Another Little League World Series begins this week in Williamsport, PA. Another collection of 12-year-olds will walk into Lamade Stadium wearing uniforms representing communities from across the United States and around the world. ESPN cameras will follow them. Parents will lean over railings. Kids will slide down the famous hill beyond the outfield fence on pieces of cardboard. For a couple of weeks, a small Pennsylvania town will once again become the center of the baseball world.
Mississippi won’t be there.
Again.
That isn’t particularly unusual anymore. In fact, it has become the norm. You have to go back 49 summers to find Mississippi in the Little League World Series record book. Back before ESPN existed. Back before travel baseball became an industry. Back to the summer of 1977.
Little League’s official history contains just one Mississippi representative at the Little League World Series: 1977 Hub City Little League. No Mississippi team had made it before them, and no Mississippi team has made it since. Nearly half a century later. The boys from Hattiesburg didn’t know they were beginning a drought that would stretch into another century.
The names remain preserved in Little League’s record book: Rodney Bourne, Robbie Gilbert, Tracy Godbolt, Charlie Hayes, Bobby Lee, Christopher Leggett, Robert McIntyre, Andrew Mott, Ellis Page, Earnest Walker, Craig Walker, Leo Watts, Mitchell Williams and Keith Young. Kenneth Fairley and Robert Walker coached them.
The Hub City All-Stars were also an all-Black team, a noteworthy piece of the story considering the time and place. This was Mississippi in 1977, barely more than a decade removed from some of the most turbulent years of the Civil Rights Movement. But baseball, not race, was what carried these kids across Mississippi, through the South Regional and eventually all the way to Williamsport.
Many of those afternoons began at Vernon Dahmer Park in Hattiesburg, where theLittle League program played. The park itself carried the name of one of Forrest County’s most important civil-rights figures. Vernon Dahmer was a Hattiesburg-area businessman and voting-rights activist who famously offered to pay poll taxes for Black residents who couldn’t afford them. In January 1966, members of the Ku Klux Klan firebombed Dahmer’s home outside Hattiesburg; Dahmer died from his injuries the following day.
Eleven summers later, a group of Black kids playing baseball at a park bearing his name was beginning a journey that would take Hattiesburg somewhere Mississippi had never been. On the national stage.
One of those kids was a lanky pitcher named Charlie Hayes.
Long before the Philadelphia Phillies, New York Yankees or Colorado Rockies, long before 14 seasons in Major League Baseball and long before he caught the final out of the 1996 World Series, Hayes was simply one of the best young baseball players in Hattiesburg.
But calling the 1977 team “Charlie Hayes’ Little League team” doesn’t quite tell the story. Hayes himself doesn’t remember it that way. When longtime Mississippi sportswriter Rick Cleveland, who covered the team for the Hattiesburg American as a young sports editor in 1977, revisited the team nearly five decades later, he asked Hayes about the best player on that Hub City club. Hayes didn’t nominate himself. He pointed toward center fielder Earnest Walker.
A kid who would eventually play more than 1,500 games in the Major Leagues remembered another 12-year-old from Hattiesburg as being better than he was that summer. That’s part of the beauty of Little League baseball. Nobody knows what happens next. The best player at 12 doesn’t necessarily become the best player at 18 or 25. Some become professional athletes. Some play in college. Some eventually put the glove away and build lives completely removed from baseball.
For one summer, though, all that mattered was who could play. And Hattiesburg could play.
Andrew Mott was another major piece of the team. He later became a standout football player at Southern Miss, where he developed into a dangerous wide receiver and return specialist. There were plenty of other talented players whose names never became nationally recognizable. This wasn’t one future Major Leaguer carrying a neighborhood team through a tournament. Hub City had enough talent throughout its lineup to survive Mississippi and then head to Florida with a chance to do something no team from the state had ever done.
Standing between Hattiesburg and Williamsport was Belmont Heights Little League from Tampa. And standing on the mound for Belmont Heights was another 12-year-old whose name would eventually become familiar to anyone who followed baseball in the 1980s.
Dwight Gooden.
