The Williamsport Crosscutters are one of the 42 minor league teams in danger of going extinct. This is part of their story.
I was seven years old sitting rapt and cross-legged in front of a TV so old you needed to stand up and turn the dial every time you wanted to change the channel. There was zero chance anyone in my family was going to change the station that day, though. We were watching my cousin…
With thanks to my husband Steve Stofka for sharing his story. It was 1967, and I was a senior in high school earning extra money by umping 5th-grade little league games. They only paid for one umpire per game at that level, so I covered the entire field from a spot behind the pitcher. There…
He was always in the cage or in batting practice, taking a few more cuts to get his reps in. Until one day, it hit him: Why take more swings, when he could just swing more bats? “Old Three-Bat Thomas,” called him. “That’s not going to help,” his teammates would shout from the dugout. “If…
Not too far from Williamsport, home of the Little League World Series, lies Ricketts Glen State Park. Covering 13,050 acres (or 4,350 baseball fields) in parts of three counties, it is a jewel of a state park. Its Lake Jean is large enough to accommodate both a busy swimming beach and lily-padded arms and stream-fed…
With the success of the Little League Classic and the outpouring of support both it and the LLWS received this year, changing baseball at the Major League level, the one through which we largely absorb it, becomes an annual conversation. Each year, we gush over the event in Williamsport and ask each other, “Can you…
1. The crows complaining from the maple tree outside the window sound enough like that one row of fans in Philadelphia in 2006, Mike Lieberthal at the plate in the second game of the September 3 double-header against Atlanta, the one that isn’t the one where Ryan Howard hit three home runs. Lieberthal stands in…
The game as it connects major league ballplayer and four-year-old, fantasy and reality, and an old man and his spare room.
For the offday, some of the BP staff share stories about the good, the bad, and the ugly of their own Little League experiences.
Short Relief visits the three main stages of life: Childhood, Adulthood and Statcast.