I’ve never been to Williamsport, the quiet swath of Pennsylvania that’s now synonymous with the Little League World Series, but I’m pretty sure I know exactly what it’s like—or how it’s supposed to be portrayed, at least.  The kids arrive with their parents right after the ESPN trucks, and then come the fans, thousands of them. They barbecue in the parking lot—fathers swigging from Coors Light cans, kids tossing a rubber ball until it rolls away—before they pack into the bleachers or, better yet, just beyond the outfield wall, where the littlest among them will scamper for prized souvenirs. For dinner, they will eat hot dogs, peanuts, cotton candy and soft, saltzy pretzels. (Everything is free.) Then they will scoop ice cream out of a miniature baseball helmet for dessert.  On the field, meanwhile, the baseball is good and loud. The 12-year-olds will never be as gleeful as they are when they guess right on a straight fastball and send it for a ride, and they might think they’ll never feel despair like whiffing on a 44-foot curveball. They will walk to the plate before an at-bat and then they will sprint back to the dugout. They will be surrounded by a team of their best friends in the whole, wide world—and some of their dads, too, who bought pizza after the biggest wins of the summer.  They will trade pins with the team from Europe and stories with the team from Canada and confused but content pleasantries with the team from Japan. They will eat from a cafeteria, and they will remember to say please and thank you. Some might play XBox if the wait for the ping-pong table is too long, especially because cell phones do not exist in Williamsport, and neither do BlackBerries or vice. Everyone in Williamsport—including the umpires, who never get a call wrong and don’t need the instant replay that was implemented this year—goes to sleep happy.  And the kids, especially the ones who don’t have to actually play baseball, probably ask themselves a question that can only be answered with time:  When I grow up and I’m older than these 12-year-olds, will I still look up to them? It’s almost too easy to project the Little League World Series as some true-to-form Norman Rockwell painting, colorful and charming and, best of all, quaint. It does, after all, symbolize the everyday life that Rockwell depicted better than any other sport, so it’s not surprising that baseball actually is the subject of a handful of Rockwells. If he were still illustrating covers for the Saturday Evening Post, chances are he would have been awfully tempted to riff on the Little League World Series by now.  In fact, in a 2003 story for Sports Illustrated, Stephen Cannella noted some of Pennsylvania’s contributions to society—soda pop (1809), the first nickelodeon (1905), bubble gum (1938)—before admitting that these “pleasures may sound impossibly Rockwellian, but even in the Internet age they have staying power.” The story does note the corporate veneer of the event, but anyone can be forgiven for favoring its rustic charm, especially then. Sammy Sosa, following through on a home-run swing as soft light draped the Wrigley Field spectators behind him, graced the cover of that week’s issue, adorned with the cover line: “Sammy Strikes Back: The Cubs’ Sammy Sosa Is Healthy and Hot. Is He Forgiven?” One diagonal strip, at the bottom left corner of the cover, teased a story about Michael Vick. How long would a fractured fibula keep the rookie off the football field?  SI had published a similar story about the Little League World Series just the year before, Sept. 2, 2002, in an issue with Randy Moss on the cover. (This was before Joe Buck found his pantomimed mooning to be disgusting.) The piece started: “These are baseball’s good old days. Maybe not in Milwaukee or Miami, major league outposts where the teams are lousy and the citizenry has better things to worry about than millionaire owners feuding with millionaire players. But the pastime was alive and well early Sunday night in Williamsport, Pa., where the final of the Little League World Series was played. Left in the hands of kids, baseball’s fine.” It was a safe, populist assumption at the time. Baseball was still punch-drunk, reeling from the glorious heyday of 1998, and the wretched hangover hadn’t yet hit. Jose Canseco was not yet a best-selling author. Sammy Sosa might have been forgiven—he hadn’t been caught corking, either—and Mark McGwire was doing something or another. The upstart Florida Marlins were about to be a feel-good World Series champion, because they beat the big boys on a low budget, and that was cute. The Oakland A’s also enjoyed this kooky knack for fielding quirky teams that somehow made the playoffs; no one knew their secret. It all seems so hazy and happy. In some sort of twisted irony, however, the outlook on the youth level wasn’t quite so rosy, as the Little League World Series was just a year removed from a salacious mess befitting of big-league tabloid attention. Remember Danny Almonte? He was the 12-year-old who wasn’t, a teenager with a zippy fastball and devastating slider who pitched his team to the United States championship game. He captured national attention in scandal, so you might not remember how punishing he was. The kid—well, maybe not—threw a no-hitter in the Mid-Atlantic regional final. Four days later, he tossed a perfect game in the Little League World Series. Four days!  