Destiny's Darlings

Destiny's Darlings
by Martin Ralborsky
Hawthorn Books, Inc. 1974

In 1954, the Schenectady, NY, Little League All Stars won the Little League World Series in Williamsport, PA. The 14 boys on that team were instantly transformed into local celebrities of the highest magnitude. Just like their counterparts in the big leagues, the champions spent the winter months after the World Series traveling from banquet to banquet, accepting honor upon honor.

Martin Ralborsky grew up with these 14 boys and the memories of that championship team had been with him even after he entered adulthood. So in the wake of the success of Roger Kahn's 1972 classic The Boys of Summer, in which Kahn revisited the members of the great Brooklyn Dodgers teams of 1952-3, Ralborsky decided to write the same kind of book about another classic baseball team from the 50s, the 1954 Schenectady Little League All Stars.

The book is written in a very clear style. The first chapter talks about Schenectady in 1954 and 1974 and particularly about baseball in Schenectady. The second chapter gives a brief game-by-game account of the 1954 Schenectady Little League All Star's run through the Little League World Series that year. It's interesting to note that in the first game of that series, the Schenectady team beat a team from Florida 17-0. The pitcher for that Florida team was a fat 12-year old named Boog Powell. And in the championship game of that year's World Series, the Schenectady team won 7-5 over a team from Colton, California.

The star of the Colton team was shortstop Kenny Hubbs, who went on to become NL Rookie of the Year and had a promising career ahead of him before he was killed in a private plane crash in 1964. Each chapter after these first two deals with one player in particular on the Schenectady team. They each talk about their memories of that summer, how they first got into baseball, how being a local superstar affected the rest of their lives, what they've done since then, and what they learned from being a world's champion at the age of 12.

Kenny Hubbs of Colton, CA, throws to first as Joe Kazmer of Schnectady, NY, slides into second.

All of this is entertaining, but the thread that holds the individual reminiscences together is when each player talks about Mike Maittea. Maittea was the coach of their team, and each player on the team looks at him a little differently. He was a very hard-nosed man, he expected his players to behave like little professionals. Some of the players took to this approach and still appreciate it today. Others didn't.

Joey Loudis was the second baseman for the team. At the time that Ralborsky revisited him, he was coaching a local high school basketball team in the regional playoffs for the first time in that school's history. He credits Maittea for turning him into a winner. "I only have fabulous memories of Mike," Loudis tells Ralborsky.

One of two players from the 1954 Little League world championship team to later play in the majors, albeit for only a short time, Jimmy Barbieri was working at a sporting goods store in Spokane, WA, in 1974. Barbieri was center fielder and captain of that team. After the series win, he was picked to throw out the first ball in the 1954 World Series between the Giants and Indians. While he says that Maittea made him into a better player, he regrets to some degree the emphasis that the coach put on winning. "I think back on it now, and I'd have to say that Mike wanted to win the world championship for himself, for his own glory, and not for any experience that it might have given to us," Barbieri says in the book. Barbieri did make a pinch hit appearance for the Dodgers in the 1966 World Series, becoming one of the first players to appear in both the Little League and major league World Series. Ironically, one of his opponents in that series was Boog Powell, who he had faced in Williamsport 12 years earlier.

Bill Masucci was the winning pitcher in the 1954 Little League world championship game. The adult Masucci has nothing but respect for the winning attitude that Maittea gave him. Joe Kazmar, who played in the Cubs minor league system for many years, also has only good memories of Maittea.

Big man on that 1954 team at 5'8" and 155 pounds, catcher Ernie Lotano is the first player that Ralborsky talks to who has very bitter memories of Coach Maittea. He complains that Maittea used to call him a "big, overgrown baby," something that the other kids picked up on. He wishes that the kids had been allowed to have more fun in Williamsport. In particular, he recalls that the town of Williamsport had a Field Day the day before the championship game. Maittea wouldn't let his team attend because he was afraid they would get hurt.

Briefly playing for the Mets in 1968, Billy Connors was the other pitcher for that 1954 Schenectady Little League All Star team. Like Barbieri, he says that Maittea did a great job of teaching their team the fundamentals of baseball and of instilling a winning attitude in them. But he also wishes that the coach had allowed the boys to enjoy the whole experience a little more. "Mike had a cruel side to him," Connors tells Ralborsky. "He would scream and holler and swear at us." In 1974, Maittea was minor league pitching supervisor for the Mets.

John Palmer has perhaps the bitterest memories of Maittea and that 1954 championship. He feels like the boys were used to gain glory for Maittea. "I think Mike could have taken any fourteen kids that year and done the same thing; that's why it kinda haunts me. I know we were used and exploited for one adult's goal; that takes the joy out of it today," Palmer says at one point. He also says, "Maybe that's the biggest lesson I learned from Little League. You play to win and you don't play for fun."

The only black player on that 1954 team, Pete Fennicks, does remember Maittea fondly. In fact, he tells Ralborsky that he ran into Maittea on the street only a couple of weeks before their interview and that Maittea invited him to come help coach a Little League team with him. Fennicks particularly recalls the team's first night in Williamsport. That same Little League team from Florida that Boog Powell played on came running by the Schenectady team's quarters late that night before their first game and started calling out racial epithets at Fennicks. When the boys on the team wanted to go out and fight the Florida team, Maittea told them all, "Now, look, these kids are from the South, and they don't like colored folks; they don't like Petey here because he's colored. I know you guys want to go over there and beat their ears back, and I don't blame you a bit; if I let you go, we don't have a team to play tomorrow. So I got a better idea: You want to beat them, you go out there tomorrow and you beat their tails off on that baseball field."

Ralborsky ends the book with his interview with Maittea. Amazingly enough, 20 years later, Maittea is still coaching Little League baseball. He has taken three teams to the Little League World Series, but the only team to win it all is still the 1954 team.

He says of his philosophy of coaching Little League:"You have to be ruthless, because the other guys are ruthless too, and you have to have kids who are tough, fighters, rough-and-ready kids who aren't going to take any bullshit."

In the end, Ralborsky's book does a great job of summarizing what it's like to reach the summit of the game of baseball at the age of 12. Some of the boys went way downhill after that and look at that 1954 season as the best moment of their life, some of them took the win-at-all-costs attitude that Maittea encouraged in them and have made it big in their professions, and some of them have such bitter memories of that season that they try not to think of it at all as adults. But all of them were drastically changed by winning that championship in 1954. Ralborsky's insightful interviews and style of writing do a great job of showing this. It is definitely recommended baseball reading.

Destiny's Darlings may be available for purchase on the net at one of these sites.

--JingleBob