WILLIAMSPORT, Pennsylvania —Eighty-five years ago, Carl Stotz had an epiphany of sorts while he was passing a lazy summer day playing catch with his two nephews and tripped over a lilac bush while chasing a wild pitch. While nursing his wounds he had a flash of brilliance that would forever change…
WILLIAMSPORT, Pennsylvania —Eighty-five years ago, Carl Stotz had an epiphany of sorts while he was passing a lazy summer day playing catch with his two nephews and tripped over a lilac bush while chasing a wild pitch. While nursing his wounds he had a flash of brilliance that would forever change the lives of children, families, communities, and small businesses around the world.
In short order, Stotz enlisted help from a couple of local brothers, George and Bert Bebble, and gathered local 9- to 12-year-old boys, enough to form three teams, and came up with the name “Little League” after some encouragement from a local sports editor.Stotz then modified the existing rules in Major League Baseball to suit the size of his young players. The only thing missing now was uniforms for the players, and that turned out to be the most difficult aspect of his vision.
Most of those coaches are the men and women Stotz envisioned at the get-go: local parents and community members like Nick Fioravanti in western Pennsylvania who started coaching when his children were younger and is still volunteering despite both of his boys aging out of the program. It costs $300 for a business to sponsor a team, and the business gets its name on the back of the jerseys, no different than the Lycoming Dairy did 85 years ago — a continuum that reflects Stotz’s belief you need buy-in from the entire community to keep Little League Baseball a part of something bigger than just baseball.
Nine years ago when Amazon announced AmazonSmile, which contributed 0.5% of every purchase made by a participating customer of their choice, a lot of Little Leagues urged their community to name their local team as their beneficiary so that the league wouldn’t collapse or the parents would be forced to foot the bill.
Sign-ups for Little Leagues and their sponsors begin in earnest this week. It will be interesting to see what impact Amazon's decision has on youth baseball and also all other types of youth programming, such as art camps that have depended on AmazonSmile to make up for essentially what Amazon in many ways took away.
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