“Throughout the United States, leagues patterned after Carl’s brainchild are springing up like weeds in a flower bed,” the Sun reported on Dec. Little League started to gain recognition beyond the Williamsport area, but it took until the end of World War II before other branches started popping up. Stotz’s league added a fourth team in 1940 and didn’t expand further for years. This gave them a way to get reacquainted.” “It was mostly run by dads, and in a lot of cases, dads who were coming home from war, sometimes not having seen their sons for months or even years. “I think it was just a way for parents to get kids out to play,” says Lance Van Auken, who was been involved with Little League for nearly 30 years, most recently as the executive director of the World of Little League Museum, before retiring in 2020. Stotz’s vision was a whole new concept, a league for boys that was run by parent volunteers. Organized baseball leagues for teeneagers had existed across the country for decades, and occasionally a few for younger boys would pop up, but those were almost always connected to local churches or professions, such as firefighters’ leagues or the Y.M.C.A.
“I said to them, ‘How would you like to play on a regular team, with uniforms, a new ball for every game and bats you could really swing?’” Stotz recalled years later in an interview, according to Play Ball! The Story of Little League Baseball by Lance and Robin Van Auken. Stotz ran to catch a throw from Major, scraped his ankle on a lilac bush and sat down on the steps of a neighbor's porch. Stotz first thought of starting a boys’ baseball league in summer of ‘38, when he was playing catch in the backyard with his two nephews, Jimmy and Major. While it’s true that the league that Stotz founded in 1939 had a positive impact on the Williamsport community, the depiction of the league’s purpose isn’t entirely accurate. The recap of the banquet in the paper the morning after that event says that 225 people attended to pay their “glowing” respects to the man whose “idea of league baseball competition for youngsters between the ages of eight and 12” six years earlier “has played no insignificant role in helping to curb juvenile delinquency.” Stotz, organizer and president of the Little Baseball League, will be honored at a community testimonial banquet for his work,” reads the beginning of a two-column article published April 13, 1944.
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