Sunday Essay: On Crystal Lake American Little League

The original date of publication for this essay is Sunday, May 23^rd. It is the 45^th of what’s intended to be a year’s worth of essays, published on Sundays. That intention, like everything, is subject to change.

Last week’s essay: On a Morning Last February

In my hometown, there is a lake. At the end of that lake, there is a beach. Around that beach, there is a park. And across the street from that park, there is a baseball field.

It’s a good little field. 200-foot fences. Evergreen trees in left flanking the scoreboard. A part-time retention pond down a small slope past right. For most of my life, there was a big “AL” on the back of the snack stand. It was above the snack stand, truthfully, on the back of the announcer’s/scoreboard booth where every now and then someone’s older brother would get on the mic and in rare instances would toe the line just enough to not get yanked down by his ears. The AL’s gone now. It stood for American League, back when there were three little leagues in Crystal Lake. Now there is only one. Travel ball, and all the societal forces that make travel baseball desired by families with nine to twelve-year-old boys, gutted Little League. It did it in a spiraling manner, first by taking some of the best players and then, by doing that, making the town leagues noncompetitive enough that other kids (or parents) with aspirations and resources followed into the grinding gears of all-weekend tournaments at dusty complexes with pricey uniforms and some vague promise that this is an opportunity for the child to maximize their baseball dreams. (I played travel baseball too, starting at age thirteen—there’s a place for it…but at nine years old…)

My dad worked a lot on that field, and on the other fields the league used. One of them was named after him on Opening Day my twelve-year-old season—his last year with a kid in the league after year after year with a kid in the league. There was a ceremony. My mom sang the national anthem. We went over to the field by the lake—Main Beach was its name then, after the beach (it’s named after the manager of my year’s All-Star team now, who might’ve been the most successful manager in Little League history and still texts me now and then with some memory or some news from the leagues against which we played)—and, with my dad managing, threw a combined no-hitter. We were a good team that year. The fields, under his care (or perhaps the better words are his leadership, since we were blessed with a lot of good dads doing a lot of good work on those fields during our time in the system), were good fields that year. Main Beach was the best, though.

We practiced at Main Beach that summer for the All-Star season—the season in which twelve players from around the in-house league (well, the Major A league—I’ll get to that in a moment) combined into one team to try to play their way to Williamsport. We got close. We lost in the state championship. That team and that summer are worth more to my life than I could put in one of these essays, and there are pieces of it I’m not sure I know now how to say, and there were twelve lives on that team, not just mine, and there were lives around ours and maybe it means more to me now than to the rest but in case it doesn’t (and I believe it doesn’t), that story will need to wait more than fourteen summers to be told. Fourteen summers, now. Fourteen summers. This, the fourteenth.

American Little League was comprised of five leagues. There was Rookie, the six and seven-year-old league in which coaches pitched and the coaches always told their teams they’d won (if you were a first grader keeping score in your head in between turning triple plays because the idiots on the other teams didn’t know how to tag up, this made for some frustrating exchanges at recess). There was Junior Slugger, the eight-year-old league with a pitching machine and some sort of playoff. There was Minors, the nine and ten-year-old league in which kids pitched for the first time and there was a six-run run limit every inning but the last and if you finished first or second, you played in the City Series against the best teams from around town, and if you were one of the best players you got to play on your age group’s All-Star team against other teams from the suburbs, with a shot at a state title when you were ten. Then there were the two Major leagues, for the eleven and twelve-year-olds—Major A and Major B—separated by a tryout at Central High School before the draft.

The result of the Major A/Major B split was that Major A was fairly competitive, and that you played your opponents often. There were only six teams, which worked out to an average of two All-Stars per team (though when I was twelve, at least one team contributed none), and you played each of the five others thrice before finishing the in-house season with a double-elimination league tournament (the two City Series representatives were decided by a combination of regular season and tournament results). There was a natural rise and fall of teams—I’m not sure whether this was more due to the draft order (whatever it was) or the tendency of the best players’ parents to coach together (creating situations in which a team might have great eleven-year-olds but not as good twelve-year-olds, then the reverse the next year)—but for whatever reason, there were often a few clear-cut best teams in the league. In one of my oldest brother’s years, my dad navigated this by using his best pitchers against the three more beatable teams, taking care of those nine wins and letting the chips fall where they may elsewhere. It worked. When I was twelve, it wasn’t so clearly divided between bad and good, and Little League’s switch from innings restrictions to pitch count restrictions (along with my single-minded focus on strikeouts driving my pitch count into the stratosphere far too often) made it harder to map out plans ahead of time, but he made it work. I’d like to see a rundown of every Major A manager’s career wins and losses. I think my dad would rank highly.

