Only one Mississippi baseball team in history has advanced to Williamsport, Pennsylvania, and the Little League World Series, which turns 74 years old this month and saturates August ESPN programing.
The Hub City’s Pineview Little League All-Stars, an all-Black team, first won the 1977 Mississippi Little League championship at Biloxi. How that Hattiesburg team advanced from Biloxi, to the South Regional Championship in St. Petersburg, Florida, and finally to the Little League World Series is a fascinating story, one well worth telling 49 years later.
This will be mostly from first-hand perspective. I covered that Little League World Series for the Hattiesburg American, where I was the 24-year-old sports editor. I remember telling my bosses we should cover the Little League World Series and being somewhat shocked when they agreed.
Rick Cleveland
So off to Pittsburgh I flew, rented a car and drove to Williamsport. The Hattiesburg team, which included future Major Leaguer Charlie Hayes and future Southern Miss football great Andrew Mott, was already there, along with coaches Boot Walker and Kenny Fairley.
The truth is, I had already missed the biggest story, which was how Hattiesburg won the South Regional, defeating a Tampa team that featured a fearsome 12-year-old pitching phenom named Dwight Gooden. Yes, that Dwight Gooden, the future Dr. K, who seven years later would win National League Rookie of the Year, unanimously, winning 17 games and leading Major League Baseball with 276 strikeouts.
Hattiesburg and Tampa, on opposite sides of the bracket, cruised through the tournament until the championship. Both trounced everyone they played. Hayes, a future Major League third baseman, pitched a two-hit shutout in Hattiesburg’s opening victory over Louisiana. Gooden threw a no-hitter in Tampa’s opener. Each team won two more games to set up the championship showdown. To hear Hattiesburg players and coaches tell it, nobody, except them, expected Hattiesburg to win. Gooden, who was huge and muscled for 12, had overpowered everyone he faced in tournament competition. He hadn’t given up so much as a hit in tournament play. He was already a well-publicized cult hero in Tampa and had a huge following in St. Petersburg where a crowd of hundreds cheered the Tampa team.
Back then, Gooden threw strictly fast balls that few 12-year-olds could touch. Hayes was different. He didn’t throw as hard as Gooden, but had mastered a curve ball that made his fast ball seem all the faster.
“I threw mostly curves against Tampa,” Hayes would tell me years and years later. “It kept working and I kept throwing it.”
Hayes threw a one-hit shutout. Hattiesburg scratched across one run. The Hub City team, many of whom had never been out of state before, won 1-0 and were now headed for Williamsport. There’s a story there, too. When the team’s bus driver learned he wasn’t on the travel list for Williamsport, he headed back to Hattiesburg and took the team’s travel money with him.
So after beating Dwight Gooden, the team celebrated at the motel with baloney sandwiches and Kool-Aid. Motel vans carried them to the airport the next day, and it was on to Williamsport. Only two of the Hattiesburg players had ever been on a plane. Not many more had ever been out of state before that week.
But they were in Williamsport by the time I got there and already had been fitted for their new World Series uniforms – green jerseys, with yellow trim, which read “SOUTH” in huge capital letters on the front. The Hattiesburg boys wore them proudly. Understand, these kids were mostly from poor families. Says Hayes, now 61 and living in Houston, “Most were like me, and I was on public assistance, food stamps, all the time I was growing up.
“People asked me why I wore two pair of thick socks under my uniform socks at Williamsport,” Hayes says. “It was because my baseball cleats were hand-me-downs, a size and a half too big.”
Charlie Hayes at Williamsport.
Some of the Hattiesburg players used gloves borrowed from fathers or uncles that seemed far too big for their hands. But believe this: Those little kids could play ball and they could even more hit. In one state tournament game, all nine starters hit home runs in the first three innings of a mercy-rule victory.
Mott, the team’s catcher, and Hayes were both home runs waiting to happen. Mott had homered in every tournament game until the championship game at Tampa.
“But our best player wasn’t me or Mott,” Hayes said. “The best player on the team was Ernest Charles Walker, our centerfielder. Man, he could do everything.”
