On a Sunday afternoon three summers ago, spectators crammed a ballpark and a grassy Pennsylvania hillside beyond the outfield wall to watch boys — who most of them had no real rooting interest in — play the championship game of the Little League World Series.
The 11- and 12-year-old players were on teams from Japan and Georgia.
The game was in South Williamsport, Pa., a small-town stage three hours’ drive from the nearest major city. Admission was free. The estimated crowd: 31,400 people.
Little League has hosted its World Series since the 1940s. To pull it off, sites for regional playoffs — to pare the pool of national all-star teams to eight — had to be arranged. Today the newest of those venues is in Warner Robins, where games begin this summer, marking an opportunity not only for Little League to showcase its brand but also for the host city and state to channel some of South Williamsport’s ambience.
It is hard to say how many — or how often — locals, in-staters and potential fans from nearby states will attend the Houston County games, either on day trips or longer stays, to bask in the Little League mystique in a brand new jewel of a youth sports ballpark.
But there is a chance that in the coming years the twin tournaments could become something of a tourism must-see.
“Moving to Warner Robins, that’s kind of right in Little League’s wheelhouse,” said Lance Van Auken, vice president of communications for Little League International. “That size city, it really just almost screams Americana there because you’ve got an Air Force base right there. It is something that we hope the folks in the South are gonna make a destination.”
Van Auken grew up in the St. Petersburg, Fla., area. Nearby Gulfport was where the Southeast Regional had been played for decades until the move to Georgia was announced in late 2008.
“Over time, St. Petersburg and Tampa sort of became this large metropolis. They got the Buccaneers and then they got the Rays, and it really became a much different place than it was when I was a kid,” he said. “If our intent was to solely get a lot of press, we probably would have put (the regional tournaments) in Orlando. But that’s not really what we want to do. We wanted to find the right place for all the right reasons.”
Fans from Warner Robins will no doubt turn out en masse during the tournaments’ early years. Crowds of 5,000 or more aren’t out of the question. What remains to be seen is whether the event catches on and become a curiosity worth a peek for folks across the South, with an allure not unlike the Cherry Blossom Festival’s when it first came on the scene.
Van Auken recalls how decades ago the regional ballpark in Gulfport was “a Taj Mahal” for young sluggers, a site where, thanks to the graveyard out past the left-field fence, homers that sailed into the distance were jokingly dubbed “dead” balls. In the old days, players spent nights on cots beneath the stands.
For years, the community embraced the event, as did volunteers from up North who planned their vacations around the tournament, Van Auken said. Plentiful news coverage didn’t hurt, either.
“If you look back at the St. Petersburg Times’ coverage of it back in the ’60s and ’70s, they blew it out every year. No matter who was in the game, it was a big deal. But in some of the last years, if there wasn’t a local team, much less a Florida team, it was like a 4-inch story on page four in the C section,” said Van Auken, a former Tampa Tribune sportswriter.
Though school will be in session locally by the time the baseball tourney rolls around in early August, the games, which typically open on a weekend, come during a relative lull in the sports year.
“That time of the year is not the best overall sports time, anyway,” Van Auken said. “Which is why ESPN puts 49 (Little League) games on. College football hasn’t started up, the NFL is just getting into preseason, the pennant races haven’t really materialized.”
Asked if the Warner Robins games and their expected festival atmosphere might have the cachet to attract a devout following and become a marquee late-summer enchantment for visitors from near and far, Jen Colvin, the Southeastern director for Little League Baseball and Softball, said, “We can always hope so.”
“If the folks locally are like the people of Florida,” she said, “they do look forward to the event each year and will come out to watch the teams even though they do not know any of the players. They appreciate the game being played in its purest form by the youngsters.”
Morgan Law, executive director of the Houston County Development Authority that spearheaded the drive to make Warner Robins a regional site, said, “In talking to Little League about their presence when they were in Florida for all those years, they had people that regularly took a trip to go to the regional tournaments, whether it was as spectators or as volunteers.”
Law said the aim is to help take the regionals “to the next level” and vigorously promote them “and have the quality tournament that the kids deserve, while at the same time putting the Middle Georgia stamp on that activity.
“It’s gonna take work. The hard part was convincing Little League to locate this facility in our community. I think the next step is for the community to partner with Little League to put on just a world-class tournament that the families and the kids enjoy.”
Jimmy Autry, senior vice president of community relations for Flint Energies, one of the regional tournament’s biggest boosters, said, “The region has really gotten used to Houston County because of the Georgia National Fair. Everybody knows their way over here. The fair goes 10 days, what was it last year, 340,000 people? ... They already know us.”
Said Autry: “The franchise of Little League, it’s been around for a long, long time, and you’ve got everybody who has a memory. The opportunity is certainly there for it to be a great destination event. It’s pure, it’s wholesome, it’s worthwhile. ... It just feels right.”
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