Williamsport 2009: the 12-year-old boys of summer

Last summer was my first living at home since 1997. A five-day-per-week internship in the business world was a jarring adjustment from the previous 12 summers of overnight camp and youth trips, but the home-cooked food and relaxing weekends provided for a restful break. Until my little brother decided to be good at baseball.

To provide some perspective, I’m the oldest of four boys of varying athletic ability. Number two, Robert, plays on his college football team, while the next one, Sammy, recently made his high school’s varsity basketball squad. Jonny, the youngest, alternates between basketball, baseball, and tennis. And me? I just write for Spec.

Jonny was this summer’s culprit. For the second year in a row, he was tapped for our town’s Little League World Series team. The tournament itself begins each summer at the local level and concludes after about eight weeks with the U.S.’s and the world’s top teams competing for the title in Williamsport, Pa. In 2008, Newton Central Little League was knocked out after just two games. A similar finish seemed inevitable this past July.

Instead, Central started to win. First a single game, then two, then four. With that last victory, Jonny and his friends completed their sweep in the district round and advanced over seven other teams to the sectionals—the Massachusetts Sweet 16.

But the road to Williamsport—which suddenly seemed a bit shorter—had a few potholes. In game three of the districts, an incompetent scorer failed to record a Central substitution and the opposing coach chose to wait until after his team had lost to complain to the umpire. With minimal discussion and absolutely no investigation into the incident, the district administrator consulted her rulebook and upheld the game’s result but suspended Central’s manager, my father, for two games.

I’m sure thousands of columnists and reporters have critiqued parental influence in youth sports. Clear-sighted people will agree that the children and the lessons they learn (teamwork, sportsmanship, etc.) come first. Parents and coaches should leave their egos behind.

The coach’s decision to appeal the outcome of a 5-0 loss based on a technicality wasn’t wise. If he suspected a minor scoring issue, it should have remained private. In the end, his own players found an undeserved consolation excuse after a tough loss, and the winning team lost its coach since some volunteer scorekeeper wasn’t paying attention when a pinch-hitter came in.

These outcomes could have been foreseen a mile away, but no one seemed to pause to consider the human element. The suspension clause holds that the coach cannot even be in attendance anywhere on site for the two games in question. When Jonny, Central’s No. 2 starting pitcher, took the mound for a rematch against the same team with a chance to advance to the sectionals, my dad couldn’t even watch his own son play baseball.

When I asked Jonny, now 13, how it felt to take the field that night with a shorthanded coaching staff, he responded from a team perspective. “It was painful not to have our leader in two games,” he wrote to me. “But the great thing about this team was that it could withstand grind and adversity. When we were down, no one ever threw dirt on us. We got back up and played our hearts out.”

Under pressure and out for revenge, my little brother had the game of his life. He tossed a three-hit shutout and cracked three hits, including a key RBI single in the first.

“That game was the most fun in my Little League career,” he wrote. “At the plate, the baseball looked like a volleyball ready to be clubbed. On the mound, the batter was little threat, and I felt as if I was merely playing catch with Naushon [the catcher].”

Central proceeded to breeze through the sectionals, and that’s when my family’s summer plans went awry. Jonny was signed up for overnight camp, but the team had been so surprisingly successful that he couldn’t even go on time and stayed home instead for the state final four. Both my parents had to cancel vacation plans.

Central readied for battle in the Massachusetts state tournament with three other teams in a double-elimination format. Day after day, as the squad stayed alive and knocked out two teams in the process, Jonny’s fan club—which had grown to include aunts and uncles, grandparents and family friends—made the 40-minute trek up to Beverly to pack the stands for the highest level of Little League ball most of us would ever see live. Brother Sammy came up from his camp in New York just to see Jonny pitch. Robert, who was a counselor at a nearby overnight camp, convinced his program director to let him borrow the camp van and bring six or seven of his campers to see the action.

Central made it all the way to the final round before losing, ending its run in second place out of 266 teams in the state tournament. It wasn’t easy for the boys to taste Williamsport and never reach it, but really, wasn’t playing the state finals enough pressure for a bunch of 12-year-olds?

Jonny still savors the thrill. For him, no feeling can equal that of taking the mound under the lights in front of a huge crowd with the game on the line. He best described the summer of 2009 when he wrote to me about his shutout in the district finals: “It was exhilarating to baffle the hitters repeatedly and to feel like I was on top of the world.”

Jacob Levenfeld is a List College junior majoring in history and Talmud.
sports@columbiaspectator.com