I was 13 at the time—somewhere between Almonte’s fact and fiction—and I remember plopping myself on the couch to watch the news stations interrupt a soap opera to broadcast a hastily organized press conference in the Bronx with Rolando Paulino, the founder of his local Little League. Almonte must have been sad, I thought. He wasn’t 12, but he was just 14, and his demise had been dramatic. His punishment didn’t fit the crime. All he had done was play baseball, and yet he had become a national lightning rod for what’s good and evil in society. Even President George W. Bush had vocalized his moral disappointment in the adults who fudged his age. A week after it broke the story, SI made another brief reference to the suddenly disgraced Almonte. This dig wasn’t so much a zing at Almonte’s expense, but a small jab at the world we live in, buried in an issue covered by another aging power pitcher, Roger Clemens. (The cover line: “AT 39 YEARS OLD ROGER CLEMENS IS MAKING HISTORY.”) The quip was subtle. His memorabilia had begun “cropping up on eBay; one ball signed by the discredited Little Leaguer was going for $355 as of Monday.” It was the sign of the apocalypse for the week of Sept. 10, 2001.  The Little League World Series lands exactly on the week when it’s time to rhapsodize the sweltering dog days and welcome the brisk breezes, right before kids go back to school and the working calendar starts in untimely earnest. It’s tempting, then, to transform a mere youth baseball tournament into a cross-pollination between “Kumbayah” and “Talkin’ Baseball,” riddled with romantic motives and a few hundred ESPN cameras.  But really, the Little League World Series is a television phenomenon because nothing else is on. In that respect, it is a perfect event. Its competition? Preseason football and late-summer Major League Baseball, right before the playoff run heats up to a semi-sizzle. Even the best cable movies are stale by now, but they prosper against the reality shows that aren’t numbing enough for the television season proper.  So when I was surfing through channels last night, I settled on watching Georgia play Hawaii. The ambient noise of a Little League game was soothing.  I’m not sure I’ve watched a full Little League World Series game since 1998, the year Toms River won the whole damn thing. I was 10 then, so I could relate to these baseball-obsessed near-teens from New Jersey. Todd Frazier, the team’s best player who cocked his hat in a way that everyone I know emulated the next spring, wasn’t just good. He was, to me, the coolest kid on the planet. Once, in middle school, I played a game against his cousin. He was the shortstop, and I was giddy to make it to second base to talk to him. We were thirteen, I think.  Last night’s game didn’t look all that different from the ones of my youth. Parents still shrieked from the bleachers, and the coaches, still wearing microphones, still offered generic words of encouragement. “You did good,” one said, deviating from the traditional refrain: “Just throw strikes out there.” If you didn’t know, though, watching a Little League game isn’t the same when you’re bigger than the kids playing. You notice different things, like an umpire swing dancing with a squirrel mascot between innings. At times, trapped by a chain-link fence, the players appeared more terrified than enthused. Some of them seemed too big for the bandbox. The catchers short-armed their tosses back to the pitcher, saddled by pitch counts but still firing curveballs that were just a bit too sharp. The hitters poked opposite-field dingers with late, slow sings of metal. I heard the Jonas Brothers and “YMCA” and Orel Hershiser comparing a pitcher’s languid delivery to that of Mariano Rivera.  A few innings in, when I had muted the television to watch a press conference discussing allegations of NCAA violations, I realized that I didn’t miss much about the game I was supposed to be watching. It was kind of boring, actually, and not all that innocent. Then in the sixth inning—that’s the last one—Georgia mounted a rally, down 7-1. It scored three runs and injected an electric thrill into a tired crowd. “This one’s not over yet, Brett,” Hershiser said, manufacturing glee.  “It’s a Little League game!” Musburger countered. Hawaii switched pitchers and survived the yips that seem to plague an inordinate number of these youth teams. The two squads meet again today for a berth in the U.S. championship. I don’t plan to watch, not that it matters much. This game isn’t meant for me—not anymore.  Long ago, I had fallen for a certain iteration of baseball, one that I could enjoy without a stake in the outcome. It didn’t matter that these kids couldn’t drive. That was the whole point. The same is undoubtedly true for the kids littered throughout Howard J. Lamade Stadium. To them, there is plenty desirable about a late-summer’s trip to Pennsylvania, and none of it comes from a wistful urging for purity.  While the rest of us are peering through a knothole, yearning for something slightly unattainable, they’re there to watch a baseball game. Snagging a foul ball might be nice, too. They will go home happy regardless. “People say TV has diluted the Norman Rockwell feel of this event,” the president of Little League said in the 2003 SI story. “I doubt if any of these kids know who Norman Rockwell is.”

