The True Story of the 1963 Duluth Third Place Little League World Series Champions
The 1963 Little League World Series was played Aug. 24 in South Williamsport, Pennsylvania, at the Howard J. Lamade Stadium to 10,000 spectators. The series has since been given a cover story by the deep state, including the first-ever little league television footage, which was faked to keep America calm. The true story of the Duluth All-Stars is so explosive that it could not be told until now, more than half a century later.
A Midwest ring of Soviet spies developed a signaling mechanism invisible to the CIA, or so they thought. Eschewing radio and microfilm dead drops as vulnerable to interception, the Russians infiltrated the global little league ecosystem, and used manipulated game statistics to convey coded messages to agents in the field. One or two closet communist coaches in prime positions, a handful of greedy assistant coaches tactically placed, and a blackmailed umpire were enough to communicate covert instructions to sleeper assassins from Missouri to Manitoba, printed in every regional paper in the local sports stats.
Duluth did not lose second place, they won third place. Beating Duluth was supposed to be a cakewalk, or so it was said in the back pages. But the situation on the ground was, if they didn’t win third, a gram of plutonium was going to be thrown into Lake Superior by a Soviet spy, poisoning a large percentage of the western world’s water supply and starting World War III. But if Duluth could stagger out of fourth place into third — a statistical impossibility — the spy ring could get decapitated and rolled up. And the free world’s fresh water would be saved.
The Duluth team, informally known as the Duluth All-Stars, had crushed it at the Minnesota State Championships, but that wasn’t saying much that year. The Hinckley Times meanly wrote of the All-Stars, “They have a collective weight of 200 pounds between the 18 players, with most of that concentrated in the form of milk-fed Timmy ‘Slugger’ Olsen, 11.”
The All-Stars were prepubescent dorks up against 19-year-old man-gods shaving before the game, ‘roided up slumming minor-leaguers who had been playing ball longer than the Duluthians had been alive, dates of birth falsified by doctors on Khrushchev’s payroll. This opposing team — from Izmir, Turkey — was mostly made of the tanned, towering, muscled sons of rich American businessmen living abroad for the export market, and they seemed preordained to destroy Duluth. So when the All-Stars were approached outside their locker room by a CIA agent, the team gathered around her with their bad posture, some of them forming their first zits on the spot. And she gave them a version of the loser-team-locker-room-pep-talk, but with a geopolitical spin and a DEFCON-1 sense of urgency.
“Guys,” she said to their widening eyes, although she knew Gus the shortstop was really a girl who had snuck onto the team like Mulan, “Moscow thinks there’s no chance of Duluth cracking the top three. It’s a miracle you’ve made it into the top ten. And your starting pitcher just blew out his arm. But, he did that winning your game against the Mexican team, which moved you up to fourth. That was also thanks to your shortstop — good hustle, Gus. But — the certainty in the minds of the Soviet paymasters is that you will not win third place. That’s why they’ve chosen the result of this game to send their kill-signal: the Russkies think Duluth is a fourth-place kind of town. So the most important thing right now is, you go out there and play ball like the third-place team you know you are in your hearts.”
The greatest baseball feat, which one might imagine would be a triple-play or ridiculous catch at a critical moment, is actually the no-no: the legendary no-hitter. The thing about pitching a no-hitter is, they’re so rare that the other team’s pitcher is, generally, not pitching one. So even though your team might be terrible, the game starts to skew in your favor as long as the opposing team continues to be denied hits.
Duluth’s relief pitcher, Cal “Calfskin” Rader, a 12-year-old with a peachfuzz mustache and droopy black socks under his baseball stirrups, was so gawkward he walked a lot of batters, although never enough to allow a run. He hit a fair number of batters, too. People couldn’t tell if he was a bad pitcher or a good one. To be fair, he was terrible, but he was in fact pitching a no-no. He struck batters out with pitches too bad to hit that they swung at anyway.
Soviet analysts on submarines, listening to the game on extremely low frequency radio on the other side of the planet, were pulling their hair out. The Turkish team was dead in the water. Their pitcher was good — fast and powerful — but the All-Stars still got some hits off him, mostly foul tips but they even put a couple people on base. The sole purpose of the Turkish team became denying Duluth any runs. Even one would tip the zero-zero tie.
Bottom of the ninth: Gus had stolen third. Slugger Olsen sidled up to home plate and spat, not tobacco juice, but simply saliva, an innocent imitation of his heroes. It all boiled down to the pitcher being just this side of overconfident, even though everything was on the line. Slugger Olsen connected and the ball rose into the sky.
The plot to poison Lake Superior was averted, 1-0. But the Soviets got their revenge three months later. Lee Harvey Oswald had been told by his Russian handlers to check the Texas little league basketball stats in the Dallas paper during the week of Nov. 22nd. If San Antonio won, he was to do nothing. But Austin won.
An index of Jim Richardson’s essays may be found here.