Every young baseball player dreams of one day being a Hall of Famer. This year, 12 Plant City-area kids will have their names added to the Baseball Hall of Fame — as close to the dream as they’ll get before anyone gets a pro contract.
Each summer, a Plant City Little League travel ball team goes to Cooperstown, New York, to play in the American Youth Baseball Hall of Fame Invitational Tournament. From Friday, June 10, through Friday, June 17, the Plant City Prowlers will get their shot in a field of 104 teams.
“We’ve been prepping for this for the past two years,” head coach Ben Smith says.
Two years of maintaining a high winning percentage, raising money and finding sponsors led to this moment. Smith estimates the Prowlers have spent around $24,000 making the trip a reality: the cost to bring 12 players and four coaches, $895 per head, set the team back about $14,320. The other expenses include travel costs, physicals and other miscellaneous items.
“We’ve played a lot of baseball,” Smith says. “We’ve kind of exposed ourselves to a lot of folks, raised a lot of money in that timeframe. It’s a long time coming, so the buildup is huge.”
These tournaments, which run every week from June through August, see hundreds of the best 12-and-under teams from around the country come through the Cooperstown Dreams Park to test their skills against one another. According to Smith, over 1,000 teams are turned away each year.
“There’s a lot of skill-set range up there, which is why you play so many seeding games,” Smith says. “Once they start elimination play, they don’t want a team with a 50% win percentage to play a team that can’t be beat, no matter how hard you try.”
Each team gets to play a handful of Saturday exhibition games to warm up before the stakes come into the picture on Sunday. Smith says that the best way to ensure survival in the single-elimination pool is to keep the best pitchers from working too much early on.
“Everybody’s going to have to pitch, and you’re going to have to suffer some losses in order to preserve that kid,” Smith says. “But if you can get him to that elimination game, you’ve got a high chance of winning it.”
Eleven of the 12 Prowlers are Plant City Little League All-Stars, and many have played together for several years in both PCLL and Prowlers games.
“We sought out kids from our community … It’s a friend-based team,” Smith says. “They get along great, they root for each other. There’s no bickering in the dugout. The parents get along. We’re all good friends, and it’s gone a long way toward us having this success with the team.”
According to Smith, the Prowlers have won about 61% of over 150 games played in the last two years. This season, the team won or placed second in 10 tournaments and used the trophies as motivation for a new goal.
“Any time we win a tournament or get runner-up we always give the trophy to one of the kids,” Smith says. “The goal was to get all the players a trophy. We came up a little bit short of that goal, but we were close.”
While a tourney win at Cooperstown wouldn’t get the team to achieve that goal, coming through on one of the biggest stages in the country would certainly make up for it. Whatever happens, the players are excited to finally be able to play after two years of waiting patiently — and in many cases, waiting while their siblings played in the tournament and told stories about the experience.
“Now, it’s their time,” Smith says.
Contact Justin Kline at jkline@plantcityobserver.com.