I’ve never been to Williamsport, the quiet swath of Pennsylvania that’s now synonymous with the Little League World Series, but I’m pretty sure I know exactly what it’s like—or how it’s supposed to be portrayed, at least. 

The kids arrive with their parents right after the ESPN trucks, and then come the fans, thousands of them. They barbecue in the parking lot—fathers swigging from Coors Light cans, kids tossing a rubber ball until it rolls away—before they pack into the bleachers or, better yet, just beyond the outfield wall, where the littlest among them will scamper for prized souvenirs. For dinner, they will eat hot dogs, peanuts, cotton candy and soft, saltzy pretzels. (Everything is free.) Then they will scoop ice cream out of a miniature baseball helmet for dessert. 

On the field, meanwhile, the baseball is good and loud. The 12-year-olds will never be as gleeful as they are when they guess right on a straight fastball and send it for a ride, and they might think they’ll never feel despair like whiffing on a 44-foot curveball. They will walk to the plate before an at-bat and then they will sprint back to the dugout. They will be surrounded by a team of their best friends in the whole, wide world—and some of their dads, too, who bought pizza after the biggest wins of the summer. 

They will trade pins with the team from Europe and stories with the team from Canada and confused but content pleasantries with the team from Japan. They will eat from a cafeteria, and they will remember to say please and thank you. Some might play XBox if the wait for the ping-pong table is too long, especially because cell phones do not exist in Williamsport, and neither do BlackBerries or vice. Everyone in Williamsport—including the umpires, who never get a call wrong and don’t need the instant replay that was implemented this year—goes to sleep happy. 

And the kids, especially the ones who don’t have to actually play baseball, probably ask themselves a question that can only be answered with time:  When I grow up and I’m older than these 12-year-olds, will I still look up to them?

It’s almost too easy to project the Little League World Series as some true-to-form Norman Rockwell painting, colorful and charming and, best of all, quaint. It does, after all, symbolize the everyday life that Rockwell depicted better than any other sport, so it’s not surprising that baseball actually is the subject of a handful of Rockwells. If he were still illustrating covers for the Saturday Evening Post, chances are he would have been awfully tempted to riff on the Little League World Series by now. 

In fact, in a 2003 story for Sports Illustrated, Stephen Cannella noted some of Pennsylvania’s contributions to society—soda pop (1809), the first nickelodeon (1905), bubble gum (1938)—before admitting that these “pleasures may sound impossibly Rockwellian, but even in the Internet age they have staying power.” The story does note the corporate veneer of the event, but anyone can be forgiven for favoring its rustic charm, especially then. Sammy Sosa, following through on a home-run swing as soft light draped the Wrigley Field spectators behind him, graced the cover of that week’s issue, adorned with the cover line: “Sammy Strikes Back: The Cubs’ Sammy Sosa Is Healthy and Hot. Is He Forgiven?” One diagonal strip, at the bottom left corner of the cover, teased a story about Michael Vick. How long would a fractured fibula keep the rookie off the football field? 

SI had published a similar story about the Little League World Series just the year before, Sept. 2, 2002, in an issue with Randy Moss on the cover. (This was before Joe Buck found his pantomimed mooning to be disgusting.) The piece started:

“These are baseball’s good old days. Maybe not in Milwaukee or Miami, major league outposts where the teams are lousy and the citizenry has better things to worry about than millionaire owners feuding with millionaire players. But the pastime was alive and well early Sunday night in Williamsport, Pa., where the final of the Little League World Series was played. Left in the hands of kids, baseball’s fine.”

It was a safe, populist assumption at the time. Baseball was still punch-drunk, reeling from the glorious heyday of 1998, and the wretched hangover hadn’t yet hit. Jose Canseco was not yet a best-selling author. Sammy Sosa might have been forgiven—he hadn’t been caught corking, either—and Mark McGwire was doing something or another. The upstart Florida Marlins were about to be a feel-good World Series champion, because they beat the big boys on a low budget, and that was cute. The Oakland A’s also enjoyed this kooky knack for fielding quirky teams that somehow made the playoffs; no one knew their secret. It all seems so hazy and happy.

In some sort of twisted irony, however, the outlook on the youth level wasn’t quite so rosy, as the Little League World Series was just a year removed from a salacious mess befitting of big-league tabloid attention. Remember Danny Almonte? He was the 12-year-old who wasn’t, a teenager with a zippy fastball and devastating slider who pitched his team to the United States championship game. He captured national attention in scandal, so you might not remember how punishing he was. The kid—well, maybe not—threw a no-hitter in the Mid-Atlantic regional final. Four days later, he tossed a perfect game in the Little League World Series. Four days! 

