When Joseph Haley founded the Chicago-based Jackie Robinson West Little League in 1971, there were no grand plans of winning state championships or reaching the Little League World Series.
There
was a vision of using youth baseball to help black families moving into
a previously all-white neighborhood unite and establish a sense of
community. Haley died in 2005, but the league he founded has blossomed
and been carried forth by his son Bill and his widow, Annie.
“I’m sure he never envisioned anything like this,” Bill Haley said.
A
team of Jackie Robinson West all-stars reached the Little League World
Series in 1983. This year, after a drought of 31 years, a team from the
league won the Great Lakes regional championship game. On Thursday, the
team played its first game in South Williamsport, Pa., beating Lynnwood,
Wash., 12-2.
Along with a team from Philadelphia led by a phenomenal young pitcher, Mo’Ne Davis, Jackie Robinson West became an early World Series story line. A similar sentiment surrounded a team from Harlem in 2002.
Bill Haley said he remembered cheering for that team.
“When
you see kids from similar backgrounds and similar situations, you pull
for them to be successful and beat the odds,” he said.
This
year’s Jackie Robinson West team has attracted the attention of Mets
right fielder Curtis Granderson, who grew up in the suburbs south of
Chicago. Granderson began playing baseball in the Lynwood Little League,
but he said he knew about Jackie Robinson West.
“A lot of my friends, guys my age, played in that league,” he said.
Granderson
said he liked what the Jackie Robinson West team represented, as well
as the idea that the team’s appearance in the World Series would prompt
discussion about blacks in baseball.
“The
cool thing is the way people talk about it,” Granderson said. “Like,
‘Wow, there is an all-black team out there; I didn’t know there was an
all-black team playing.’
“The
fact that people don’t realize that there is a black team means that
people are under the assumption that black kids aren’t playing baseball.
Hopefully this could be something that sheds light both in the
African-American community and the non-African-American community.”
Granderson recently contributed $5 million to the development of Curtis Granderson Stadium at the University of Illinois-Chicago, where he played for three seasons
and where his No. 28 was retired. The stadium will be the home of the
university’s baseball and softball teams and will serve more than 38
youth organizations in Chicago.
Asked
about the small number of blacks in baseball, Granderson said there was
simply not much buzz about the game in predominantly black communities,
where basketball dominates and football is another substantial
presence.
Getting
his peers to see baseball as a viable sports option was difficult,
Granderson said, so much so that when he accepted a baseball scholarship
to U.I.C., his friends seemed surprised that he was still involved in
the sport.
“They said, ‘You’re still doing that baseball thing?’ ” he said. “For them, baseball was a thing, a hobby.”
Even
as baseball preaches diversity, the game continues to spiral
economically out of the reach of an increasingly larger pool of
potential players after Little League. The cost of participation,
especially with travel teams becoming the norm before players reach high
school, can reach thousands of dollars a year.
To
reverse the decline in black participation, Granderson said, Major
League Baseball could copy the Amateur Athletic Union model in
basketball, in which major shoe companies provide financial support that
allows talented teams to travel to tournaments. Baseball also needs to
do a better job of putting black players in front of young people, he
said.
“You
have to make some major changes if you’re serious about really getting
more African-Americans into the game and staying in the game,”
Granderson said.
While
Haley acknowledged that basketball was king in Chicago, he said the
athletes on this year’s Jackie Robinson team were a different breed.
Perhaps a new breed.
“These
kids who are playing in Pennsylvania are baseball players,” Haley said.
“They won’t switch over to anything else. They’ll play baseball a long
time.”
The
Jackie Robinson team is the best marketing for a sport that continues
to lose ground to basketball and football. But when asked if the success
of his all-stars might lead to a surge of young black players in the
majors, Haley said that was not his concern.
“Our mission is absolutely not turning out major league baseball players,” he said.
He
added, “Our goal is to focus on getting as many kids involved as
possible and get them to love the game as early as possible.”
For
now, Haley is focused on the journey to Williamsport and having his
team meet players from around the world and experiencing first-class
treatment.
But
what he primarily wants is to see the players compete to the best of
their ability on a grand stage — to be excited by the environment, not
intimidated by it.
“When
it comes game time, the kids are going to be fine,” he said. “Kids are
going to make errors; kids are going to strike out — things are going to
happen in a baseball game. But it won’t happen because the kids are
scared or intimidated or nervous. They’re going to play their style of
baseball, and they are going to compete.”
They
will have some major league stars in their corner. After they advanced
to the series, Los Angeles Dodgers outfielder Carl Crawford called
Darrold Butler, the Jackie Robinson West manager, and volunteered to
give the team a pep talk via speaker phone. Granderson will be watching
from the Mets’ clubhouse. And thousands who played Little League
baseball and never got close to South Williamsport will be pulling for a
team from Chicago’s South Side, and for Davis, a hard-throwing black
girl from Philadelphia, to beat the odds.
They represent a refreshing breeze in a sport in desperate need of fresh air.
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