Nobody called him Dr. K yet. Nobody knew he would reach the New York Mets seven years later. Nobody knew that at only 20 years old he would go 24-4 with a 1.53 ERA and win the National League Cy Young Award. Nobody knew he would eventually strike out 2,293 Major League hitters.
In August 1977, Gooden was simply the kid standing between Hattiesburg and Williamsport. Across the field was Hayes. The South Regional championship became a pitching duel. Runs were almost impossible to find. Hattiesburg eventually scratched one across. Hayes took care of everything else.
Hattiesburg 1, Tampa 0. Mississippi was going to the Little League World Series.
There are probably hundreds of Little League games played every summer that disappear from memory almost as soon as the uniforms are washed. This wasn’t one of them. A future Major League third baseman had just outdueled a future Cy Young Award winner with a trip to Williamsport hanging on the line.
Then came the part of the story that almost perfectly captures how different youth baseball looked in 1977. Today, when we imagine a team winning a regional championship, we picture parents recording everything on their phones, matching travel gear, charter buses, hotel arrangements, team meals and carefully planned itineraries.
Hub City’s celebration wasn’t quite like that. Cleveland has recalled what happened after Hattiesburg won the regional championship in Florida. The team’s bus driver apparently discovered he wouldn’t be making the rest of the trip to Pennsylvania. So he headed back toward Mississippi.
The problem wasn’t simply that the bus disappeared. According to Cleveland’s account, the team’s travel money went with it. Consider the scene. A group of 12-year-olds had just beaten Dwight Gooden. They were South Regional champions. They were about to become the first group of kids from Mississippi ever to play in the Little League World Series. And suddenly they were in Florida without their bus and without access to their travel money.
Instead, Cleveland remembered the newly crowned South champions sitting down to baloney sandwiches and Kool-Aid. There’s something unique about that image. One of the eight best Little League teams in the world, having just accomplished something no Mississippi team had ever done, eating sandwiches in a motel because their ride had headed back home.
By the following morning, motel vans helped get the team to the airport. For many of the players, even that part of the journey was unfamiliar. They weren’t a group of kids accustomed to flying around the country for weekend baseball tournaments. Williamsport wasn’t simply another stop on a summer schedule.
It might as well have been another world.
The Little League World Series looked very different from the massive event people watch today. Only eight teams reached Williamsport in 1977. Four representing regions of the United States and four from the international field.
Hattiesburg represented the South. Western Little League of El Cajon, California, represented the West. Rotterdam, New York, came from the East, while Youngstown, Ohio, represented the Central Region. The international side included teams from Canada, Spain, Venezuela and Taiwan.
Hub City’s first opponent was Western Little League from El Cajon. Once again, Mississippi ran into a pitcher having the game of his life. John Osborne took the mound for California and struck out 15 Hattiesburg hitters. Hayes pitched for Hub City and kept Mississippi close, but El Cajon eventually built a 3-0 advantage.
Hattiesburg didn’t disappear quietly. Mott singled during Hub City’s final trip to the plate and eventually came around to score. Mississippi kept pushing. The tying runs reached base. Suddenly a game that had seemingly belonged to California wasn’t finished at all. For a moment, Hattiesburg was one swing away from changing its entire tournament. Osborne recorded the final out.
California 3, Hattiesburg 1.
The loss eliminated Hub City from championship contention, but what happened afterward puts that defeat into perspective. El Cajon kept winning. California defeated Rotterdam and advanced all the way to the Little League World Series championship game before finally losing to the powerhouse from Kaohsiung, Taiwan. The only team to beat Hattiesburg in Williamsport finished second in the world.
But Hub City wasn’t finished playing. Hattiesburg moved into consolation play, where it faced the European representative from Torrejón Air Base in Spain. Hub City won 10-2. Then came Youngstown, Ohio. Hattiesburg won again, 9-2.
That detail sometimes gets buried underneath the larger accomplishment of simply reaching Williamsport. Mississippi’s only Little League World Series team went 2-1 against the world. Hattiesburg didn’t stumble into Pennsylvania and discover it didn’t belong. The team won two of its three games. Its only loss came by two runs against the eventual world runner-up.
