Las Vegas Sun

By Ron Kantowski

Tue, Aug 12, 2008 (2 a.m.)

With all due respect to Tom Hanks and his movie alter ago, Jimmy Dugan, there is crying in baseball. I saw it with my own eyes Sunday night.

There is jumping up and down and hugging your teammates and forming a pile in the middle of the diamond as if a free Xbox 360 were on the bottom of it, too — which is what the kids from Waipio, Hawaii, were doing after defeating the ones from Henderson’s Paseo Verde Little League, 4-3, in the winner-goes-to-Williamsport game, aka the Little League Western Regional championship game.

They made the Henderson kids stand to one side of the pitcher’s mound and said nice things about them on the public address system, such as it’s too bad two teams from the Western Region couldn’t go to Williamsport, etc.

It was a nice gesture, what you’d expect at this level, where the way you play the game is supposed to be more important than how many runs you score. And yet it seemed a little cruel, too, because a few moments later, just when most of the Henderson kids had stopped crying, they handed the banner to the Island kids, who starting jumping up and down all over again.

Finally, ESPN said the Henderson kids were free to go. They trudged off the field in single file down the right field line, out of view of the cameras toward the Hawaiian Shave Ice stand — which seemed a little cruel, too — and, finally, the parking lot, where dads draped arms across shoulders and moms supplied hugs, and brothers and sisters — for once — were sympathetic.

Yeah, I know. The Henderson kids will learn one of life’s lessons from this, the one about life throwing you a curveball with the bases loaded that you don’t hit over the fence, because, occasionally, life’s curveballs are meaner than Bert Blyleven’s. Even if you’re 12 and have never heard of Bert Blyleven.

But if you’re much older than that and watching all of this unfold — and you’ve got at least one sympathetic bone in your body — your first thought is that some of life’s lessons would be better learned when you are 17 or 18.

Jim Kelly, the middle school math teacher who has been coaching the Henderson kids since they began hitting a baseball off a tee, stopped on the warning track to explain the game in baseball terms. Our kids had too many errors (although my score card showed just one), he said. Swung at too many pitches in the dirt.

Then he tried to explain it in broader terms. That a Nevada team had never made it to Williamsport, and that this one had come within one run of making history. And that he got to coach his son, Griffin, whose two-run home run in the third inning had tied the big game at 3-3, and how cool was that?

At that point, it looked certain the Henderson kids would win, because that was the second consecutive home run they had hit off the Hawaii relief pitcher who had come into the game when Khade Paris, Waipio’s big kid who looks like a 12-year-old version of the Milwaukee Brewers’ C.C. Sabathia, seemed to hurt his arm.

Plus, Henderson had its big kid, Michael Blasko, on the mound, and he was throwing bullets like Tatum O’Neal in the “Bad News Bears.”

But because this was baseball, strange things were bound to happen.

In the fourth inning, the Hawaii second baseman, named Kainoa Fong, the smallest kid in the lineup, who had started the game in right field — isn’t that where the Bad News Bears tried to hide Timmy Lupus? — raced into short right field with Henderson kids perched on second and third and speared the ball in the webbing of his glove, which came up to his elbow. Little Fong spun ’round in the same motion and threw to first to complete a play that Dan Uggla would have messed up three different ways.

In the bottom of the fourth, Pikai Winchester, the Hawaii third baseman who slept with his bat the night before the game, took the second pitch he had seen all night and did exactly what he did to the only other pitch he had seen, whacking it on a flat line over the left-field fence and into the hospitality tents at Al Houghton Field.

So in the sixth inning, the Henderson kids, down to their last out, sent Blasko to the plate in one of those Casey-at-the-Bat moments that baseball always seems to provide, even in a game in which none of the players shaves.

Everybody expected the big kid, whose career batting average is about .850, to hit the ball over the fence. But he didn’t, and then the Henderson kids had a good cry in the middle of the diamond, because there is crying in baseball.

Afterward, I met Mike Blasko, the big kid’s old man, who said sometimes when you are 12 or 13, it’s tough being the big kid, and this was definitely one of those times. His precocious son was standing nearby, talking to new friends and signing autographs for old men. You could tell he was upset, but his chin was up.

Maybe that was because it had to be, to support the giant Joba Chamberlain-style brim of his ball cap. Or maybe it was because he had already learned that lesson about life the grown-ups were talking about.

“He’ll be all right,” Michael Blasko’s dad said. “He’ll probably be asleep by the time we hit the freeway.”

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