Major A played at Main Beach on Saturdays. The first game was at 9:00 AM. The second was at 11:30. The third was at 2:00. When my dad was a newer dad, he’d take my oldest brother down to Main Beach to watch some of the games. My brother had a favorite player—I forget his name, but he hit more than a couple balls over the evergreens. When I was twelve, kids who played in the 9:00 game would often go home, shower, lunch, and come back in time to watch the end of the 11:30 game and the whole of the 2:00 game. In a six-team league, every game was impactful.

I think often about the excitement of those spring afternoons riding my bike back over to the beach to watch the rest of the league, chirping All-Star teammates through the back of their dugouts, watching as kids beginning to outgrow Little League did what kids beginning to outgrow Little League do—blow each other away with fastballs; send home runs splashing deep into the retention pond; track down gappers and fire them into the infield effortlessly to stop runners from advancing. The core of the league had played with and against each other for seven seasons by that point, and almost all of us went to one of two middle schools, which gave the games familiarity both personally and in the baseball sense. The best hitter in the league hammered balls down in the zone. The best All-Star pitcher (he wasn’t as good in the regular season,, having a tendency to show up late for morning games because his dad was trying to find which neighborhood trampoline he was sleeping on) had a backdoor slurve he’d use to fool lefties. It was high-quality baseball for an in-house, manageable-commitment, no-travel for the vast majority of players Little League.

But there were also kids who had to scrap. The bottom of the order was rarely potent. There were kids who’d barely made the cut above Major B, or who needed to develop as an eleven-year-old before competing as a twelve-year-old. We had a mess of a game against the National League’s runner up in the City Series my twelve-year-old season (the National League lacked our firepower that year but made up for it by having just four teams, which resulted in two stacked teams we had to go through while the Continental League’s representatives, for reasons I don’t fully understand, got absolutely pulverized, as was an annual custom at that point in our age group), and at the end of it, the bottom of the order had to come through. Our twelfth hitter had to put the ball in play to get us a key run late, and our tenth hitter had to get past a catcher’s block on the fielder’s choice, something he did by scooting across the plate on his butt as the ball rolled away.

I tutor a seventh grader now, and on Thursday, we worked on an essay of his that’s his language arts final. The topic was whether competitive sports are good or bad for kids, with the context seeming, to me, to revolve around the life skills competitive sports teach and the pressure they put on children. I’d already been thinking about that Little League, as I often do this time of year, and as I often do when I haven’t been home in a while or I’ve just been home and I miss Main Beach and Crystal Lake and my dad and that perfect, so-close-to-perfect summer fourteen years ago when everything that mattered fell within a ninety degree angle of chalk and spray paint with eleven other kids wearing the same hat. But reading his essay, in which he talked about his love of competitive sports, I thought again about how lucky I was to play in that league, to live in that town, to get in before Little League wilted in Crystal Lake and baseball became, like so many things, a thing divided even more than before between haves and have-nots, and a thing no longer within the fabric of the community but instead set apart from it with that all-encompassing goal of college thrust upon it, kids at nine years old not playing baseball with and against their friends for the thrill of competing with their friends but instead traveling to weekend tournament after weekend tournament across the Chicagoland metro, with the goal not to win the City Series then, for the best, to have a great All-Star season, but instead to get good enough to achieve some nebulous goal of “playing in college.”

Maybe I have it wrong. Maybe that’s not what the prevalence of travel sports at such a young age are doing. Maybe I misunderstand. But I look at what I see of nine to twelve-year-old baseball, and I look at what I had as a twelve-year-old, and I’m grateful that my greatest athletic championship was not some high-buy-in tournament with a big acronym in front of it played in a dustbowl of a complex over in Naperville but instead a real Little League tournament, a real championship of the city, won with blazing fastballs and towering home runs but also by a kid who struck out a lot coming through with a ground ball to the left side and a kid who was pretty undersized forcing his rubber cleats through the catcher’s five hole by scooting himself ahead inch-by-inch on his butt. I hope that if I have kids, those kids get to play games like those. Games in their town. Games in their neighborhood. Games against their friends, more meaningful than any flashy-uniformed cake-eater tournament without a tree in sight could ever be. Competitive games. Real competitive games. Not games turned into a baseball parallel of this all-encompassing fixation on college that drives like zombies a powerful American cultural bloc, but games that matter: games where the winner gets to chirp their friends in social studies on Monday. I think there’s something about the importance of community in here. I think there’s something about the importance of a neighborhood, or a village, or a town, or a city. Whatever it is, I hope I get it. I hope my kids get it. I hope this country gets it. Because it feels like it needs it. It feels like it needs more Little League. More Little League like that Little League. More Little League at Main Beach.

Next week’s essay: On the Pink Blanket