Big-Time Little League

All summer long, some 200,000 baseball players have battled each other to get to Williamsport, Pa. (pop. 45,000). Organized in more than 11,000 teams in the U.S. and its territories, Canada, Cuba and the far Pacific, they played under familiar club names--Yankees, Braves, Tigers, most of the big-league roll call. Less than one team out of each thousand finally made it to Williamsport last week. A few days later, after six teams had been eliminated, the two surviving clubs met in a final game for the world championship. Some 8,500 hoarse fans, burning with World Series fever, ignored such distractions as one catcher's bubble gum continually ballooning out through his mask. Between pitches, his battery mate ballooned back. That was natural enough. This was the annual finale of the Little League, limited to boys of eight to twelve.

Like a Flood. In membership, the Little League is the world's biggest baseball organization. It was started in Williamsport in 1939 by Businessman Carl E. Stotz, 43, who decided that organized baseball was just the tonic for lads too small or too young to get into their big brothers' games. Rallying support from local businessmen, Stotz soon had a three-team league--with regulation uniforms, coaches and managers--going full blast.

After World War II, with his idea on the go like a Susquehanna flood, Stotz asked U.S. Rubber Co. if it would make a rubber-cleated shoe for his Little Leaguers. The company not only agreed to turn out the shoe (the Little League now gives approval to any manufacturer meeting its specifications), but also to underwrite most of the Little League's central expenses as "enlightened public relations." This year, U.S. Rubber donated about $150,000 toward operating the league's 25-staffer headquarters in Williamsport and footing World Series players' traveling expenses. Other league activities are locally financed, manned by volunteers. Stotz is now commissioner. U.S. Rubber's easygoing Publicity Man Peter J. McGovern, 51, who moved to Williamsport last winter, is the Little League's elected president.

Growing Pains. In going big time, the Little League has acquired both troubles and critics. Some physical educators, and many a parent whose boy failed to make a team, sincerely believe the whole movement has degenerated into an unseemly exploitation of a relatively few talented boys. The accused: local commercial sponsors from jewelry stores and filling stations to undertaking parlors, rabid fathers and coaches trying vicariously to realize their own frustrated ambitions, mobs of partisan fans to whom winning means more than the boys' welfare or the game. Counters Pete McGovern: "The kids, on their own, can take the competition in their stride; it's the adults who sometimes go off the deep end." Admitting that local abuses have forced withdrawal of some Little League franchises ($20 a year), he points out that, "a bureaucracy" would be needed to police some 11,000 potential trouble spots. Adds he: "Little League must have growing pains, and we must see that it grows properly." To his critics, however, the growth will be dangerous until, at the very least, it is decentralized and reverts back to Stotz's original, community-level contests.

If last week's final World Series game was exploitation, the players seemed oblivious to the dark cloud. Some were nervous, but none cracked up. Bantam-sized (5 ft. 2 in., 103 Ibs.) Joe Sims of Birmingham struck out six batters, issued no walks, allowed only two hits in shutting out Schenectady, 1 to 0. The losers, moist-eyed but not bawling, pattered from their dugout to congratulate the Alabama players, who triumphantly hoisted Sims to their shoulders. The winners were then engulfed by autograph-hunting bobby-soxers. Piped one downy-cheeked champion: "This is worse than the game."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.