Machias, the Aroostook County/Washington County winner, is next on the docket - a two-out-of-three series, and the winner will be District 3 champion. The first game is to be played at the Bangor field, behind the c.o.ke plant, the second at Bob Beal Field in Machias. The last game, if needed, will be played on neutral ground between the two towns.
As Neil Waterman has promised, the coaching staff is all encouragement once the national anthem has been played and the first game starts.
"That"s all right, no damage!" Dave Mansfield cries as Arthur Dorr misjudges a long shot to right and the ball lands behind him. "Get an out, now! Belly play! Let"s just get an out!" No one seems to know exactly what "belly play" is, but since it seems to involve winning ball games, the boys are all for it.
No third game against Machias is necessary. Bangor West gets a strong pitching performance from Matt Kinney in the first one and wins 17-5. Winning the second game is a little tougher only because the weather does not cooperate: a drenching summer downpour washes out the first try, and it is necessary for Bangor West to make the 168-mile round trip to Machias twice in order to clinch the division. They finally get the game in, on the twenty-ninth of July. Mike Pelkey"s family has spirited Bangor West"s number two pitcher off to Disney World in Orlando, making Mike the third player to fade from the team, but Owen King steps quietly in and pitches a five-hitter, striking out eight before tiring and giving way to Mike Arnold in the sixth inning. Bangor West wins, 12-2, and becomes District 3 Little League champ.
At moments like these, the pros retire to their air-conditioned locker rooms and pour champagne over each other"s heads. The Bangor West team goes out to Helen"s, the best (maybe the only) restaurant in Machias, to celebrate with hot dogs, hamburgers, gallons of Pepsi-Cola, and mountains of French fries. Looking at them as they laugh at each other, razz each other, and blow napkin pellets through their straws at each other, it is impossible not to be aware of how soon they will discover gaudier modes of celebration.
For now, however, this is perfectly O.K. - great, in fact. They are not overwhelmed by what they have done, but they seem tremendously pleased, tremendously content, and entirely here. If they have been touched with magic this summer, they do not know it, and no one has as yet been unkind enough to tell them that it may be so. For now they are allowed the deep-fried simplicities of Helen"s, and those simplicities are quite enough. They have won their division; the State Championship Tournament, where bigger and better teams from the more heavily populated regions downstate will probably blow them out, is still a week away.
Ryan Larrobino has changed back into his tank top. Arthur Donhas a rakish smear of ketchup on one cheek. And Owen King, who struck terror into the hearts of the Machias batters by coming at them with a powerful sidearm fastball on 0-2 counts, is burbling happily into his gla.s.s of Pepsi. Nick Trzaskos, who can look unhappier than any boy on earth when things don"t break his way, looks supremely happy tonight. And why not? Tonight they"re twelve and they"re winners.
Not that they don"t remind you themselves from time to time. Halfway back from Machias after the first trip, the rainout, J. J. Fiddler begins to wriggle around uneasily in the back seat of the car he is riding in. "I gotta go," he says. He clutches at himself and adds ominously, "Man, I gotta go bad. I mean big time."
"J.J."s gonna do it!" Joe Wilc.o.x cries gleefully. "Watch this! J.J."s gonna flood the car!"
"Shut up, Joey," J.J. says, and then begins to wriggle around again.
He has waited until the worst possible moment to make his announcement. The eighty-four-mile trip between Machias and Bangor is, for the most part, an exercise in emptiness. There isn"t even a decent stand of trees into which J.J. can disappear for a few moments along this stretch of road - only mile after mile of open hayfields, with Route 1A cutting a winding course through them.
Just as JJ."s bladder is going to DEFCON-1, a providential gas station appears. The a.s.sistant coach swings in and tops up his tank while J.J. splits for the men"s room. "Boy!" he says, brushing his hair out of his eyes as he jogs back to the car. " That was close!"
"Got some on your pants, J.J.," Joe Wilc.o.x says casually, and everyone goes into spasms of wild laughter as J.J. checks.
On the trip back to Machias the next day, Matt Kinney reveals one of the chief attractions People magazine holds for boys of Little League age. "I"m sure there"s one in here someplace," he says, leafing slowly through an issue he has found on the back seat. "There almost always is."
"What? What are you looking for?" third baseman Kevin Rochefort asks, peering over Matt"s shoulder as Matt leafs past the week"s celebs, barely giving them a look.
"The breast-examination ad," Matt explains. "You can"t see everything, but you can see quite a lot. Here it is!" He holds the magazine up triumphantly.
Four other heads, each wearing a red Bangor West baseball cap, immediately cl.u.s.ter around the magazine. For a few minutes, at least, baseball is the furthest thing from these boys" minds.
The 1989 Maine State Little League Championship Tournament begins on August 3, just over four weeks after All-Star play began for the teams involved. The state is divided into five districts, and all five send teams to Old Town, where this year"s tourney is to be held. The partic.i.p.ants are Yarmouth, Belfast, Lewiston, York, and Bangor West. All the teams but Belfast are bigger than the Bangor West All-Stars, and Belfast is supposed to have a secret weapon. Their number one pitcher is this year"s tourney wunderkind.
