lack of preparedness than the fact that he threw our catcher and cleanup hitter nine curveballs over the course of three at bats, garnering nine swinging strikes and three strikeouts for his effort. Our pitching was once again more than good enough to win a normal game, yet not quite enough to overcome receiving no offensive support. I played two innings at second base in the 2-0 defeat and either five or six innings in the field over the course of the pair of contests, not getting to bat a single time. Even worse than that was the fact that several players on the team did not even see the field in the game against the other Ridgefield team. LL did not have a mandatory play rule and our coaches used that allowance to prevent multiple kids from getting to actually play in what turned out to be their final Little League game, which felt wrong to me at the time and is unconscionable now. Rubbing extra salt into the wound was that we learned when turning in our jerseys that the league's order of traditional commemorative team t-shirts had been delayed until after the start of the Districts, so, with our team having been knocked out the day before the order was to be sent, they were not going to bother getting us t-shirts. It was a fitting end, I suppose.

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In the many years that I have coached on the District level and observed teams from the outside when not coaching the 12s, it is often fairly clear as to which teams will overachieve and which will struggle. Of course, talent plays a huge role, particularly the further down the levels one goes given the manner in which the individual gaps between talent levels can be. An untouchable pitcher or unretirable batter can carry a flawed squad a decent way simply by brute force. However, talent alone is not nearly enough. Some of our league's most talented teams have not even reached the District title game, let alone won the crown. I have personally coached teams of moderate talent that were filled with kids who loved coming to practice and being on a team together, with those squads invariably exceeding expectations that one might have based solely on playing ability. Similarly, teams with personality dynamics similar to those from my 12-year-old season often falter in ways similar to those that mine did. Coaching can patch some of these issues, but not all of them, especially in a very short span of time. The reverse holds true, as well.

We as a league were fortunate to have a rather strong run of success in the 2000s, including four consecutive years in which one of the two Ridgefield teams won the District title, two of which I helped coach. This success was due in massive part to the approach by the players, the vast majority of which would have lived at the field if permitted to do so. Little League, like most sports organizations nationwide, has seen its enrollment numbers dwindle in recent years, with our league moving to a single charter in 2014. The push for travel teams crept in and took hold, making summer teams and teams themselves (rather than individual statistics) much more of an afterthought. While our District teams have done decently since the shift, there is definitely an observable difference in the overall dynamic that exists around youth baseball on the whole. In 2017, a very talented squad became RLL's sixth 12-U team to win the Districts, yet joined the two clubs that I coached and the other three Ridgefield District champions in falling in Sectionals. As such, our league is still seeking its first trip to Williamsport, making one wonder if learning about how to order ice cream at 2:00 AM will ever prove to have utility. ;)