It’s been a long road for Bridgewater Little League to make it to the Little League Baseball World Series for the first time in program history.
“You’ve got to go back to districts,” said manager Tim Zackrison, tracing the winning season back to the beginning. “So, there was district play. Then there’s the sectional play. The state play. The regional play. And now we’re here.”
That’s a whole lot of baseball for Little Leaguers to play before the whirlwind of the little big dance in Pennsylvania.
Bridgewater lost 2-1 in its first game Wednesday night against the Metro region champions from Bayonne, New Jersey. Now, the challenge is balancing the fun of youth baseball with the serious business of the Little League World Series.
“On the bus ride down, it was like letting the boys know you’re one of the 10 teams left in the country,” Zackrison said earlier this week to GBH News. “You know, you’re one of 20 teams left in the entire world. That’s amazing.”
This will be the second year in a row that a Massachusetts tam has made the LLWS, after Braintree American Little League played in the tournament last year.
Bridgewater Little League president Pat Murphy said the run is a culmination of a community that rallies around youth sports. And that comes at the same time as what he called a “great wave” of baseball players in Massachusetts.
“Baseball is booming in New England and Massachusetts in particular,” Murphy said. “And, you know, being a travel ball coach myself and seeing the competition that’s around the state of Massachusetts outside of Little League, that then stems into that in the spring and summer seasons, it’s amazing.”
Bridgewater was dominant in regional play, going 3-0 and giving up just one run. That gave the team a little bit of what they could expect in South Williamsport. But the Little League World Series is still a different beast.
Zackrison was surprised by all the guidelines put in place to help protect the coaches and players, some of whom will reach celebrity status over the course of the next week-and-a-half. People are going to want selfies with 12-year-olds.
“That part ... was a little bit eye-opening that I didn’t quite think about until after that meeting” Zackrison said describing a meeting the coaches were a part of after they arrived. “That we’re going to be playing games in front of tens of thousands of people and there’s going to be a stadium right behind us full of tens of thousands of people and then there’s going to be thousands of people walking around,” he said.
Zackrison doesn’t want the team to get too caught up in the results and soak the whole experience in. Even though they’re on a bigger stage than they’ve ever been on, he wants the players to treat each matchup as just another baseball game.
That’s not too big of a problem for center fielder Jackson Morin. He’s a fan of the gear the players have gotten (he’s particularly fond of the bats) and said the team from Japan is really nice.
And while the Little League World Series is big time, he’s focused on enjoying the experience.
“I just really think, like, no one really cares if you get out,” he said. “Just try to get on base. Just do your best.”
Wednesday’s game was a thriller that ended in heartbreak when the New Jersey squad hit a walk-off homer in the bottom of the sixth to seal the game.
But Bridgewater will live to see at least one more game. They’ll play again Saturday against the loser of Thursday’s game between the Great Lakes Region team from Hamilton, Ohio and the Mountain Region team from Henderson, Nevada.
