The Los Angeles Times from Los Angeles, California • 35

Part II! 11 1 MIKE DOWNEY Once as American as Apple Pie, Little League Baseball Over the Years Has Developed a More International Flavor as Shown by Its Annual World Series at Williamsport, Pa. PHOTOS: LORI SHEPLER, Los Angeles Times Season Has Been a Bear for Tigers if ft- jjp Sparky Anderson stepped out of the shower, spotted an old acquaintance, shook his head sadly and said: "If I live through this season, you'll know I'm tough." It was a Friday night in Anaheim, and Commander Whitehead had just seen his Detroit Tigers mess up a game with the Angels. The center fielder overran a ball, the catcher let a throw roll away, the third baseman made a wild peg to first base and the relief pitcher turned a 6-2 win into a 7-6 loss, all in one hysterical ninth inning. Baseball's best team had turned into the Bad News Bears. "In 32 years, I ain't never seen nothing like this," Anderson said.

"Never in my career have I seen a team do this. No place." Within a span of 15 games, the Tigers had blown a two-run lead in the eighth inning, a two-run lead in the ninth, two three-run leads in the ninth and a four-run lead in the ninth. "And we're 8-7!" Anderson howled. "We win those games, we're right up Toronto's (synonym for donkey)." Incredibly, the guilty party in all five giveaways was Willie Hernandez, the left-handed relief pitcher. This is the guy who won the American League's Cy Young and Most Valuable Player awards in 1984 and before the World Series was over was pressing for a spectacular new contract, one that would pay him what he was worth.

This is the same guy who in his seven previous seasons in the majors had piled up a spectacular 27 saves. Lance Parrish, his catcher, said of Hernandez after Friday's game: "He's having a frustrating time. I don't think even he knows what's wrong. He'll just keep showing up every day, just like everybody else, hoping that things will turn around." Things do have a way of turning around. In 1975, Detroit lost the season opener to Baltimore, 10-0, and went on to lose 102 games.

In 1984, the Tigers won 35 of their first 40 games and wound up winning 111 games in all, including seven of eight in the playoffs and World Series. as sleds, children enjoy some unorganized fun on the grass slope overlooking the Little League stadium at Williamsport, Pa. orthopedists say, should throw a curveball until he is at least 15. Don Oster, manager of the Minnetonka, team, disagreed with those theories. His pitchers throw a breaking ball, he said.

Saudi Arabia Manager Dean Stroman said he did not allow his pitchers to throw curves during the regular season but gave them permission to throw them in tournaments. Virtually all the pitchers here last week threw curves, or at least tried to. After pitching a no-hit game for 5 innings and beating Minnetonka, 5-1, Richie Conway, Morristown's No. 1 pitcher, said he threw curveballs about 70 of the time. "And when I face a really good hitting team, I throw them 80 of the time," he said.

Stories of bizarre parental behavior at Little League games abound. Some disputes end up in court. For example, a pitcher's mother was convicted in Texarkana, of assault, disorderly conduct, resisting arrest and making "terrorist threats" after she pulled a knife on two women during an argument at a game. The boy's father was found guilty of disorderly conduct. Reportedly, the women who were threatened had made derogatory comments about the pitcher.

Little League got off to a modest start here in the summer of 1939. Its founder, Carl E. Stotz, formed a league for young boys and recruited three teams that played a total of 24 games. Slowed at first by World War II, Stotz's game expanded rapidly in the late 1940s, growing from 60 teams in 1947 to 416 in 1948. The first World Series here in 1947, however, was neither international, nor even national.

A Williamsport team.won it, in fact. But in 1957, a bunch of kids from Monterrey Mexico, won the series and became Little League's most popular champions. They would not be the last foreigners to dominate the American game. Monterrey won again in 1958 and teams from Japan took the 1967 and 1968 series. Then, starting in 1969, the championship virtually became the private property of Taiwan.

The Chinese won 10 tournaments in 13 years, including five in a row starting in 1977. In 1973, the Chinese won games by scores of 18-0 and 27-0. Their pitchers threw three no-hit games, one a perfect one. U.S. teams were outscored, 57-0, and outhit, 43-0.

