After last year’s incredibly successful game at Fort Bragg, MLB is continuing to take their show on the road. On Thursday, MLB announced that the St. Louis Cardinals and the Pittsburgh Pirates will play a one-off game in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, which happens to be the home of the Little League World Series. Even better, the game will happen during the LLWS, and will be part of a celebration of youth baseball.
They’re calling the game the MLB Little League Classic, and it’ll be played on August 20 at 7pm ET at BB&T Ballpark at Historic Bowman Field. It’s aptly named, since it’s the second oldest minor league ballpark in the country, built in 1926. It’s normally the home of the Class-A Williamsport Crosscutters, a minor league affiliate of the Philadelphia Phillies.
The game will be broadcast exclusively on ESPN as part of Sunday Night Baseball. ESPN already televises the Little League World Series (in partnership with ABC), so this makes sense. As far as current major leaguers who are alumni of the Little League World Series, there are several, but there are two who could appear in the MLB Little League Classic: Lance Lynn and Randal Grichuk, who both play for the Cardinals.
The press release says that this game will “celebrate youth baseball”, but doesn’t reveal any details about how they plan to do that during the game. It will probably involve fun moments and ceremonies between innings, but there are other things they could do if they want to *really* celebrate little league. Bring little leaguers out onto the field during the game, and have them play with a real MLB player! Dangerous? Probably. A once-in-a-lifetime experience for a kid? Definitely!
Derek Goold of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch shed a little more light on what will go on beyond the game itself.
The Little League World Series begins two days earlier, and the Cardinals-Pirates game will be the culmination of a daylong celebration of Little League baseball and the big-leaguers it has molded. Members of the Cardinals and Pirates will attend the little-league games during the day, and the the families and players from the Little League World Series will be brought to Bowman to enjoy the big-league one-off.
That sounds like a lot of fun. MLB is desperate for young fans, and this kind of involvement in the Little League World Series is so obvious it’s almost insane how long it took them to make it happen. But it’s happening, and that’s what matters. Just like it’s major league relative, little league baseball has a long and proud history, and it’s fantastic that MLB is going to celebrate that.
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