The article below was submitted by North Penn baseball coach Kevin Manero, who has been involved with American Legion baseball as both a player and coach. (Photos provided)
By Kevin Manero
Duck your head just slightly as you enter behind home plate, under the iconic wooden grandstand of Quakertown, Pennsylvania’s Memorial Stadium. As you walk through the short tunnel, a game is already underway, and you hear a quiet roar and then the sounds of summer, a semi-soft echoing clap from the left side of the grandstand, as the visiting team parents and fans applaud a base hit that just got through the left side. The dust settles where the shortstop valiantly dove but came up just short.
To your right you see at the far end of the first base side bleachers, Neil McCurdy sitting at the low end of the bleachers keeping score and pitch count. He’s wearing a Quakertown ShootOut Tournament T-shirt with an image of Yosemite Sam on the front. That shirt is probably 30 years old, but it looks like Neil could have bought it yesterday. He’s been with the team for 38 years. Leaning up against the side of the wooden grandstand is Bob Helm, who has been the head coach at Quakertown for 18 years. He barely blinks as he watches the dust pop out of the catcher’s mitt on a perfect 0-2 pitch. On the field, “strike three” echoes back to the grandstand as Jan Tashman punches out a hitter from behind the plate - there’s that echoing applause again. Jan has been doing that for 35 years, and he’s umpired more games at Quakertown than anyone can imagine, but he still doesn’t look old. It’s Bux-Mont American Legion playoff time in Quakertown, and that means we are in the heart of the summer.
John Pedrazzani is here tonight too. John was the head coach at Hatfield American Legion about 30 years ago, before coaching his last 15 years on staff with Nor-Gwyn American Legion and North Penn High School, where he was part of one Legion state title and two high school state titles. He used to take vacation days to volunteer at Legion Regional tournaments, and he knows everyone. Coach P sticks around until after the game is over, and as the coaches are fixing the field, he walks out and shoots the breeze and exchanges a few laughs with some fellow longtimers.
Earlier in the summer, a late June Saturday night - the perfect kind of hot summer night really - the lights were on at Bear Stadium in Boyertown, where dozens of volunteers arrive each night to work the concessions, prep the fields, and man the ticket gate. Down at the end of the Bears’ dugout, Craig Eddinger takes a seat. He’s in his first season not coaching after spending 30 years in a Legion uniform as a coach, after playing for the Bears himself in the early 70s and then playing college ball at St Joe’s. He still stops by and hangs out in the dugout for a few innings. Craig just had his number retired by the Bears’ Legion program the day before. On the other end of the dugout, two young kids who aspire to be Bears someday are the evening’s foul ball chasers, and they’ll be hustling all night. Bear Stadium will be in all her 40-year-old glory when it hosts the Legion State Tournament in a few weeks, the stadium that was built with a boatload of community support back in the early 1980s so that it could go on to host everything from the Berks County playoffs to the American Legion World Series.
Over at Ben Hostelley Field at Nor-Gwyn, the sun takes its usual final breaths on the horizon behind the first base dugout. A few kids from the 10- and 11-year-old teams are watching up in the bleachers after their practice on the small field. Down the right field line, Dave Hill sits up on the aluminum bleachers and watches most of the game, engaging in a short chat with Jimmy Rittenhouse. Jimmy and Dave are about 30 years apart in age, but both are Nor-Gwyn Hall of Famers. Dave is one of the long-time community members who helped build Nor-Gwyn over 40-plus years ago. Jimmy just finished coaching his son’s 13-year-old game on the other field. Alan Warner stops by the field that night too and hangs out until after the legion game is over. Al played Legion ball on that field in 1979, and still plays there at the age of 59 in the Perkiomen Valley Twilight League. Back behind the right-center field fence stands the “Hawks Nest” batting cage, recently built and funded largely by the Nor-Gwyn 12U team whose 2020 season was erased by COVID, but they used their fundraiser money instead to build that cage for all Nor-Gwyn families to use for years to come. That night a freshman lefty pitched well enough to have a big headline in the local newspaper the next day - another beautiful thing when it comes to local baseball and an item for that kid’s scrapbook.
These are the sights and sounds of something very special, something with longstanding tradition, something that has given generations of kids, parents, and communities a great sense of pride, accomplishment, volunteerism, and purpose. This thing is disappearing though, and with it those experiences are beginning to diminish for many kids and communities as well. It is American Legion Baseball, and now, more than ever, we need to work to keep it alive.
American Legion Baseball needs to thrive, not so much for all those people who have already been a part of its fabric for decades, but for those who still have a chance to be so.