In 1974, Taiwan won again by scores of 16-0, 11-0 and 12-1. In nine games over three years, the Republic of China outscored the United States, 120-2, and kindled an argument that grew into Little League's most serious controversy. Michener called it a scandal. Were the Chinese teams cheating? Many angry Americans thought so, and in the wake of their complaints, Little League Chairman Peter J. McGovern, kicked out all the foreigners, leaving four U.S.

teams to compete in what was hardly a World Series in 1975. "We took an awful beating," Hale said. Editorial writers and other critics, in fact, clobbered McGovern, who had replaced Stotz as chief executive in 1955." Hale said the decision had been made by the board of directors because tournament play had gotten out of focus. "Our philosophy of play had gotten lost in an Olympic fervor," he said. "It became too nationalistic.

That was not Little League." A Little League game he watched in Maracaibo, Venezuela, was like a professional soccer game, Hale said. If the Chinese had been cheating, they could have been lying about the ages of their players, using professional coaches or sending all-star teams rather than teams from one area with a population of no more than 20,000. Investigators dispatched to Taiwan could not find any rules being broken. Hale said. On Dec.

30, 1975, McGovern lifted the ban, and the tournament became a real World Series again in 1976 and was won by a Japanese team. ers. He was an educator a professor of physiology at Springfield College in Massachusettsand a research specialist. "I took a year-and-a-half leave of absence and I'm still on it," he said. What Hale and his associates learned was: "The kids are not nearly as stimulated (by the pressure) as the adults.

The public was concerned about the kids. I was worried about the parents." Hale said he found some parents who were so involved in the games that "they had symptoms of appendicitis or heart attacks." Hale once took the blood pressure and pulse rate of a player who had just pitched a perfect game. "He had a pulse rate increase of only 50," Hale said. "His manager had one over 100. Fifteen minutes later, the pitcher had a normal rate, but the manager still had an elevated rate five hours after the game." Hale said his studies were done because: "We were concerned about youngsters playing in a tournament at this level." Hale is amused at the idea that today people want girls to have the same experience as boys.

"At one time, they didn't even want boys to have it," he said. The Little League game is not all bad, of course. Since Joey Jay, a pitcher from Middletown, became the first Little League graduate to reach the major leagues in 1953, 2,500 have gotten jobs as professionals. Today about 450 major league players, out of 650, are former Little Leaguers. Manager Bobby Valentine of the Texas Rangers also is a Little League graduate.

Children can still have fun in Little League if they have gentle and understanding managers who are not unduly concerned with won -lost records, and parents who conceal their disappointment when their children have a bad game. Dr. Arthur A. Esslinger, a former member of the Little League board of directors, once studied the manager's role and responsibility and concluded: "The heart of Little League baseball is what happens between the manager and player. It is your manager who makes your program a success or failure.

We have seen managers who exerted a wonderful influence upon their players. Unfortunately, we have also observed a few managers who were a menace to children. Many managers are untrained in youth leadership and have done harm to their players and have given critics an opportunity to blast our program." Little League managers are restricted to the dugout during games. Players serve as coaches. A manager must get permission from an umpire to go as far as the foul line to talk to his pitcher.

Little League baseball is relatively safe. Metal spikes are banned and batting helmets and other safety equipment are mandatory. Pitchers cannot work consecutive games. The batting helmet used in baseball everywhere today was developed here 20 years ago by Hale, a consultant to the U.S. military on head protection.

In 1956, Little League batters were getting hurt by pitches too often to suit officials, who wondered if 44 feet was the proper distance from home plate for the pitcher's mound. Hale did a study and discovered that Little Leaguers were more apt to get hit by pitches than major leaguers. The word went out to 5,000 leagues: Dig up your mounds and move them back two feet. Injuries soon declined. Some critics say that even more injuries could be prevented if the curveball was banned.

"I cannot think of a single legitimate excuse for having a Little League pitcher throwing curveballs," former major league star Al Rosen said in his book, "Baseball and Your Boy." "Youngsters should not throw curve-balls until the growth centers of their arms are fused. This does not occur until age 14 or 15." Robin Roberts, former star pitcher with the Philadelphia Phillies, once said he would never allow his sons to throw curves when they were 8 or 9 years old. "My father encouraged me to take it easy, and at 18 I had my arm prepared for the strain of real pitching," he said. While studying for his doctorate, Mike Marshall, a kinesiologist and former Dodger relief pitcher, X-rayed the arms of youngsters and found that elbows can be permanently damaged by excessive pitching at such a young age. Marshall didn't pitch until he was 18.

