Customer Reviews

Little League, Big Dreams

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4 star:		(2)
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This is an excellent book on the inner happenings of Little League Baseball. I really enjoyed the candid assesments of how parents and managers go overboard. The book though is not a bashing of the little league faults - it gives inside looks at what happens at williamsport and the teams...I really enjoyed the stories about the ugly rivalry between California and Florida and how Dante Bichette Sr. got out of control - also the stories about Curacao and Japan and how serious they take the game - the stories about the pitcher's not resting their arms and getting major injuries is a wake up...
Finally, the story centers on Hawaii and how they built their team swithcing from Pony to Little League - and how they practiced so hard - 6 days a week! Great stories about Little league baseball and how Travel teams are so much better and talented (cooperstown baseball)...
if you enjoy youth baseball - you'll love this book

This will be a perfect book for my little brother, who loved baseball so much when we were kids that he decided to up and move to Cooperstown soon as he got himself mobile.

Maybe if he had read it back then, he would have change dhis mind and moved on down to Williamsport, PA, the city that by some freak chance became the site of the annual Little League World Series. Charles Euchner paints the area in lavish descriptive terms, nestled in the shadow of the Alleghenies and with a beautifully preserved old downtown area, though one that's sadly underpopulated due to increased globalism and outsourcing of manufacturing and sales. No wonder the populace are all so into their annual event which draws hundred of thousands of spectators.

Euchner describes the origins of Little League and takes us to a meeting of the very first Little Leaguers at a local restaurant where the oldtimers gather every year to eat and swap stories about working with the original inventor, Carl Stotz.

He's an interesting reporter, though sometimes annoyingly vague: "Newsreels produced by the maker of the classic film 'Lost Horizon' carried an account of the second tournament in 1948." Does this mean that Frank Capra filmed the newsreel? If not Capra, then who? There's nowhere to turn because the book hasn't been footnoted.

Euchner makes an impassioned plea to dismantle the Little League by showing how it has turned a generation of kids into little monsters who live for the camera and don't care about moral issues like steroids. Based on the deep sampling of kids interviewed, they think steroid use is cool. Anabolic steroids helps players do better and get on TV more, that's the bottom line. There are no child stars, and yet Little League coaches and parents put such pressure on the kids that they wreck their arms before they reach puberty. It's a grim story of greed and ambition, and yet, by the end, you'll be waving your ball flag high.

Ive read halfway the book and Im starting to love it. I recomend this book to me and and other boys that are interested in baseball and going to Williamsport in Pynselvania to win the Little League World Series.

Now that would be a Little League Big Dream.

When I was a kid I pushed myself to play baseball. When looking back on it, I see a different perspective of kids and coaches who are both pushing and being pushed. As someone who has played at Williamsport and competed in regular Little League I thought I had seen all that it had to offer until I earned some money umpiring it as a teen.

For a large chunk of my life I played spring and fall baseball (fall was for the hard-cores, spring the middle ground and summer the lightweights[except all-stars at 11-12]} in youth baseball), and occupying my off season with camps and practicing I understand that there are limits to what children should do. At the same time I have trouble with pitch counts when I probably threw an average of 200+ pitches a day for years with no problems whatsoever.

The weird thing looking back on it is that no one pushed me but me. Reading about kids being pushed by coaches and coaches by parents doesn't ring as true with my experiences playing. Unfortunately it rings true with the experiences I saw umpiring. Parents were the worst. I almost had to call a forfeit once because of parent behavior in a championship game for eight year-olds when an ejected parent was hesitant to leave.

The truly insightful sections of this book dealt not with the players, coaches, or parents but the other aspects. The commercial nature of the Series, the impact Little League has had on the way baseball is played and the competition Little League has from other organizations. The travel team system when discussed makes this book worth reading by itself. How competing leagues like the Cal Ripken League are threatening the dominance of Little League is interesting unto itself.

The most interesting section would still have to be the aforementioned impact Little League has had on the way baseball is played. From metal bats, safety gear, youths throwing curveballs and the way the long time Head of Player Safety for Little League is the most influential person in baseball in the latter half, if not the whole, twentieth century. The changes made to the way baseball is played at a young age have a profound impact on not just the way it is perceived, but how it is played at all levels.

I wholeheartedly recommend this to anyone with even a passing interest or experience playing baseball.

I'm not a big fan of non-fiction, but I am an avid reader and have been coaching Little League for a number of years. Normally, I think most non-fiction texts can and should be shrunk down by 90% and placed in a magazine so their narrative doesn't run dry. This book is a solid case in point. I got bored after four chapters and had to put the book down. It's not that the writing was bad, it's that the book went into too much detail about people I didn't care about.

If only this were an article in Sports Illustrated!

I was excited to read this book when I saw it at my local library. I had just finished managing my kids' little league t-ball team (5 to 7 year olds) and was ready to read about kids playing at a higher level. I came out of the experience bewildered and disappointed.

Little League, Big Dreams is a jaundiced, uneven account of the little league world series and all of organized youth baseball. Charles Euchner did an excellent job researching the book. However, the writing is disjointed, and the structure of the book is almost impossible to follow. It seems like the book may have started as a series of articles because much information is repeated throughout the book. (How many times does the reader need to be told that Dante Bichette quit major league baseball upon hearing that his son hit his first little league homerun?)

While I agree with many of the points the writer attempted to make in this book, the unevenness throughout does little to bring those points home. In addition, His "Let the kids play" conclusion was too simplistic and not at all developed. Did I mention that Dante Bichette quit major league baseball upon hearing that his son hit his first little league homerun?