For the kid who didn’t get to start every game for his high school team but over a summer of legion ball will start every game at third base and get 60 ABs, Legion ball is important. For the kid who was injured and missed most of the spring, but loves baseball, is healthy now, and just wants to play every night, Legion ball must exist. For the pitcher who was the #4 on his staff in high school and only logged a handful of innings on the mound but throughout the summer started a game every week and figured out his off-speed stuff while gaining a ton of confidence in attacking hitters, Legion ball is essential. For all the late bloomers out there who still have a desire to walk on to a college team, and in some way keep playing for many more years, and need these innings to keep getting better, Legion ball is needed. For the graduating senior who is going on to a college program in the fall but needs another 50-70 ABs to really hone his skills and work on hitting the ball to the middle part of the field a little bit better, Legion ball is key. Oh, and that same kid probably grew up in community baseball and played games five minutes from his house most of his life, and this might be his last shot to put that uniform on and play for the organization that created his love for the game. For all the kids in each community, who play baseball because they love it, who wake up on summer mornings and can’t wait to get to the field, whose parents and grandparents, friends, and maybe some neighbors come and sit in the home grandstands every game and have for the last dozen years or so… for all of those kids, American Legion Baseball must carry on.
This is not an argument or a debate between community baseball and travel baseball. To each his own. Every family and player has to do what they feel is the right thing for them, and there are a thousand different scenarios along the way that dictate that. But for all the scenarios where kids and communities benefit from American Legion Baseball, it’s time to roll up the sleeves and work harder than ever before. Legion organizations need to work to preserve and build or rebuild their programs, and the American Legion Baseball organization needs to change with the new landscape of youth baseball. Bigger territories, combined leagues, less compressed schedules may all be solutions to create more opportunities for programs and the kids within them to thrive, but none of this can just magically happen.
Trying to just remain status quo with the structure of American Legion Baseball is like trying to send a text message with a typewriter. We don’t have to just quit, and stop writing, but we can’t keep using the typewriter either. With time, comes change. It takes people just like all those listed above to keep something as valuable as American Legion Baseball relevant, but it also takes some reimagining and reconstructing, just like anything else that has aged over time.
Some kids may well need to travel to Georgia, Diamond Nation, and other destinations to be seen by college coaches at the right time in their baseball development, but some need to be seen by their parents, grandparents, friends, and high school coaches, and American Legion Baseball owes these kids the chance to do that. And maybe, a reimagined landscape of American Legion ball can give them both opportunities. But again, like everything else, the call is out to American Legion Baseball, its communities of volunteers, their connected high school programs, and anyone else who loves baseball to make that happen. Or, yes, we might be close, in many communities, to losing the whole experience.
A decade ago, the Bux-Mont League was thriving with 12 teams. The summer of 2022… half that, just a six-team league. That’s no anomaly. In 2022, Pennsylvania has 207 Legion teams, but 10 years ago that number was double. New Jersey and New York combined have only 95 teams. Pennsylvania has lost 46 teams in just the last 3 years.
So, there are two paths forward. One, throw up the hands and repeat that now hackneyed phrase “Legion ball is dying.” Or, two, rebuild it. If you rebuild it, they will come. But it’s going to take some dedication, some rethinking, and it’s going to take the next generation of people who have a desire to be the fabric of the next generation of American Legion Baseball to keep it going for the many kids who still need it.
Eleven years ago, I wrote an article about why kids should play Legion baseball. I wrote that piece just as current Major League pitchers Tim Mayza (Toronto Blue Jays) and Lou Trivino (Oakland A’s) had finished up their youth baseball careers with Perkiomen Legion Baseball and Pennridge Legion Baseball respectively. Mayza played his Legion ball for longtime successful skipper Ernie Quatrani, and Trivino played for Rocky Wright, who not only carved out a great Legion coaching career of his own, but he was also following in the footsteps of his father Mel, who was a former American Legion league president. This time around, I’m not saying all kids should play Legion baseball. And that’s ok. It doesn't have to be a battle between kids playing one kind of ball or another. There is room for both, but I am saying Legion baseball needs to get to work, to make it possible for those who do want that experience to have it.
Warm summer nights under the lights in your own town, a young pitcher learning how to battle through that mountain of a fourth inning so the adrenaline can take over in the fifth, a graduated high school senior playing for the last time with his town’s name on the front of his jersey getting a bunt down in the bottom of the seventh to put the winning run on third base, the high school bench player who now has a season full of at bats lining a single past a diving second baseman to drive in the winning run, parents and grandparents alongside neighbors and some high school buddies standing up and pumping their fists in the grandstand as a team full of kids from the same town run out to mob home plate. If you rebuild it… it can all keep happening.
- Log in to post comments
