Little League Revisited

 

This photo could not be more evocative. A group of scrubbed clean white boys and their smiling ear to ear black teammates, along with two coaches pose with a trophy proclaiming them kid baseball champions of some corner of a 12-year old’s universe. It is sometime in the 1960’s, I would guess, and the boys are from the blue-collar factory towns of Crystal City and Festus, MO. They live lives dominated by a huge glass factory, not far from their Field of Dreams, that throbbed and clanged night and day. But they don’t care about any of that grown-up stuff. They pose proud and happy, not realizing this is a snapshot in time they should forever treasure. This is as good as life gets.

According to their website, the Crystal City and Festus, Missouri neighbors in 1939 chartered the Twin City Baseball Little League. It has operated at full strength ever since. By the early 1950’s ’s the league had racially integrated. Local historians today note that co-op helped pave a mostly smooth late-1950’s integration of the local schools. In fact, the national Little League organization had always taken a progressive stand on race, especially when compared with the slow pace of integration of major league baseball. In the 1950’s, four Little League World Series champions were integrated teams from New Jersey and Connecticut. In 1955 white teams in South Carolina refused to take the field to play an all-black team of 12-year-olds from Charleston, so the national organization in Williamsport, PA ruled that state's championship vacant and invited the black Charleston team to the World Series in Williamsport as honorary, though nonplaying, South Carolina champs.

Today, Youth Baseball has been revolutionized by select travel teams, preying on parents’ vicarious desire to secure college scholarships and high-paying major league careers for their offspring. A group called U.S. Specialty Sports Association ranks the nation’s top 30 four-year-old and under teams – as in preschoolers.

Travel team tryouts are held in the fall and 11-month seasons dominate and often overwhelm a young player’s schedule (and life).The neighborhood pickup games of the past are as gone as the summer mosquito spray truck. Over the last 50 years we have organized the lifeblood out of youth baseball. Heavy on the mechanics and too light on the fun. Fun requires a summer afternoon in the backyard while dad is at work. Remember Indian Ball? Hot Box? Burnout? Too many recreational leagues today just check off the boxes of “equal opportunity.” We stick kids in the outfield in T-ball leagues, where nobody hits them a ball for an hour, and wonder why they end up on skateboards. I give the Twin City Little League its kudos, since 1939 every child in the Twin City Little League gets a uniform, and every child gets to play. It is a throwback inclusive philosophy, found not often enough today.

From the ages of 10 to 12 I played in the Twin City Little League, for the Indians. It is my favorite childhood memory. We played two games a week through the months of June and July. Our uniforms were gray flannel with blue pin stripes and my number was 6, same as Stan Musial.

In our league the coach was a father who arrived at games straight from work, often still wearing his work attire, and he probably knew more about slide rules or union bylaws than about the double cutoff or a suicide squeeze. My team, the Indians, were an exception. My Coach was Poogie Skaggs. As far as I can recall, he was the only non-father coach in the league. Poogie was perhaps in his mid-30’s. By day, he was a meat cutter at the local IGA. While most teams would shuffle in a new coach each year (as the coaches’ son would age out of the league) Poogie was a fixture with the Indians. Year after year. And the Indians were the New York Yankees of the 1960’s Twin City Little League. When you were selected in the 10-year-old draft, you wanted it to be by the Indians.

Poogie did the little things that made a 10-year-old feel special. Every year he would buy each player a blue long-sleeved shirt to wear under our jersey, just like what we saw on the Saturday afternoon Major League TV Game of the Week. No other team in our league had them. Poogie hammered into us the importance of the pregame infield warmup routine. We drilled and perfected it every practice. With the opposition watching from their dugout, we would sprint from our dugout to our warmup position with enthusiasm and snap. Everybody “chattered” No wasted motion, synchronized execution that left our opponents slack jawed with envy. Poogie and his ever-present fungo bat put us through the warmup. We sent the message, "we are here to win." We finished with a fungo pop up to the catcher who then fired the ball to the starting pitcher standing in the door of our dugout. "Game on," was the message. I was the catcher. Poogie is the only human I have ever encountered who could stand on home plate and hit a baseball straight up in the air.

Poogie was a task master, but he was fun to play for. If I made a mistake, most often I knew it and Poogie never said a word, certainly never yelled at me. If I needed correction or instruction, it was given in a firm manner. I always wanted his approval. For years, Poogie was on the chain gang for the Crystal City Hornet home football games. Even as a high school senior, if I made a good play on the football field, I always glanced Poogie's way and he would acknowledge me with a wave. I always shook his hand after the game.

I coached high school and college athletes for 43 years. When I retrace my path the image of every coach over the past nearly 60 years who passed along their wisdom to me, hand-to-hand, like a bucket on the way to a fire, appears. Poogie is the first.