The naming of the tourney wunderkind is a yearly ceremony, a small tumor that seems to defy all attempts to remove it. This boy, who is anointed Kid Baseball whether he wants the honor or not, finds himself in a heretofore unsuspected spotlight, the object of discussion, speculation, and, inevitably, wagering. He also finds himself in the unenviable position of having to live up to all sorts of pretournament hype. A Little League tournament is a pressure situation for any kid; When you get to Tourney Town and discover you have somehow become an instant legend as well, it"s usually too much.
This year"s object of myth and discussion is Belfast"s southpaw Stanley Sturgis. In his two outings for Belfast he has chalked up thirty strikeouts - fourteen in his first game, sixteen in his second. Thirty K"s in two games is an impressive statistic in any league, but to fully understand Sturgis"s accomplishment one has to remember that Little League games consist of only six innings. That means that 83 per cent of the outs Belfast recorded with Sturgis on the hill came on strikeouts.
Then there is York. All the teams that come to the Knights of Columbus field in Old Town to compete in the tourney have excellent records, but York, which is undefeated, is the clear favorite to win a ticket to the Eastern Regionals. None of their players are giants, but several of them are over five-ten, and their best pitcher, Phil Tarbox, has a fastball that may top seventy miles an hour on some pitches - extravagant by Little League standards. Like Yarmouth and Belfast, the York players come dressed in special All-Star uniforms and matching turf shoes, which make them look like pros.
Only Bangor West and Lewiston come wearing mufti - which is to say, shirts of many colors bearing the names of their regular-season team sponsors. Owen King wears Elks orange, Ryan Larrobino and Nick Trzaskos wear Bangor Hydro red, Roger Fisher and Fred Moore wear Lions green, and so on. The Lewiston team is dressed in similar fashion, but they have at least been provided with matching shoes and stirrups. Compared with Lewiston, the Bangor team, dressed in a variety of baggy gray sweatpants and nondescript street sneakers, looks eccentric. Next to the other teams, however, they look like out-and-out ragam.u.f.fins. No one, with the possible exception of the Bangor West coaches and the players themselves, takes them very seriously. In its first article on the tourney the local newspaper gives more coverage to Sturgis, of Belfast, than it does to the entire Bangor West team.
Dave, Neil, and Saint, the odd but surprisingly effective brain trust that has brought the team this far, watch Belfast take infield and batting practice without saying much. The Belfast kids are resplendent in their new purple-and-white uniforms - uniforms that have not worn so much as a speck of infield dirt until today. At last, Dave says, "Well, we finally got here again. We did that much. n.o.body can take that away from us."
Bangor West comes from the district in which the tournament is being held this year, and the team will not have to play until two of the five teams have been eliminated. This is called a first-round bye, and right now it"s the biggest, perhaps the only, advantage this team has. In their own district, they looked like champions (except for that one awful game against Hampden), but Dave, Neil, and Saint have been around long enough to know that they are now looking at an entirely different level of baseball. Their silence as they stand by the fence watching Belfast work out acknowledges this eloquently.
In contrast, York has already ordered District 4 pins. Trading pins is a tradition at the regional tournaments, and the fact that York has already laid in a supply tells an interesting tale. The pins say York means to play with the best of the East Coast, in Bristol. The pins say they don"t think Yarmouth can stop them; or Belfast, with its wunderkind southpaw; or Lewiston, which clawed its way to the Division 2 championship through the losers" bracket, after dropping their first game 15-12; or, least of all, fourteen badly dressed pipsqueaks from the west side of Bangor.
"At least we"ll get a chance to play," Dave says, "and we"ll try to make them remember we were here."
But first Belfast and Lewiston have their chance to play, and after the Boston Pops has steamed through a recorded version of the national anthem, and a local writer of some repute has tossed out the obligatory first pitch (it sails all the way to the backstop), they have at it.
Area sports reporters have spilled a lot of ink on the subject of Stanley Sturgis, but reporters are not allowed on the field once the game starts (a situation caused by a mistake in the rules as they were originally laid out, some of them seem to feel). Once the umpire has commanded the teams to play ball, Sturgis finds himself on his own. The writers, the pundits, and the entire Belfast hot-stove league are now all on the other side of the fence.
Baseball is a team sport, but there is only one player with a ball at the center of each diamond and only one player with a bat at the diamond"s lowest point. The man with the bat keeps changing, but the pitcher remains - unless he can no longer cut it, that is. Today is Stan Sturgis"s day to discover the hard truth of tourney play: sooner or later, every wunderkind meets his match.
Sturgis struck out thirty men in his last pair of games, but that was District 2. The team Belfast is playing today, a tough bunch of sc.r.a.ppers out of Lewiston"s Elliot Avenue League, is a different plate of beans altogether. They are not as big as the boys from York and don"t field as smoothly as the boys from Yarmouth, but they are pesky and persistent. The first batter, Carlton Gagnon, personifies the gnawing, clawing spirit of the team. He singles up the middle, steals second, is sacrificed to third, and then bolts home on a steal play sent in from the bench. In the third inning, with the score 1-0, Gagnon reaches base again, this time on a fielder"s choice. Randy Gervais, who follows this pest in the lineup, strikes out, but before he does, Gagnon has gone to second on a pa.s.sed ball and stolen third. He scores on a two-out base hit by Bill Paradis, the third baseman.