Then the uniforms were packed away and the kids eventually came home. But Nobody knew a clock had started.
One year passed.
Then five. Then 10. Then 20. Then 40. Now 49.
Nobody from Mississippi has been back.
For most Little Leaguers, Williamsport becomes the baseball story they spend the rest of their lives telling. Charlie Hayes somehow found an encore. Hayes reached Major League Baseball in 1988 and began a career that would carry him through San Francisco, Philadelphia, Colorado, Pittsburgh, Milwaukee, Houston and New York. Then came October 26, 1996.
Hayes was playing third base for the Yankees against the Atlanta Braves in Game 6 of the World Series. New York led the series three games to two and carried a 3-2 advantage into the ninth inning. Two outs. Mark Lemke lifted a foul ball toward third and Hayes moved underneath it. The ball came right down in his glove and the Yankees were World Champions.
Nineteen summers after pitching a group of kids from Hattiesburg into the Little League World Series, Charlie Hayes had caught the final out of the Major League World Series.
From Hattiesburg to Williamsport to Yankee Stadium. You couldn’t write a much better baseball circle.So why has it been almost 50 years since a team from the Magnolia State went back to Williamsport ? Mississippi certainly hasn’t stopped producing baseball players. Far from it.
The state has produced an extraordinary amount of baseball talent relative to its population. Mississippi State won the College World Series in 2021. Ole Miss won it the following summer. Southern Miss has developed into one of the country’s most consistent college baseball programs. Major League organizations routinely draft players from Mississippi high schools, junior colleges and universities.
The talent never disappeared. The path to Williamsport, however, became more complicated. One important piece of context gets lost whenever Mississippi’s 49-year Little League World Series drought is mentioned: not every 12-year-old playing organized baseball in Mississippi is actually playing for a chance to reach Williamsport.
A significant portion of Mississippi’s community-based youth baseball operates through Diamond Youth Baseball, formerly Dixie Youth Baseball. It’s a separate organization from Little League Baseball. DYB teams have their own district and state tournaments and can advance to their own World Series, but Williamsport isn’t part of that road.
The distinction is especially interesting in Hattiesburg. The city that produced Mississippi’s only Little League World Series team now has a major youth baseball presence through Hattiesburg Diamond Youth Baseball. Kids in Hattiesburg are still spending their summers chasing district championships, state championships and World Series appearances.
They’re simply traveling a different road than the Hub City kids traveled in 1977. Travel baseball has divided the talent pool even further. Many talented Mississippi players now spend their summers with independent select organizations, sometimes playing alongside teammates drawn from several different towns. Those teams might travel throughout Mississippi and across the Southeast, but they aren’t playing their way toward Williamsport either.
To reach the Little League World Series today, a Mississippi team first has to come from a league officially chartered with Little League Baseball. Then it has to survive the Mississippi tournament before advancing to the Southwest Regional, where the state champion competes against representatives from Arkansas, Louisiana, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Texas East and Texas West for a trip to Williamsport.
So Mississippi’s 49-year absence from Williamsport needs some context. It isn’t simply a case of the state’s best collection of 12-year-olds trying and failing every summer since 1977. Many of Mississippi’s young baseball players were never on the Williamsport road in the first place.
That makes Hub City’s accomplishment even more interesting. The baseball landscape that produced that team has changed dramatically, but the record hasn’t.
And maybe the best description of just how talented that group was came years later from its most famous player.
Another Little League World Series begins this week, and somewhere another American town is about to experience what Hattiesburg experienced in 1977. Kids will suddenly find themselves playing baseball on television, families will make last-minute travel plans and an entire community will follow them to Williamsport.
Somewhere in Mississippi, another generation will watch. The boys from Hub City couldn’t have known what they were doing in 1977. They didn’t know Mississippi wouldn’t return the following summer, or the next decade, or the next century. They were 12-year-olds playing baseball.
Forty-nine summers later, Little League’s record book still contains the same lonely Mississippi entry:
1977 — Hub City Little League, Hattiesburg.
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