Heading home from the grocery store with a few supplies for dinner on a recent late afternoon, I made the left turn from Perry Street to Wood Street in Bristol and put Veterans Park — and the kids warming up for a Little League game —in my rear view mirror.
“Stop! Turn around! Go back!” an inner voice from 61 years ago demanded. “You’ll be sorry if you don’t!”
As the kids warming up slowly receded, I recalled a few moments of my Little League career. I smiled, shook my head and — like a character at the beginning of a Stephen King mystery — listened to the voice, turned around and went back. Way back to a time of ball games on warm summer evenings when we celebrated hits and runs, forgot the errors, and played for a championship.
The ice cream in the back seat would have to wait to get home to the freezer.
Little League baseball is underway for its 86th season. The game is much the same as when Carl E. Stotz rounded up 30 players in Williamsport, Pa., for the inaugural Little League season in the spring of 1939. Nine players to a side. Three strikes and you’re out. Six innings. You get the idea.
But the trappings are so different now. Kids buy their own equipment. Well, their parents pick up the tab for a $50 bat, $80 fielder’s mitt, $50 helmet, $13 eye black, $25 batting gloves and face paint. Catcher’s gear can cost $300! The finest teams in the United States —and from the rest of North America, South America, Europe, Africa and Asia — play their way to the Little League World Series in Williamsport. Thanks to ESPN and its unquenchable thirst for live programming, 12-year-olds are treated like Major Leaguers, their memorable moments preserved on YouTube forever.
Vets Park, as Bristolians call it, is a beautiful complex at the end of Wood Street, a long fly ball from Guiteras Field, home of the local Mt. Hope high school nine. A 5-inch gun painted white stands in mute tribute to the military veterans for whom the park is named. The field was dedicated in 1952.
On this perfect evening, King Phillip Little Leaguers and their opponents from Warren wear spiffy uniforms. They arrive with batpacks containing personal gear plus a pair of metal bats tucked in sleeves on each side. They warm up to music. An electronic scoreboard glows above the outfield fence. Parents and relatives set up lawn chairs beneath shade trees. A few dads linger along the fence by left field line. A coach on the right field line swats grounders, popups and fly balls to eager fielders who with all their might toss the ball back to a teammate. The coach swings a racquet of some sort, not a bat, but the ritual is as old as Little League itself.
It’s 1963, I’m knocking on the door of 13 but still the 12-year-old shortstop for the Red Sox of the Methuen Little League, 28 miles north of Fenway Park, home of the Boston Red Sox. I reached this point after playing for the Panthers as an 8-year-old, the minor-league Blue Jays at 9 and the Little League Yankees at 10. When I was 11, I was traded to the Red Sox so Ziggy Koczat could coach his son Bob. The logistics made sense for the Koczat family.
The Methuen LL in ’63 comprises the Red Sox, Yankees, Braves and Dodgers. We wear scratchy wool uniforms and play at the Neil Playstead on a baseball field carved from a former high-school football field tucked between Lawrence Street and the Spicket River. My father played football on that field and set records on the Neil’s cinder track 30 years ago.
Our diamond is a gem. The gravel infield is dragged before every game. A wooden viewing platform rises behind the backstop. Cages of chain link fence with a bench replaced dugouts in 1962. The outfield fence is wood, about 5 feet high and painted green. The numbers 190 in straightaway center are white. The flagpole is just behind the 190. A wood scoreboard stands behind the left-field fence. It’s not the Green Monster, but it takes quite a stroke to clear it. If you’re lucky, Mr. Polizotti, the heavy-set, cigar-smoking Little League president who umpires occasionally, or Mr. Poole, the vice president, ask you to man the scoreboard if your team is idle. In return, you get a candy bar or ice cream and a chance to flirt with Brenda Poole — tall, blonde and also a seventh grader. The grandstand is behind the third-base dugout. Playing on this field is the best.
Opening Day in May means a parade from Town Hall to the Neil, flags, and ceremonies announced over a loudspeaker. I miss the opener one year because it falls on the same Sunday as our parish May Procession. I am an altar boy, and my father insists I march in the parish procession. Hearing the Little League festivities about a half-mile away just about kills me.