Belfast comes up with a run in the fourth, briefly making a game of it, but then Lewiston puts them, and Stanley Sturgis, away for good, scoring two in the fifth and four more in the sixth. The final tally is 9-1. Sturgis strikes out eleven, but he also gives up seven hits, while Carlton Gagnon, Lewiston"s pitcher, strikes out eight and allows only three hits. When Sturgis leaves the field at the end of the game, he looks both depressed and relieved. For him the hype and hoopla are over. He can quit being a newspaper sidebar and go back to being a kid again. His face suggests that he sees certain advantages in that.
Later, in a battle of the giants, tourney favorite York knocks off Yarmouth. Then everybody goes home (or, in the case of the visiting players, back to their motels or to the homes of their host families). Tomorrow, Friday, it will be Bangor West"s turn to play while York waits to meet the winner in the closer.
Friday comes in hot, foggy, and cloudy. Rain threatens from first light, and an hour or so before Bangor West and Lewiston are scheduled to square off the rain comes - a deluge of rain. When this sort of weather struck in Machias, the game was quickly cancelled. Not here. This is a different field - one with a gra.s.s infield instead of dirt - but that isn"t the only factor. The major one is TV. This year, for the first time, two stations have pooled their resources and will telecast the tournament final statewide on Sat.u.r.day afternoon. If the semifinal between Bangor and Lewiston is postponed, it means trouble with the schedule, and even in Maine, even in this most amateur of amateur sports, the one thing you don"t jiggle is the media"s schedule.
So the Bangor West and Lewiston teams are not dismissed when they come to the field. Instead, they sit in cars or cl.u.s.ter in little groups beneath the candy-striped canvas of the central concession booth. Then they wait for a break in the weather. And wait. And wait. Restlessness sets in, of course. Many of these kids will play in bigger games before their athletic careers end, but this is the biggest to date for all of them; they are pumped to the max.
Someone eventually has a brainstorm. After a few quick phone calls, two Old Town school buses, gleaming bright yellow in the drenching rain, pull up to the nearby Elks Club, and the players are whisked off on a tour of the Old Town Canoe Company factory and the local James River paper mill. (The James River Corporation is the prime buyer of ad time on the upcoming championship telecast.) None of the players look particularly happy as they climb aboard the buses; they don"t look much happier when they arrive back. Each player is carrying a small canoe paddle, about the right size for a well-built elf. Freebies from the canoe factory. None of the boys seem to know just what they should do with the paddles, but when I check later they"re all gone, just like the Bangor pennants after that first game against Millinocket. Free souvenirs - good deal.
And there will be a game after all, it seems. At some point - perhaps while the Little Leaguers were watching the fellows at the James River mill turn trees into toilet paper - the rain stopped. The field has drained well, the pitcher"s mound and the batters" boxes have been dusted with Quick-Dry, and now, at just past three in the afternoon, a watery sun takes its first peek through the clouds.
The Bangor West team has come back from the field trip flat and listless. No one has thrown a ball or swung a bat or run a single base so far today, but everybody already seems tired. The players walk toward the practice field without looking at each other; gloves dangle at the ends of arms. They walk like losers, and they talk like losers.
Instead of lecturing them, Dave lines them up and begins playing his version of pepper with them. Soon the Bangor players are razzing each other, catcalling, trying for circus catches, groaning and b.i.t.c.hing when Dave calls an error and sends someone to the end of the line. Then, just before Dave is ready to call the workout off and take them over to Neil and Saint for batting practice, Roger Fisher steps out of the line and bends over with his glove against his belly. Dave goes to him at once, his smile becoming an expression of concern. He wants to know if Roger is all right.
"Yes," Roger says. "I just wanted to get this." He bends down a little farther, dark eyes intent, plucks something out of the gra.s.s, and hands it to Dave. It is a four-leaf clover.
In Little League tournament games, the home team is always decided by a coin toss. Dave has been extremely lucky at winning these, but today he loses, and Bangor West is designated the visiting team. Sometimes even bad luck turns out to be good, though, and this is one of those days. Nick Trzaskos is the reason.
The skills of all the players have improved during their six-week season, but in some cases att.i.tudes have improved as well. Nick started deep on the bench, despite his proven skills as a defensive player and his potential as a hitter; his fear of failure made him unready to play. Little by little, he has begun to trust himself, and now Dave is ready to try starting him. "Nick finally figured out that the other guys weren"t going to give him a hard time if he dropped a ball or struck out," St. Pierre says. "For a kid like Nick, that"s a big change."
Today, Nick cranks the third pitch of the game to deep center field. It is a hard, rising line drive, over the fence and gone before the center fielder has a chance to turn and look, let alone cruise back and grab it. As Nick Trzaskos rounds second and slows down, breaking into the home-run trot all these boys know so well from TV, the fans behind the backstop are treated to a rare sight: Nick is grinning. As he crosses home plate and his surprised, happy teammates mob him, he actually begins to laugh. As he enters the dugout, Neil claps him on the back, and Dave Mansfield gives him a brief, hard hug.