No pitcher, many ervert the normal experiences of 1. With shocking frequency they oy the child's interest in further and the outcome of their overly tious programs is apt to be a cynical by the children that they have misused." 1 Veeck, to illustrate this parental tion, once told a story of a father, a er so mean he would knock down his er "but only if she was digging in at )late" who wanted his son to be a League star. One day the father took oy out for batting practice and the kid and hit the first pitch all the way to ence. The next pitch knocked the boy 1 and the father said, "What was I Dsed to do? The little bastard hit my eball." I a result of its popularity, Little League has been subjected to more cynical attention than organized children's games, as Pop Warner football, youth soccer 'eeWee hockey. Much of the criticism unfavorable publicity, in Michener's is deserved.

he scandals that overtook Little ue baseball were two-fold," the nov-said. "Parents with ordinary common began looking with a critical eye at was happening to their sons. They ed going to games and saw the loia, the coaches screaming at 12--olds, fathers belting their sons for ing out, little boys ruining their arms to pitch like big leaguers before bone ends hardened. They saw ers behaving insanely, and boys fall-nto despair because of an error for their parents abused them." believes Michener's research was y. He invited the novelist to come to review it.

The novelist declined, ter studying 28 kids' teams for 10 and talking to hundreds of players, igers and parents at 70 games, sociol- Brower concluded: "Laws exist to children at work and school, but 'play' as governed by adults goes ecked." League officials took the criticism usly. Hale, in fact, was brought here 'ears ago to study the effects of sure and competition on young play 1 Shunned Contribution )ns. ay, Stotz gets little recognition or starting the popular program 'acant lot in Williamsport so his ws could play on a regular team. Vorld Series brochure makes no on of him and his name is barely in the Little League Museum, is named after McGovern. has his own museum in a rted shed in his backyard.

His al house on the outskirts of msport is also his tax office, once said that Little League Is are "interlopers who recline i nicely stated purposes." But was a sign last week that the old is mellowing. After turning invitations for 15 years, he ed a banquet for the Little World Series Umpires Alumni Last year was a long year in Detroit. No matter how far ahead the Tigers pulled, there always seemed to be months to go before they could put the thing on ice. As late as August, Sparky Anderson was pointing out to a center-field flagpole and saying: "See that? That's where they'll hang me if I blow this thing." Media coverage became so concentrated that the Tigers spent half their time telling their life stories. There was Parrish, the strapping son of an L.A.

cop; Kirk Gibson, the volatile ex-Michigan State football player; Chet Lemon, the gentle soul who converted teammate Lou Whitaker to Jehovah's Witnesses. There was even Rusty Kuntz, the sweetheart of Paso Robles, who drove in the game-winning run in the final game of the World Series with a sacrifice fly to the second baseman, then received a parade in his home town. By the end of the season, Detroiters knew more about the ballplayers than Rona Barrett knew about Cher. One newspaper ran a full page of facts that included Darrell Evans' recipe for tacos, third-base coach Alex Grammas' favorite golf club driver. I can hit it 240 pitcher Bill Scherrer's thoughts on not owning a pet have to die someday, and I don't want to see anything catcher Dwight Lowry's person he'd most like to meet like to meet Elijah, the prophet.

Fd ask him to explain life to pitcher Dan Petry's advice for making ice cream important thing is not to get electrocuted when you plug it and catcher-infielder Marty Castillo's Most Scared I've Ever Been City. AVL the players started throwing grasshoppers on me. I can't stand grasshoppers. They were in my clothes, in my shoes. I was They lived through the season, so you know they were tough.

The same team went to spring training four months later, dreaming of dynasties. One of the worst habits in America is the anticipation of dynasties by athletes and by fans of athletes whose string of championships rests at one in a row. "You take the team we had last year and the team we had this April no comparison," Anderson said. "We should have been better this year. I'm serious.

Better!" So, what don't the Tigers have now that they had then? They don't have Milt Wilcox, the Marquis de Cortisone, who sacrificed his arm, his health and possibly his career to win 17 games. They don't have Ruppert Jones, who wanted guaranteed playing time built into his contract, and ran off to hit homers in California when he didn't get it. And they don't have Roger Craig, Sparky's pitching coach and co-pilot, who wanted to spend more time riding horses on his ranch near San Diego and less time riding buses from airports to hotels to stadiums. "Aw, we've still got the people it takes to win," Anderson said. "We just ain't doing it.

It's scary how good we should be and how bad we're playing." Not as scary as Kansas City grasshoppers, but close. Pin trading takes on as much importance in Williamsport, during the World Series as it does elsewhere during Olympics. Armando Verdugo of Mexicali team from Mexico makes a spectacular, albeit unsuccessful, attempt at a diving catch..