Remember Danny Almonte? What about the team that got cheated out of trip to Williamsport?
Carter Sullivan They stood along the fence in Bristol, Conn., as curious onlookers. A dozen boys from State College, Pa., whose summer had revolved around baseball practices, many of them twice a day for the previous six weeks, had waited for this tournament.
They’d dreamed of appearing in it since they were 9. They practiced every last detail down to how to stand at attention with their hat over their heart during the national anthem. Their once-white practice T-shirts with their nicknames and inspirational messages scribbled on them would soon hang in the dugout. Those hadn’t been washed all summer.
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As the 11- and 12-year-old All-Stars of the State College American Little League team looked across the field to scout their next opponent — the winner of that game would secure a coveted spot in Williamsport, Pa., in the Little League Baseball World Series — they saw a ferocious left-handed pitcher on the mound.
He was lanky and taller than the other kids and appeared more muscular, too. His fastball topped out in the mid-70s, making him nearly untouchable from 46 feet away. The dads who watched alongside weren’t sure if they could even throw as hard as the 12-year-old who was the star of Rolando Paulino’s Little League team from the Bronx, N.Y.
The kid hadn’t given up a run all year.
“I had not seen a pitcher throw that hard or have that type of command and off-speed stuff,” said Brook Hart, who pitched for the State College American All-Stars. His father, Tom, was the team’s manager. “He had a slider that was very advanced. It was harder than my fastball.”
The pitcher was Danny Almonte. And as the world would eventually find out two weeks after the Little League Baseball World Series ended with Almonte’s New York team finishing in third place, the star pitcher was indeed 14, not 12 as Little League required. This wasn’t a surprise to many who watched the tournament before it hit Williamsport.
“Almost immediately the buzz started up there in Bristol that something wasn’t right,” said Tom Mincemoyer, one of the coaches for the State College team. His son Tyler was on the team. “Somebody that New York beat late in the process was making a fuss that they had ineligible players. … I went and talked to the guy who was in charge of the regional and he basically said, ‘I don’t know what you’re worried about. You guys can beat them.’ I said ‘Have you watched him pitch?'”
Little League’s most notorious cheating scandal inevitably resurfaces this time of year. Paulino’s team eventually had all of its wins vacated, and he is serving a lifetime ban from Little League. Almonte’s playing career fizzled after a stint in junior college. He last appeared in a semi-pro game in 2009.
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As teams from all over the globe travel to Williamsport this week, there’s a group of mid-30-somethings from that State College All-Star team who will joke with their spouses and kids about the summer of 2001.
They were the kids on the other side of the Almonte saga, the team that came up one win short of a trip to the Little League World Series after getting no-hit by Almonte in the Mid-Atlantic Regional championship. Almonte struck out 16 of the 18 State College batters he faced as New York won 2-0. The State College kids ended their summer — which some of them still recall as the best of their lives — with an appearance on SportsCenter.
Stuart Scott narrated as they were frozen at the plate. They were almost all fanned by Almonte.
“Mincemoyer? More like minced meat,” Scott said.
“It’s not the stereotypical jock scenario where we’re bald and drinking beer at the local VFW at 35 years old like furious that Danny Almonte beat us when were were 12,” Tyler Mincemoyer said with a laugh. “I might answer a question of like two truths and a lie or something saying that I peaked athletically at 12. We might be the only team or one of the few that qualified for the Little League World Series but didn’t play.”
After Little League’s investigation at the conclusion of the tournament, State College was named the Mid-Atlantic Regional champion. The players were awarded medals and honored the following year on the field in Williamsport. What felt like the most important place in the world to them at 12 seemed kind of trivial by age 13.
In Bristol, at the regional site, a photo of the team from the Bronx was taken down and replaced by one of the boys from State College. They’ve never had any reason to go back and see if it’s there.
“This was new territory for Little League,” said Tom Hart, the manager of the State College team. “There were suspicions on this, but they didn’t have a system in place. They kept saying to me, ‘You’re a cop so why don’t you investigate it?'”
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To make matters worse for State College, the team was never supposed to face Almonte. In fact, had New York been eliminated before reaching Williamsport, the world may not have ever known about Almonte or Paulino.