Nick has also finished what Dave started with his game of pepper: the team is fully awake now, and ready to do some business. Matt Kinney gives up a lead-off single to Carl Gagnon, the pest who began the process of dismantling Stanley Sturgis. Gagnon goes to second on Ryan Stretton"s sacrifice, advances to third on a wild pitch, and scores on another wild pitch. It is an almost uncanny repet.i.tion of his first at bat against Belfast. Kinney"s control is not great this afternoon, but Gagnon"s is the only run the team from Lewiston can manage in the early going. This is unfortunate for them, because Bangor comes up hitting in the top of the second.
Owen King leads off with a deep single; Arthur Dorr follows with another; Mike Arnold reaches when Lewiston"s catcher, Jason Auger, picks up Arnold"s bunt and throws wild to first base. King scores on the error, putting Bangor West back on top, 2-1. Joe Wilc.o.x, Bangor"s catcher, scratches out an infield hit to load the bases. Nick Trzaskos strikes out his second time up, and that brings Ryan Larrobino to the plate. He struck out his first time up, but not now. He turns Matt Noyes"s first pitch into a grand-slam home run, and after an inning and a half the score is Bangor West 6, Lewiston 1.
Up to the sixth, it is an authentic four-leaf-clover day for Bangor West. When Lewiston comes to bat for what the Bangor fans hope will be the last time, they are down by a score of 9-1. The pest, Carlton Gagnon, leads off and reaches on an error. The next batter, Ryan Stretton, also reaches on an error. The Bangor fans, who have been cheering wildly, begin to look a little uneasy. It"s hard to choke when you"re eight runs ahead, but not impossible. These northern New Englanders are Red Sox fans. They have seen it happen many times.
Bill Paradis makes the jitters worse by singling sharply up the middle. Both Gagnon and Stretton come home. The score is now 9-3, runner on first, n.o.body out. The Bangor fans shuffle and look at each other uneasily. It can"t really get away from us this late in the game, can it? their looks ask. The answer is, Of course, you bet it can. In Little League, anything can and often does happen.
But not this time. Lewiston scores one more time, and that"s it. Noyes, who fanned three times against Sturgis, fans for the third time today, and there is finally one out. Auger, Lewiston"s catcher, hits the first pitch hard to the shortstop, Roger Fisher. Roger booted Carl Gagnon"s ball earlier in the inning to open the door, but he picks this one up easily and shovels it to Mike Arnold, who feeds it on to Owen King at first. Auger is slow, and King"s reach is long. The result is a game-ending 6-4-3 double play. You don"t often see around-the-horn d.p.s in the scaled-down world of Little League, where the base paths are only sixty feet long, but Roger found a four-leaf clover today. If you have to chalk it up to anything, it might as well be that. Whatever you chalk it up to, the boys from Bangor have won another one, 9-4.
Tomorrow, there are the giants from York.
It is August 5, 1989, and in the state of Maine only twenty-nine boys are still playing Little League ball - fourteen on the Bangor West squad and fifteen on York"s team. The day is an almost exact replica of the day before: hot, foggy, and threatening. The game is scheduled to begin promptly at 12:30, but the skies open once again, and by 11 it looks as though the game will be - must be - cancelled. The rain comes pouring down in buckets.
Dave, Neil, and Saint are taking no chances, however. None of them liked the flat mood the kids were in when they returned from their impromptu tour of the day before, and they have no intention of allowing a repeat. No one wants to end up counting on a game of pepper or a four-leaf clover today. If there is a game - and TV is a powerful motivator, no matter how murky the weather - it will be for all the marbles. The winners go on to Bristol; the losers go home.
So a makeshift cavalcade of vans and station wagons driven by coaches and parents is a.s.sembled at the field behind the c.o.ke plant, and the team is ferried the ten miles up to the University of Maine field house, a barnlike indoor facility where Neil and Saint rally them through their paces until the boys are soaked with sweat. Dave has arranged for the York team to use the field house, too, and as the Bangor team exits into the overcast the York team, dressed in their natty blue uniforms, troops in.
The rain is down to isolated dribbles by three o"clock, and the ground crew works frantically to return the field to playable shape. Five makeshift TV platforms have been constructed on steel frames around the field. In a nearby parking lot is a huge truck with MAINE BROADCASTING SYSTEM LIVE REMOTE painted on the side. Thick bundles of cable, held together with cinches of electrician"s tape, lead from the cameras and the temporary announcer"s booth back to this truck. One door stands open, and many TV monitors glimmer within.
York hasn"t arrived from the field house yet. The Bangor West squad begins throwing outside the left-field fence, mostly to have something to do and keep the jitters at bay; they certainly don"t need to warm up after the humid hour they just spent at the University. The camerapersons stand on their towers and watch the ground crew try to get rid of the water.
The outfield is in fair shape, and the skin parts of the infield have been raked and coated with Quick-Dry. The real problem is the area between home plate and the pitcher"s mound. This section of the diamond was freshly resodded before the tournament began, and there has been no time for the roots to take hold and provide some natural drainage. The result is a swampy mess in front of home plate - a mess that slops off toward the third-base line.
