Head Down

‘That’s all right, no damage!’ Dave Mansfield cries as Arthur Dorr misjudges a long shot to right and the ball lands behind him. ‘Get an out, now! Belly play! Let’s just get an out!’ No one seems to know exactly what ‘belly play’ is, but since it seems to involve wi

No third game against Machias is necessary. Bangor West gets a strong pitching performance from Matt Ki

For now, however, this is perfectly O.K. – great, in fact. They are not overwhelmed by what they have done, but they seem tremendously pleased, tremendously content, and entirely here. If they have been touched with magic this summer, they do not know it, and no one has as yet been unkind enough to tell them that it may be so. For now they are allowed the deep-fried simplicities of Helen’s, and those simplicities are quite enough. They have won their division; the State Championship Tournament, where bigger and better teams from the more heavily populated regions downstate will probably blow them out, is still a week away. Ryan Larrobino has changed back into his tank top. Arthur Donhas a rakish smear of ketchup on one cheek. And Owen King, who struck terror into the hearts of the Machias batters by coming at them with a powerful sidearm fastball on 0-2 counts, is burbling happily into his glass of Pepsi. Nick Trzaskos, who can look unhappier than any boy on earth when things don’t break his way, looks supremely happy tonight. And why not? Tonight they’re twelve and they’re wi

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 go

‘Shut up, Joey,’ J.J. says, and then begins to wriggle around again. He has waited until the worst possible moment to make his a

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 Ki

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 i

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.

Dave, Neil, and Saint, the odd but surprisingly effective brain trust that has brought the team this far, watch Belfast take infield and batting practice without saying much. The Belfast kids are resplendent in their new purple-and-white uniforms – uniforms that have not worn so much as a speck of infield dirt until today. At last, Dave says, ‘Well, we finally got here again. We did that much. Nobody can take that away from us.’