When State College scouted Almonte’s team the day before the championship game in Bristol, the coaches were relieved to see the powerful lefty on the mound. Hart had masterfully managed his team through pool play. State College had secured a bye and did everything it could to avoid playing New York, and thus Almonte, as long as possible. Hart used his lower-tier pitchers and had even dropped a game to
State College needed New York to burn Almonte, its top pitcher, in the semifinal game against
He was on the mound. They thought they were set.
Almonte fanned his first three batters. Then, the worst-case scenario unfolded:
“We’re just sitting there saying I can not believe this! They’re going to pull him!” Tom Mincemoyer said.
Almonte walked out to the mound in the top of the second inning and tossed the ball to his teammate, signifying the end of his outing. Because he threw only one inning, he was eligible to pitch in the championship game against State College.
“We just needed him to throw one pitch in the second inning,” Tom Hart said. “One pitch.”
While the State College kids didn’t recall feeling defeated right then and there, they knew there was another challenge that came with facing the kid who picked up the Randy Johnson-inspired nickname The Little Unit: He was a lefty. State College didn’t have any left-handed pitchers. They spent the summer with any willing left-handed parent throwing batting practice. Mincemoyer had the ailing arm to prove it.
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“We set Mr. Mincemoyer up which felt like 10 feet if that in front of us, and he just threw the ball pretty much as hard as he could at us to try and get us ready,” Brook Hart said. “It wasn’t even close.”
As Almonte cruised through the State College lineup, with only Chad White reaching base on a walk and a hit by pitch, Hart found himself racking his brain trying to figure out what to say to his team.
“I didn’t want them to know all the cheating stuff that was going on behind the scenes, but some of the parents had let that cat out of the bag,” Tom Hart said. “It didn’t take a rocket scientist to know that when our best player, Doug Suhey, can’t touch the guy’s fastball and he’s mowing everybody down like nothing that’s ever been seen before, you start mentally … you don’t wanna give up the ship, but you start thinking about how you’re gonna handle the kids.”
Hart, a longtime member of the State College Police Department, had been the kids’ no-nonsense manager for years. He spoke about life lessons all summer as he burned his six weeks’ worth of vacation time to coach this group.
There was no better time for a lesson than now as they approached their final out.
“I brought the kids together and I said, ‘We’re not done yet, but it doesn’t look good,'” Tom Hart said. “I said, ‘When we go out there, as tough as it’s gonna be, nobody is gonna cry. We’re going out there as a team and you’re gonna applaud the other team no matter what you think of them.’ And that’s what we did.”
State College players held out hope in the weeks between the regional and the World Series that maybe Little League would investigate the long-standing rumor about Almonte’s age. When it didn’t, they salvaged what was left of their summer and hopped into football and soccer season.
“We were just angry in general,” White, the team’s catcher, said. “We wished we could’ve played in it. We were frustrated. It was a really tough experience.”
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Almonte hysteria hit a fever pitch after he threw a perfect game in Williamsport against a team from Apopka, Fla. The New York Yankees sent the team well wishes. At the conclusion of the World Series, Almonte and his team were given the key to the city by New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani.
Almonte and Paulino would become the center of controversy on Sept. 1 when Little League revealed that Almonte was 14 and revoked all of New York’s wins. Paulino’s history of using ineligible players — one that State College was warned about by a team that played against a Paulino squad two years prior — would come into question.
Hart appeared on “Good Morning America” with his son, Brook. Within a week few would remember or care about a teenage pitcher and the absurdity of such a story.
“Then, 9/11 happened,” Tom Hart said.
The world moved on and so too did all the players and coaches. The State College kids funneled it away as it became a weird fun fact as they got older. It wasn’t until years later when Brook Hart was pitching in a summer league between his junior and senior year of college at Yale that he was reminded of his team’s magical summer of 2001.
In the batter’s box was Carlos Garcia, one of the 12-year-olds who was on Almonte’s World Series team. Garcia approached Hart after the game and asked if he remembered him. The pitcher told him yes, he was the kid who struggled to hit the curveball. They shared a laugh and then Garcia asked a question that had been on his mind for several years: “Do you guys hate us?”
As Tom Hart tells it, “Brook said, ‘No, we knew it was the parents and specifically Rolando Paulino doing it.'”
(Top photo courtesy of Tom Mincemoyer)