At Williamsport, Hattiesburg would need to win three straight games to get to the nationally televised championship game, which everyone assumed would be against perennial champion Taiwan. Hattiesburg faced the West champs from El Cajon, California, a San Diego suburb.
Hattiesburg ran into a buzzsaw named John Osborne, the El Cajon pitcher.
Hayes pitched well for Hattiesburg. Osborne, a tall, strapping 12-year-old who easily could have passed for 14, pitched better. He allowed only three hits and struck out 15 of a possible 18 batters.
Hattiesburg battled. Down 3-0 going into the last inning, Mott singled and later scored Hattiesburg’s only run. But with the bases loaded, Osborne struck out Hattiesburg’s last hope.
That dropped Hattiesburg into the consolation bracket, which they easily won with two straight lopsided victories over Spain and Ohio. In the consolation championship game, the Hattiesburg team pounded out 20 hits to win 9-2. The next day, they watched Taiwan, as expected, defeat California 7-2.
As it turned out, the Hattiesburg players hung out mostly with the Californians and Taiwanese in the Little League village, where each team had its own cabin. You may wonder about the language barrier. The Taiwan players did not speak English. The California and Hattiesburg players did not speak Mandarin Chinese.
“But baseball has a universal language and there were interpreters,” Mott says.
One encounter stands out in my memory. A player from Spain poked a player from Taiwan, and asked him, “Pitcher?”
The Taiwanese player shook his head. “Shortstop,” he said, then smiled. “Home run hitter!”
The Taiwan players hit lots of those. One of Mott’s favorite Williamsport memories was from a Hattiesburg practice, which was interrupted several times by balls landing in the infield, hit from another diamond across the way.
“Where are those balls coming from?” one of the Hattiesburg coaches asked.
“That’s Taiwan taking batting practice,” an outfielder told him.
Says Mott, “So Coach Fairley gets me and Hayes to take batting practice and hit balls over into the Taiwan practice field, which we did.”
The Hub City team’s Little League World Series experience didn’t end in Williamsport. No, they rode a bus to Washington D.C., where they toured the city and had breakfast with President Jimmy Carter. Later, the same day, they were on to Baltimore where they watched the Orioles play a night game against the Kansas City Royals.
Forty-nine years later, Hattiesburg players cherish all those memories. They didn’t get to play Taiwan. They didn’t get to play on national TV. Only one of them, Hayes, went on to play professional baseball. Hayes played 14 Major League seasons with 10 different teams, including the 1996 World Series champion New York Yankees. Indeed, Hayes caught Mark Lemke’s out when the Yankees defeated the Atlanta Braves to win it all. Hayes hit .262 for his career with 144 home runs and 740 runs batted in. He is one of only 12 in history to play in both the Little League World Series and the Major League World Series.
New York Yankees Derek Jeter (2) celebrates as teammate Charlie Hayes catches the final out of Game 6 of the World Series between the New York Yankees and the Atlanta Braves at Yankee Stadium in New York, Saturday, Oct. 26, 1996. The Yankees defeated the Braves 3-2 to win the game and the World Series. (AP Photo/Kathy Willens) Credit: AP
Hayes, 61, lives in Tomball, Texas, a Houston suburb, where he operates a baseball academy and follows closely the career of his youngest son, Cincinnati Reds third baseman Ke’Bryan Hayes.
Mott, who led the nation in punt return yardage at Southern Miss, still lives in Hattiesburg where he deals will injuries that required 21 surgeries from his football career that included a stint in the Canadian Football League after USM.
Hayes insists Mott would have been a Big League catcher had he decided to pursue baseball instead of football. “Mott could really catch,” Hayes said. “He had the pop time, could hit for power and he was fast.”
When told what Hayes had said, Mott said, “Maybe I wouldn’t be so beat up.”
Both Hayes and Mott say they still watch the Little League World Series every year when it comes around. “Brings back so many memories,” Mott says.
Could that Hattiesburg team of 1977 compete with the current World Series teams?
“I don’t think there’s any doubt,” Mott says. “We were fundamentally sound and, man, we had some athletes.”