Someone has an idea - an inspiration, as it turns out - that involves actually removing a large section of the wounded infield. While this is being done, a truck arrives from Old Town High School and two industrial-size Rinsenvacs are off-loaded. Five minutes later, the ground crew is literally vacuuming the subsurface of the infield. It works. By 3:25, the groundskeepers are replacing chunks of sod like pieces in a large green jigsaw puzzle. By 3:35, a local music teacher, accompanying herself on an acoustic guitar, is winging her way through a gorgeous rendition of "The Star-Spangled Banner." And at 3:37 Bangor West"s Roger Fisher, Dave"s dark-horse pick to start in place of the absent Mike Pelkey, is warming up. Did Roger"s find of the day before have anything to do with Dave"s decision to start him instead of King or Arnold? Dave only puts his finger on the side of his nose and smiles wisely.
At 3:40, the umpire steps in. "Send it down, catcher," he says briskly. Joey does. Mike Arnold makes the sweep tag on the invisible runner, then sends the baseball on its quick journey around the infield. A TV audience that stretches from New Hampshire to the Maritime Provinces of Canada watches as Roger fusses nervously with the sleeves of his green jersey and the gray warm-up shirt he wears beneath it. Owen King tosses him the ball from first base. Fisher takes it and holds it against his hip.
"Let"s play ball," the umpire invites - an invitation that umpires have been extending to Little League players for fifty years now - and Dan Bouchard, York"s catcher and leadoff hitter, steps into the box. Roger goes to the set position and prepares to throw the first pitch of the 1989 State Championship game.
Five days earlier: Dave and I take the Bangor West pitching staff up to Old Town. Dave wants them all to know how the mound feels when they come up here to play for real. With Mike Pelkey gone, the staff consists of Matt Kinney (his triumph over Lewiston still four days in the future), Owen King, Roger Fisher, and Mike Arnold. We get off to a late start, and as the four boys take turns throwing, Dave and I sit in the visitors" dugout, watching the boys as the light slowly leaves the summer sky.
On the mound, Matt Kinney is throwing one hard curve after another to J. J. Fiddler. In the home dugout, across the diamond, the three other pitchers, their workouts finished, are sitting on the bench with a few teammates who have come along for the ride. Although the talk comes to me only in s.n.a.t.c.hes, I can tell it"s mostly about school - a subject that comes up with greater and greater frequency during the last month of summer vacation. They talk about teachers past and teachers future, pa.s.sing on the anecdotes that form an important part of their preadolescent mythology: the teacher who blew her cool during the last month of the school year because her oldest son was in a car accident; the crazy grammar-school coach (they make him sound like a lethal combination of Jason, Freddy, and Leatherface); the science teacher who supposedly once threw a kid against his locker so hard the kid was knocked out; the home-room teacher who will give you lunch money if you forget, or if you just say you forgot. It is junior high apocrypha, powerful stuff, and they tell it with great relish as twilight closes in.
Between the two dugouts, the baseball is a white streak as Matt throws it again and again. His rhythm is a kind of hypnosis: Set, wind, and fire. Set, wind, and fire. Set, wind, and fire. J.J."s mitt cracks with each reception.
"What are they going to take with them?" I ask Dave. "When this is all over, what are they going to take with them? What difference does it make for them, do you think?"
The look on Dave"s face is surprised and considering. Then he turns back to look at Matt and smiles. "They"re going to take each other," he says.
It is not the answer I have been expecting - far from it. There was an article about Little League in the paper today - one of those think pieces that usually run in the ad-littered wasteland between the obituaries and the horoscopes. This one summarized the findings of a sociologist who spent a season monitoring Little Leaguers, and then followed their progress for a short time thereafter. He wanted to find out if the game did what Little League boosters claim it does - that is, pa.s.s on such old-fashioned American values as fair play, hard work, and the virtue of team effort. The fellow who did the study reported that it did, sort of. But he also reported that Little League did little to change the individual lives of the players. School troublemakers were still school troublemakers when cla.s.ses started again in September; good scholars were still good scholars; the cla.s.s clown (read Fred Moore) who took June and July off to play some serious Little League ball was still the cla.s.s clown after Labor Day. The sociologist found exceptions; exceptional play sometimes bred exceptional changes. But in the main this fellow found that the boys were about the same coming out as they were going in.
I suppose my confusion at Dave"s answer grows out of my knowledge of him - he is an almost fanatic booster of Little League. I"m sure he must have read the article, and I have been expecting him to refute the sociologist"s conclusions, using the question as a springboard. Instead, he has delivered one of the h.o.a.riest chestnuts of the sports world.
On the mound, Matt continues to throw to J.J., harder than ever now. He has found that mystic place pitchers call "the groove," and even though this is only an informal practice session to familiarize the boys with the field, he is reluctant to quit.
I ask Dave if he can explain a little more fully, but I do so in a gingerly way, half expecting that I am on the verge of hitting a hitherto unsuspected jackpot of cliches: night owls never fly in the daytime; winners never quit and quitters never win; use it, don"t lose it. Maybe even, G.o.d save us, a little Hummm, baby.
