My wife, Margo, was walking our dog Chester last week when she came upon a Little League practice in a park near our home. There were two teams, one practicing shagging flies and the other working on batting.
The one working on catching fly balls needed to hone their skills a bit, she observed.
“They were using whiffle balls, I guess so they wouldn’t get hurt if they got bonked on the head,” she said.
She said the kids were looking up in the air for the ball and waving their gloves around in a frantic manner to catch it.
“Then It would just plop to the ground next to them,” she said.
She said the next group working on batting practice had some great instruction from their coach.
“Remember, you have to take you glove off before you can bat,” he admonished the youngsters.
I’ve been randomly watching the Little League World Series this week. The game on Wednesday between a Texas team and a Washington team was a gem. It was a 0-0 tie after the regulation six innings (for Little League). It finally was won by Texas in the ninth, 1-0
There were some outstanding defensive plays by both teams — stuff you’d expect to see in the big leagues. I think the catcher from Texas will be playing in “the show” some day.
Pitching was great as well. One Texas kid pitched the maximum of 85 throws he could make before he was retired. He managed many strike outs during his effort. A pitcher from Washington was boxed in with three men on base and no outs in two different innings, yet managed to work his way out of the predicament.
This made me think about something I believe most New Mexicans don’t know about. In 1956, a team from Roswell won the Little League World Series. I happened to go to college and was friends with one of the kids who played on that team, but never heard him talk about it. My brother-in-law, who lived in Roswell at the time, has a souvenir baseball from the team. He witnessed them boarding the train as they left Roswell for Williamsport, PA, for the series.
It is a great feel-good story about a rag-tag bunch of kids from a relatively small town in New Mexico who defeated teams from big city programs around the country on their way to become champions. My hope is to write a short book about it someday.
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