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closeSOUTH WILLIAMSPORT, Pa. — In the hour after their season faded to memory, the Warner Robins baseball boys were huddled around an RV parked up the hill from the scene of their first loss in 19 outings.
They were no longer in uniform. No longer, you might say, on the Little League World Series clock. Shorts and T-shirts and pats on the back probably had never felt so deserved in their young lives.
They’d gathered for a late-night cookout. Hamburgers, fries and family. Their road trip had taken to the highways more than a month ago, and now all that was left was the ride home.
Sure, the fact that they’d lost was setting in, along with the realization that their run at the La-La Land of Little League had drawn to a close. Moments earlier, many of them had tears in their eyes, fresh off a heart-wrenching, 11-10 loss to California in a game which, had the Georgians won, would have landed them in the U.S. final, a win shy of the world-title clash.
It was in that cookout moment, though, when the dust from a cyclonic season began to settle. The whirlwind that was Warner Robins baseball had, finally and barely, powered down for the summer.
“It was just a time for them to decompress,” Kristi Stephens, whose son Jeremiah played for the Georgia boys, said later. “It was kind of time to breathe out and get away and take it all in and say, ‘We played an incredible game.’ ... It was sooo close. But our boys showed who they were. They were the real thing.”
They rallied from a 5-1 deficit to take a 10-5 lead in the course of half an inning. The West Coast crew surged back, shooting towering homers and spraying timely hits to load the bases and push the winning run across in the final frame.
The Southeast stars’ midnight meal with their folks seemed to take the edge off elimination.
“I think it was good for them, and maybe they didn’t even realize it,” Stephens, one of the team moms, said. “It had time to sink in. A couple of them said, ‘I’m OK now.’”
In the minutes after the curtains fell on their 18-win, one-loss campaign, their head coach — their “manager” as the baseball lingo would have it — sounded more like a consoling father, one who saw the bright side through the sting.
Someone asked him how he himself would cope with the loss.
“I don’t know,” Randy Jones said. “I’ve never dealt with this before.”
Not as an all-star coach. The team he lead to a regional tourney for 9- and 10-year-olds two seasons back went 15-0. Up until Thursday night, this year’s bunch, two years more seasoned, was 18-0.
“I don’t know how long it’s gonna take me to get over it,” Jones said, hinting that it might be a while.
As for the boys, he went on, his voice almost catching, “I think in 24 hours they’ll bounce back. ... When I see the first pillow fight, I’ll know that they’re back. I’ll look forward to seeing that pillow fight.”
There was talk of possibly playing the also-eliminated Japanese club in a just-for-kicks game on Friday, but rain washed that out.
A dreary, misty day in the Susquehanna Valley, one where tarps covered the ball fields, would seem a fitting backdrop of teardrops for a season’s sudden halt.
Yet the Houston County kids, who finished among the final four teams in the land, were anything but down.
“They’re all up,” said Warner Robins assistant coach Nathan Hunt. “Now they’re able to enjoy and embrace all they have accomplished.”
They will fly home Monday after watching Sunday’s championship game.
Sure, more than a couple of them might wonder what it would’ve been like to have starred in that show. And that will be just fine, a learning moment even. One about how dreams don’t always come true, and how when they don’t, sometimes unseen vaults of good fortune swing open.
“You can’t expect miracles every time,” Hunt said. “A lot of great things happened here. Sometimes the baseball gods just say, ‘It’s not meant for you today.’”
To contact writer Joe Kovac Jr., call 744-4397.
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