"Look at them," Dave says, still smiling. Something in that smile suggests he may be reading my mind. "Take a good look." I do. There are perhaps half a dozen of them on the bench, still laughing and telling junior high school war stories. One of them breaks out of the discussion long enough to ask Matt Kinney to throw the curve, and Matt does - one with a particularly nasty break. The boys on the bench all laugh and cheer.
"Look at those two guys," Dave says, pointing. "One of them comes from a good home. The other one, not so good." He tosses some sunflower seeds into his mouth and then indicates another boy. "Or that one. He was born in one of the worst sections of Boston. Do you think he"d know a kid like Matt Kinney or Kevin Rochefort, if it wasn"t for Little League? They won"t be in the same cla.s.ses at junior high, wouldn"t talk to each other in the halls, wouldn"t have the slightest idea the other one was alive." Matt throws another curve; this one so nasty J.J. can"t handle it. It rolls all the way to the backstop, and as J.J. gets up and trots after it the boys on the bench cheer again.
"But this changes all that," Dave says. "These boys have played together and won their district together. Some come from families that are well-to-do, and there"s a couple from families as poor as used dishwater, but when they put on the uniform and cross the chalk they leave all that on the other side. Your school grades can"t help you between the chalk, or what your parents do, or what they don"t do. Between the chalk, what happens is the kids" business. They tend it, too, as well as they can. All the rest - " Dave makes a shooing gesture with one hand. "All left behind. And they know it, too. Just look at them if you don"t believe me, because the proof is right there."
I look across the field and see my own kid and one of the boys Dave has mentioned sitting side-by-side, heads together, talking something over seriously. They look at each other in amazement, then break out laughing.
"They played together," Dave repeats. "They practiced together, day after day, and that"s probably even more important than the games. Now they"re going into the State Tournament. They"ve even got a chance to win it. I don"t think they will, but that doesn"t matter. They"re going to be there, and that"s enough. Even if Lewiston knocks them out in the first round, that"s enough. Because it"s something they did together between those chalk lines. They"re going to remember that. They"re going to remember how that felt."
"Between the chalk," I say, and all at once I get it - the penny drops. Dave Mansfield believes this old chestnut. Not only that, he can afford to believe it. Such cliches may be hollow in the big leagues, where some player or other tests positive for drugs every week or two and the free agent is G.o.d, but this is not the big leagues. This is where Anita Bryant sings the national anthem over battered PA speakers that have been wired to the chain-link behind the dugouts. This is where, instead of paying admission, to watch the game, you put something in the hat when it comes around. If you want to, of course. None of these kids are going to spend the off-season playing fantasy baseball in Florida with overweight businessmen, or signing expensive baseball cards at memorabilia shows, or touring the chicken circuit at two thousand bucks a night. When it"s all free, Dave"s smile suggests, they have to give the cliches back and let you own them again, fair and square. You are once more allowed to believe in Red Barber, John Tunis, and the Kid from Tomkinsville. Dave Mansfield believes what he is saying about how the boys are equal between the chalk, and he has a right to believe, because he and Neil and Saint have patiently led these kids to a point where they believe it. They do believe it; I can see it on their faces as they sit in the dugout on the far side of the diamond. It could be why Dave Mansfield and all the other Dave Mansfields across the country keep on doing this, year after year. It"s a free pa.s.s. Not back into childhood - it doesn"t work that way - but back into the dream.
Dave falls silent for a moment, thinking, bouncing a few sunflower seeds up and down in the palm of his hand.
"It"s not about winning or losing," he says finally. "That comes later. It"s about how they"ll pa.s.s each other in the corridor this year, or even down the road in high school, and look at each other, and remember. In a way, they"re going to be on the team that won the district in 1989 for a long time." Dave glances across into the shadowy first-base dugout, where Fred Moore is now laughing about something with Mike Arnold. Owen King glances from one to the other, grinning. "It"s about knowing who your teammates are. The people you had to depend on, whether you wanted to or not."
He watches the boys as they laugh and joke four days before their tournament is scheduled to begin, then raises his voice and tells Matt to throw four or five more and knock off.
Not all coaches who win the coin toss - as Dave Mansfield does on August 5, for the sixth time in nine postseason games - elect to be the home team. Some of them (the coach from Brewer, for instance) believe the so-called home-team advantage is a complete fiction, especially in a tournament game, where neither team is actually playing on its home field. The argument for being the visitors in a jackpot game runs like this: At the start of such a game, the kids on both teams are nervous. The way to take advantage of those nerves, the reasoning goes, is to bat first and let the defending team commit enough walks, balks, and errors to put you in the driver"s seat. If you bat first and score four runs, these theorists conclude, you own the game before it"s barely begun. QED. It"s a theory Dave Mansfield has never subscribed to. "I want my lasties," he says, and for him that"s the end of it.
Except today is a little different. It is not only a tournament game, it is a championship tournament game - a televised championship game, in fact. And as Roger Fisher winds and fires his first pitch past everything for ball one, Dave Mansfield"s face is that of a man who is fervently hoping he hasn"t made a mistake.