I was 13 at the time—somewhere between Almonte’s fact and fiction—and I remember plopping myself on the couch to watch the news stations interrupt a soap opera to broadcast a hastily organized press conference in the Bronx with Rolando Paulino, the founder of his local Little League. Almonte must have been sad, I thought. He wasn’t 12, but he was just 14, and his demise had been dramatic. His punishment didn’t fit the crime. All he had done was play baseball, and yet he had become a national lightning rod for what’s good and evil in society. Even President George W. Bush had vocalized his moral disappointment in the adults who fudged his age.

A week after it broke the story, SI made another brief reference to the suddenly disgraced Almonte. This dig wasn’t so much a zing at Almonte’s expense, but a small jab at the world we live in, buried in an issue covered by another aging power pitcher, Roger Clemens. (The cover line: “AT 39 YEARS OLD ROGER CLEMENS IS MAKING HISTORY.”) The quip was subtle. His memorabilia had begun “cropping up on eBay; one ball signed by the discredited Little Leaguer was going for $355 as of Monday.” It was the sign of the apocalypse for the week of Sept. 10, 2001. 

The Little League World Series lands exactly on the week when it’s time to rhapsodize the sweltering dog days and welcome the brisk breezes, right before kids go back to school and the working calendar starts in untimely earnest. It’s tempting, then, to transform a mere youth baseball tournament into a cross-pollination between “Kumbayah” and “Talkin’ Baseball,” riddled with romantic motives and a few hundred ESPN cameras. 

But really, the Little League World Series is a television phenomenon because nothing else is on. In that respect, it is a perfect event. Its competition? Preseason football and late-summer Major League Baseball, right before the playoff run heats up to a semi-sizzle. Even the best cable movies are stale by now, but they prosper against the reality shows that aren’t numbing enough for the television season proper. 

So when I was surfing through channels last night, I settled on watching Georgia play Hawaii. The ambient noise of a Little League game was soothing. 

I’m not sure I’ve watched a full Little League World Series game since 1998, the year Toms River won the whole damn thing. I was 10 then, so I could relate to these baseball-obsessed near-teens from New Jersey. Todd Frazier, the team’s best player who cocked his hat in a way that everyone I know emulated the next spring, wasn’t just good. He was, to me, the coolest kid on the planet. Once, in middle school, I played a game against his cousin. He was the shortstop, and I was giddy to make it to second base to talk to him. We were thirteen, I think. 



Last night’s game didn’t look all that different from the ones of my youth. Parents still shrieked from the bleachers, and the coaches, still wearing microphones, still offered generic words of encouragement. “You did good,” one said, deviating from the traditional refrain: “Just throw strikes out there.”

If you didn’t know, though, watching a Little League game isn’t the same when you’re bigger than the kids playing. You notice different things, like an umpire swing dancing with a squirrel mascot between innings. At times, trapped by a chain-link fence, the players appeared more terrified than enthused. Some of them seemed too big for the bandbox. The catchers short-armed their tosses back to the pitcher, saddled by pitch counts but still firing curveballs that were just a bit too sharp. The hitters poked opposite-field dingers with late, slow sings of metal. I heard the Jonas Brothers and “YMCA” and Orel Hershiser comparing a pitcher’s languid delivery to that of Mariano Rivera. 

A few innings in, when I had muted the television to watch a press conference discussing allegations of NCAA violations, I realized that I didn’t miss much about the game I was supposed to be watching. It was kind of boring, actually, and not all that innocent. Then in the sixth inning—that’s the last one—Georgia mounted a rally, down 7-1. It scored three runs and injected an electric thrill into a tired crowd.

“This one’s not over yet, Brett,” Hershiser said, manufacturing glee. 

“It’s a Little League game!” Musburger countered.

Hawaii switched pitchers and survived the yips that seem to plague an inordinate number of these youth teams. The two squads meet again today for a berth in the U.S. championship. I don’t plan to watch, not that it matters much. This game isn’t meant for me—not anymore. 

Long ago, I had fallen for a certain iteration of baseball, one that I could enjoy without a stake in the outcome. It didn’t matter that these kids couldn’t drive. That was the whole point. The same is undoubtedly true for the kids littered throughout Howard J. Lamade Stadium. To them, there is plenty desirable about a late-summer’s trip to Pennsylvania, and none of it comes from a wistful urging for purity. 

While the rest of us are peering through a knothole, yearning for something slightly unattainable, they’re there to watch a baseball game. Snagging a foul ball might be nice, too. They will go home happy regardless. “People say TV has diluted the Norman Rockwell feel of this event,” the president of Little League said in the 2003 SI story. “I doubt if any of these kids know who Norman Rockwell is.”