The High Park Braves are an elite baseball force. And they have been playing some mythic baseball this summer. Toronto’s High Park Baseball League produced the group. They’re a Rep team of tweens, which makes them sort of like a Little League all-star team that makes its home on one of the High Park baseball diamonds, but also represents Toronto in the far reaches of Oakville, Vancouver or beyond. The 2011 High Park Braves must have struck fear and terror into the hearts of opponents all summer long. They went a combined 8 and 0 through their district and provincial tournaments. They haven’t just been beating other teams. They’ve been racking up mercy kills (as applicable as that can be to 12-year olds). This is Little League. But it’s the big time of Little League. I don’t even know if I can even compare it to my own experience in the sport. Back when I was seeing action in Little League, I was making the most of my extensive tour of duty in left field by learning all of the words to Run DMC’s album “Raising Hell”. I barely remember anyone even hitting it to the outfield in my games. These High Park Braves are a team for history, and they are led by one Ryan Kula. Ryan Kula has a stunning .733 batting average (which is unbelievable, sort of like not even knowing how to strike out) and led his team with 6 innings pitched while giving up only 1 hit, no runs. High Park’s roster boasted 3 other players batting over .300 to round the team out as a powerhouse, and an enthusiastic one at that if, as one player was quoted in the Star saying, they’ve been dreaming about this since they were 7. And now they’re 12 years old, which is pretty much the maximum age for Little League. Later there will probably high school teams, aspirations to play at higher levels. But for the best 12-year olds in baseball, the goal is to win the Little League World Series. For a team like the High Park Braves to get to the Little League World Series in Williamsport Pa, they need to qualify as Canada’s entry. That’s why it’s important for them to have gotten through the ranks of Toronto’s and Ontario’s tournaments. The whole thing is still a very American affair, with half of the teams in the World Series tournament coming from different regions of the US. Also, this year the draw is arranged so that all of the American teams are in one half, and the international teams in the other, ensuring that an American team plays in the final game. But it’s a global tournament that America has been hosting now for 64 years. High Park got all the way to Canada’s Little League national tournament in Vancouver. And they really started to clean up, barely surrendering a run let alone a game. (They surrendered 14 runs, but only to 43 runs of their own over the first 5 games.) The semi-finals began, the first of the single-elimination games. High Park looked indomitable, but a hot pitcher on a focused Valleyfield team from Quebec held our Braves to only 3 runs, and Valleyfield got away with a 4-3 win. Sadly, High Park doesn’t get to go the World Series. Langley, British Columbia ended up beating Valleyfield soundly, and will represent Canada when the World Series gets underway on August 18. But it’s not so sad, really. It’s said over and over again that baseball is a game of numbers. The numbers show that this year’s High Park Braves was a very special team. And they’re winners, no matter what. Their fate in BC was part of what can happen to anyone when a single game can end a tournament. But the Little League World Series is full of some fascinating stories, even though this year’s tournament is only just getting underway. The idea of 12-year old kids from Toronto’s High Park being out on the world’s stage as part of it all was exciting even just as a possibility. In the tournament’s 64 years, the US and the rest of the world have split the number of total wins evenly 32-32, so I guess this year’s a tie-breaker. Tokyo is the reigning champion, and have sent the team that has won the tournament 3 times int he last 10 years. International teams were first invited in the 1960s. In 1975, the rest of the world wasn’t invited because the US hadn’t been winning much, and only US teams competed. That decision only lasted a year. Hawaii frequently has a strong presence in the World Series. High Park could become a perennial force in Canada’s little league landscape. Typically, BC is the most dominant region of the country (mild winters have been cited as a cause of this luxury of baseball talent). And one of the most intriguing of all stories ever to come along in Little League World Series is what happened this year with the team from Uganda. They were first African country ever to qualify for the World Series (representing the Europe-Middle East and Africa region). A couple of weeks ago the story broke, although without much in the way of detailed information, that they weren’t going to be granted visas to enter the US. Discrepancies in the personal information of the players, particularly about the ages of the players, were cited as the reasons. It’s possible it was an administrative problem on the part of the Ugandan team, but also possible that some of the Ugandan players are too old to compete. If going from High Park to Vancouver to the World Series would have seemed like an unbelievable ride compared to what we might normally expect out of Little League baseball, imagine how the ride from Uganda to the World Series would have been.
