Not that they don’t remind you themselves from time to time. Halfway back from Machias after the first trip, the rainout, J. J. Fiddler begins to wriggle around uneasily in the back seat of the car he is riding in. ‘I gotta go,’ he says. He clutches at himself and adds ominously, ‘Man, I gotta go bad. I mean big time.’
‘J.J.’s gonna do it!’ Joe Wilcox cries gleefully. ‘Watch this! J.J.’s gonna flood the car!’
‘Shut up, Joey,’ J.J. says, and then begins to wriggle around again. He has waited until the worst possible moment to make his announcement. The eighty-four-mile trip between Machias and Bangor is, for the most part, an exercise in emptiness. There isn’t even a decent stand of trees into which J.J. can disappear for a few moments along this stretch of road – only mile after mile of open hayfields, with Route 1A cutting a winding course through them.
Just as JJ.’s bladder is going to DEFCON-1, a providential gas station appears. The assistant coach swings in and tops up his tank while J.J. splits for the men’s room. ‘Boy!’ he says, brushing his hair out of his eyes as he jogs back to the car. ‘ That was close!’ ‘Got some on your pants, J.J.,’ Joe Wilcox says casually, and everyone goes into spasms of wild laughter as J.J. checks.
On the trip back to Machias the next day, Matt Kinney reveals one of the chief attractions People magazine holds for boys of Little League age. ‘I’m sure there’s one in here someplace,’ he says, leafing slowly through an issue he has found on the back seat. ‘There almost always is.’ ‘What? What are you looking for?’ third baseman Kevin Rochefort asks, peering over Matt’s shoulder as Matt leafs past the week’s celebs, barely giving them a look. ‘The breast-examination ad,’ Matt explains. ‘You can’t see everything, but you can see quite a lot. Here it is!’ He holds the magazine up triumphantly.
Four other heads, each wearing a red Bangor West baseball cap, immediately cluster around the magazine. For a few minutes, at least, baseball is the furthest thing from these boys’ minds. The 1989 Maine State Little League Championship Tournament begins on August 3, just over four weeks after All-Star play began for the teams involved. The state is divided into five districts, and all five send teams to Old Town, where this year’s tourney is to be held. The participants are Yarmouth, Belfast, Lewiston, York, and Bangor West. All the teams but Belfast are bigger than the Bangor West All-Stars, and Belfast is supposed to have a secret weapon. Their number one pitcher is this year’s tourney wunderkind.
The naming of the tourney wunderkind is a yearly ceremony, a small tumor that seems to defy all attempts to remove it. This boy, who is anointed Kid Baseball whether he wants the honor or not, finds himself in a heretofore unsuspected spotlight, the object of discussion, speculation, and, inevitably, wagering. He also finds himself in the unenviable position of having to live up to all sorts of pretournament hype. A Little League tournament is a pressure situation for any kid.
When you get to Tourney Town and discover you have somehow become an instant legend as well, it’s usually too much.
This year’s object of myth and discussion is Belfast’s southpaw Stanley Sturgis. In his two outings for Belfast he has chalked up thirty strikeouts – fourteen in his first game, sixteen in his second. Thirty K’s in two games is an impressive statistic in any league, but to fully understand Sturgis’s accomplishment one has to remember that Little League games consist of only six innings. That means that 83 per cent of the outs Belfast recorded with Sturgis on the hill came on strikeouts.
Then there is York. All the teams that come to the Knights of Columbus field in Old Town to compete in the tourney have excellent records, but York, which is undefeated, is the clear favorite to win a ticket to the Eastern Regionals. None of their players are giants, but several of them are over five-ten, and their best pitcher, Phil Tarbox, has a fastball that may top seventy miles an hour on some pitches – extravagant by Little League standards. Like Yarmouth and Belfast, the York players come dressed in special All-Star uniforms and matching turf shoes, which make them look like pros. Only Bangor West and Lewiston come wearing mufti – which is to say, shirts of many colors bearing the names of their regular-season team sponsors. Owen King wears Elks orange, Ryan Larrobino and Nick Trzaskos wear Bangor Hydro red, Roger Fisher and Fred Moore wear Lions green, and so on. The Lewiston team is dressed in similar fashion, but they have at least been provided with matching shoes and stirrups. Compared with Lewiston, the Bangor team, dressed in a variety of baggy gray sweatpants and nondescript street sneakers, looks eccentric. Next to the other teams, however, they look like out-and-out ragamuffins. No one, with the possible exception of the Bangor West coaches and the players themselves, takes them very seriously. In its first article on the tourney the local newspaper gives more coverage to Sturgis, of Belfast, than it does to the entire Bangor West team.