Brian Bellwood sits anxiously in the grandstand, polishing his shoes and waiting for them to dry. His Little League baseball team was slated to play at seven o'clock, but it is now a quarter past, and the teams in the first game are still tied. Baseball has no clock, as Yogi Berra once observed.
Brian is fourteen. He has played Little League baseball in Jacksonville, Florida, each spring and summer for the last seven years. What does he do in fall and winter? "Wait for spring," he says. "There's nothing in the world that matters to me as much as baseball."
Brian is outfitted in most of his uniform: white polyester undershirt stretching far beyond the sleeves of his pullover; knee-length trousers; white stockings; and leotard-type blue stockings, which wrap around the foot but run up only to the knee. He lost his baseball cap. As the rest of his team laugh, yell at the other team, hit each other, kick the dirt, and chew gum, the parents are in the stands, sharing their snacks, getting fresh air, and taking a social break.
An American institution
This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of Little League baseball. For almost a century before 1939, nearly every American boy played some form of unorganized sandlot ball. During the waning years of the Great Depression, Carl Stoltz and Bert and George Bebble got together in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, to form Little League, Inc., an idea whose hour had come. Today Little League sanctions over 7,000 official Little Leagues throughout the world; Little League spinoffs number over 20,000. Williamsport plays host each year to the Little League World Series, which usually features teams from opposite hemispheres.
Little League baseball is an American institution, and it has as much to do with shaping some boys' and girls' values as do the schools they attend. Alexis de Tocqueville observed that victory is a fundamental value in the United States. Sociologist David Reisman noted that "in America, the road to the boardroom leads through the locker room." Playing competitive sports, many children learn the importance of winning and sportsmanship. Nearly all Little League coaches, the purveyors of these values, are men. Coaches run the gamut from welfare recipients to $500,000-a-year attorneys, from former professional athletes to men who never played baseball.
Bob Bonaccorso, president of the Arlington Babe Ruth League (a spin-off of the Little League) in Arlington, Virginia, said of his teams, "This is not a win-at-all-costs league. We have no draft. The kids choose which team they play for, and they want to play with their friends." Bonaccorso is a man of many hats; he wears the cap of whichever team he happens to be coaching at the moment. His play fair, have-fun attitude filters down through the coaches to the players, who, win or lose, always conclude an contest with a rousing rendition of "Two-four-six-eight, who do we appreciate?!"
Through fund-raising activities and an entry fee of fifteen dollars, the Arlington team is able to afford lights for night games, dugouts, electronic scoreboards, and the surrounding trees that mute traffic noise. The uniforms are replicas of those of major league teams; this team, called the Yankees, even have a NY patch sewn
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