Roger knows that he is a spot starter - that Mike Pelkey would be out here in his place if Pelkey weren"t currently shaking hands with Goofy down in Disney World - but he manages his first-inning jitters as well as one could expect, maybe a little better. He backs off the mound following each return from the catcher, Joe Wilc.o.x, studies the batter, fiddles with his shirtsleeves, and takes all the time he needs. Most important of all, he understands how necessary it is to keep the ball in the lowest quarter of the strike zone. The York lineup is packed with power from top to bottom. If Roger makes a mistake and gets one up in the batter"s eyes - especially a batter like Tarbox, who hits as powerfully as he throws - it"s going to get lost in a hurry.
He loses the first York batter nevertheless. Bouchard trots down to first, accompanied by the hysterical cheers of the York rooting section. The next batter is Philbrick, the shortstop. He bangs the first pitch back to Fisher. In one of those plays that sometimes decide ball games, Roger elects to go to second and try to force the lead runner. In most Little League games, this turns out to be a bad idea. Either the pitcher throws wild into center field, allowing the lead runner to get to third, or he discovers that his short-stop has not moved over to cover second and the bag is undefended. Today, however, it works. St. Pierre has drilled these boys well on their defensive positions. Matt Kinney, today"s shortstop, is right where he"s supposed to be. So is Roger"s throw. Philbrick reaches first on a fielder"s choice, but Bouchard is out. This time, it is the Bangor West fans who roar out their approval.
The play settles most of Bangor West"s jitters and gives Roger Fisher some badly needed confidence. Phil Tarbox, York"s most consistent hitter as well as their ace pitcher, strikes out on a pitch low and out of the strike zone. "Get him next time, Phil!" a York player calls from the bench. "You"re just not used to pitching this slow!"
But speed is not the problem the York batters are having with Roger; it"s location. Ron St. Pierre has preached the gospel of the low pitch all season long, and Roger Fisher - Fish, the boys call him - has been a quiet but extremely attentive student during Saint"s ball-yard seminars. Dave"s decisions to pitch Roger and bat last look pretty good as Bangor comes in to bat in the bottom of the first. I see several of the boys touch Mo, the little plastic sandal, as they enter the dugout.
Confidence - of the team, of the fans, of the coaches - is a quality that can be measured in different ways, but whatever yardstick you choose, York comes out on the long side. The hometown cheering section has hung a sign on the lower posts of the scoreboard. YORK IS BRISTOL BOUND, this exuberant Fan-O-Gram reads. And there is the matter of those District 4 pins, all made up and ready for trading. But the clearest indicator of the deep confidence York"s coach has in his players is revealed in his starting pitcher. All the other clubs, including Bangor West, pitched their number one starter in their first game, bearing an old playoff axiom in mind: if you don"t get a date, you can"t dance at the prom. If you can"t win your prelim, you don"t have to worry about the final. Only the coach from York ran counter to this wisdom, and pitched his number two starter, Ryan Fernald, in the first game, against Yarmouth. He got away with it - by a whisker - as his team outlasted Yarmouth, 9-8. That was a close shave, but today should be the payoff. He has saved Phil Tarbox for the final, and while Tarbox may not be technically as good as Stanley Sturgis, he"s got something going for him that Sturgis did not. Phil Tarbox is scary.
Nolan Ryan, probably the greatest fastball pitcher ever to play the game of baseball, likes to tell a story about a Babe Ruth League tournament game he pitched in. He hit the opposing team"s leadoff batter in the arm, breaking it. He hit the second batter in the head, splitting the boy"s helmet in two and knocking him out for a few moments. While this second boy was being attended to, the number three batter, ashen-faced and trembling, went up to his coach and begged the man not to make him hit. "And I didn"t blame him," Ryan adds.
Tarbox is no Nolan Ryan, but he throws hard and he is aware that intimidation is the pitcher"s secret weapon. Sturgis also threw hard, but he kept the ball low and outside. Sturgis was polite. Tarbox likes to work high and tight. Bangor West has got to where they are today by swinging the bat. If Tarbox can intimidate them, he will take the bats out of their hands, and if he does that Bangor is finished.
Nick Trzaskos doesn"t come anywhere near a leadoff home run today. Tarbox strikes him out with an intimate fastball that has Nick ducking out of the box. Nick looks around unbelievingly at the home-plate umpire and opens his mouth to protest. "Don"t say a word, Nick!" Dave blares from the dugout. "Just hustle back in there!" Nick does, but his face has resumed its former narrow look. Once inside the dugout, he slings his batting helmet disgustedly under the bench.
Tarbox will try to work everyone but Ryan Larrobino high and tight today. Word on Larrobino has got around, and not even Phil Tarbox, confident as he appears to be, will challenge him. He works Ryan low and outside, finally walking him. He also walks Matt Kinney, who follows Ryan, but now he is high and tight again. Matt has superb reflexes, and he needs them to avoid being hit, and hit hard. By the time he is awarded first base, Larrobino is already at second, courtesy of a wild pitch that came within inches of Mart"s face. Then Tarbox settles down a little, striking out Kevin Rochefort and Roger Fisher to end the first inning.