Our coach, Mr. [Ron] Learned, a mailman, arrives at about 5 on a typical game night with a big smile and a duffel bag containing bats, balls, helmets and catcher’s gear. I bring my glove, usually hanging from the handlebar of the bike I rode to the Neal. Some of us wear rubber cleats, the rest of us sneakers. We all wear a baseball cap with the letter M. For good luck I pin a Blessed Virgin Mary medal on the crown of the cap. For good looks I insert three or four baseball cards in the sweatband of the front panel to keep that M riding high. Such vanity backfired one game. My cap flew off during a collision at second base, and the cards scattered all over the infield. Was I embarrassed!
I always mark the sign of the cross in the dirt before stepping into the batter’s box.
Despite the idyllic setting in Bristol, Little League — youth baseball in general — is declining in popularity. Participation by kids 6 to 12 has declined about 3% every year since the 1990s peak, according to one study. The Sports & Fitness Industry Association after a more recent survey reported a 20% participation decline from 2019 to 2022. Still, only basketball with 3,971,445 participants exceeded baseball’s 3,279,997 players from age 6 to 12 coming out of the COVID pandemic.
“It’s hugely different from 20, 30, 40 years ago,” Adam Ring told me last week. He is president of the King Phillip Little League. “Back then in the spring and summer it was baseball and nothing else. Today there are a lot of options. Soccer, lacrosse, basketball, karate. Kids have so many options all year long.”
Ring suggested that youth baseball is cannibalizing itself with the proliferation of travel teams that play twice on Sundays and through the fall.
“I think kids should play multiple sports. Fall baseball should be shut down,” Ring said. “There’s been a huge cultural shift in what we do. Pickup games? That just doesn’t happen.”
Travel teams are no longer just for the elite player, he added. “Now, anybody can play,” he said. Anybody whose parents can come up with $3,500.
The enrollment decline has affected the King Phillip and Warren Little Leagues. Each was able to field only two Major (age 10-12) teams this season. As a result, they merged so all four could play a full schedule at fields in the two towns.
This is a sad development because for such a small state, Rhode Island has a rich Little League history. Twelve teams from the Ocean State have gone to the Little League World Series in Williamsport. Westerly was the first in 1950 followed by Darlington American of Pawtucket in 1980, Western Cranston in 1996, Lincoln in 2001 and 2004, Cumberland American in 2011 and 2014, Western Cranston in 2015, Warwick North in 2016, Coventry in 2018, Barrington on 2019, and Smithfield in 2023. Only Connecticut has sent more teams, 21, to the LLWS. Massachusetts has sent 11.
The road to Williamsport starts now and picks up in July. The World Series is in August.
In 1963, the Red Sox and Braves play for the Methuen Little League championship. Steve Touma, shortstop, pitcher, home run hitter, is the best of the Braves. I am his counterpart on the Red Sox.
The Braves win the first game with Steve on the mound. I pitch the Red Sox to victory in the second game, forcing a winner-take-all third game. Jim Lafond starts for the Braves, and I lead off with a home run. My aunt and uncle arrive from nearby Salem, N.H., as I circle the bases. Uncle Frank blasts his car horn. The Braves tie the score and take the lead when Steve’s cousin, light-hitting Eddie Gabriel, punches a bases-loaded seeing-eye grounder that rolls all the way to the right field fence. He clears the bases.
I hit another home run to make it 4-3. Steve comes to bat in maybe the fifth inning. I stroll to the mound and tell Richie Belair, our big 10-year-old lefty, not to throw a fastball over the plate. He does exactly that. Steve launches a rocket over the fence.
Final score: Braves 5, Red Sox 3.
Every August 7, Steve gets a call from his Braves teammate, second baseman Dickie Diodati.
“That was the day of the championship game,” Steve reminded me as we reminisced last week. “You feasted on Jim Lafond, and every year we thank God for Richie Belair. We laugh and laugh.”
Friendly rivals in Methuen for six years, Steve and I became teammates at Central Catholic High School in Lawrence. As seniors, we qualified for the state tournament.
I hope the players making Little League memories at Vets Park in Bristol can laugh about them in six decades, as Steve and I, and Dickie, have.
And I hope the kids from Bristol and Warren some day in the distant future listen when an inner voice urges them to stop for a minute and watch a bunch of eager Little Leaguers — if there are any — warming up for a game on a perfect spring evening.