Roger Fisher continues to work slowly and methodically, fiddling with his sleeves between pitches, glancing around at his infield, occasionally even checking the sky, possibly for UFOs. With two on and one out, Estes, who reached on a walk, breaks for third on a pitch that bounces out of Joe Wilc.o.x"s glove and lands at his feet. Joe recovers quickly and guns the ball down to Kevin Rochefort at third. The ball is waiting for Estes when he arrives, and he trots back to the dugout. Two out; Fernald has gone to second on the play.
Wyatt, York"s number eight hitter, dribbles one up the right side of the infield. The ball"s progress is slowed further by the soggy condition of the ground. Fisher goes for the ball. So does King, the first baseman. Roger grabs it, then slips on the wet gra.s.s and crawls for the bag, ball in hand. Wyatt beats him easily. Fernald comes all the way home on the play to score the first run of the game.
If Roger is going to crack, one would expect it to happen right here. He checks his infield, and examines the ball. He appears ready to pitch, and then steps off the rubber. His sleeves, it seems, are not quite to his liking after all. He takes his time fixing them while Matt Francke, the York batter, grows old and mouldy in the batter"s box. By the time Fisher finally gets around to throwing, he all but owns Francke, who hits an easy hopper to Kevin Rochefort at third. Rochefort throws on to Matt Kinney, forcing Wyatt. Still, York has drawn first blood and leads, 1-0, at the end of an inning and a half.
Bangor West doesn"t put any runs on the board in the second inning, either, but they score against Phil Tarbox just the same. The rangy York pitcher trotted off the mound with his head up at the end of the first inning. Going in after pitching the second, he trudges with his head down, and some of his teammates glance at him uneasily.
Tarbox doesn"t intimidate Owen King, who bats first in Bangor"s half of the second, but he is a big boy, much slower than Matt Kinney. After running the count full, Tarbox tries to jam him inside. The fastball turns up and in - too much of both. King is. .h.i.t hard in the armpit. He falls to the ground, clutching the hurt place, too stunned to cry at first, but obviously in pain. Eventually, the tears do come - not a lot of them, but real tears, for all that. At six foot two and over two hundred pounds, he"s as big as a man, but he"s still only twelve and not used to being hit by seventy-mile-an-hour inside fastb.a.l.l.s. Tarbox immediately rushes off the mound toward him, his face a mask of concern and contrition. The umpire, already bending over the downed player, waves him off impatiently. The on-duty paramedic who hurries out doesn"t even give Tarbox a second look. The fans do, however. The fans are giving him all kinds of second looks.
"Take him out before he hits someone else!" one yells.
"Pull him before someone really gets hurt!" another adds, as if being hit in the ribcage by a fastball weren"t really getting hurt.
"Warn im, ump!" a third voice chimes in. "That was a deliberate brushback! Warn im what happens if he does it again!"
Tarbox glances toward the fans, and for a moment this boy, who has formerly radiated a kind of serene confidence, looks very young and very uncertain. He looks, in fact, the way Stanley Sturgis did as the Belfast-Lewiston game neared its conclusion. As he goes back to the mound, he slams the ball into his glove in frustration.
King, meanwhile, has been helped to his feet. After making it clear to Neil Waterman, the paramedic, and the umpire that he wants to stay in the game and is capable of doing so, he trots down to first base. Both sets of fans give him a solid round of applause.
Phil Tarbox, who of course had no intention of hitting the lead-off batter in a one-run game, immediately shows how shaken he is by grooving one right down the middle to Arthur Dorr. Arthur, the second-smallest boy in Bangor West"s starting lineup, accepts this unexpected but welcome gift by driving it deep to right center.
King is off at the crack of the bat. He rounds third, knowing he can"t score but hoping to draw the throw that will a.s.sure Arthur of second base, and, as he does, the wet conditions become a factor. The third-base side of the diamond is still damp. When King tries to put on the brakes, his feet go out from under him and he lands on his a.s.s. The relay has come in to Tarbox, and Tarbox will not risk a throw; he charges King, who is making feeble efforts to regain his feet. At the end, Bangor"s biggest player just raises his arms in an eloquent, touching gesture: I surrender. Thanks to the slippery conditions, Tarbox now has a runner on second with one out instead of runners on second and third with none out. It is a big difference, and Tarbox displays his renewed confidence by sinking out Mike Arnold.
Then, on his third pitch to Joe Wilc.o.x, the next batter, he hits him smack in the elbow. This time, the cries of outrage from the Bangor West fans are louder, and tinged with threat. Several of them direct their ire at the home-plate umpire, demanding that Tarbox be taken out. The ump, who understands this situation completely, does not bother even to warn Tarbox. The stricken look on the boy"s face as Wilc.o.x jogs shakily down to first undoubtedly tells him it isn"t necessary. But York"s manager has to come out and settle the pitcher down, to point out the obvious: You have two outs and first base was open anyway. There"s no problem.
But for Tarbox there is a problem. He has. .h.i.t two boys this inning, hit both of them hard enough to make them cry. If that weren"t a problem, he would need a mental examination.