On August 23, 1947, the first Little League World Series championship game—the culmination of a three-day tournament in Williamsport, Pennsylvania—features teams from Pennsylvania. Before roughly 2,500 fans, Maynard, a team from Williamsport, defeats Lock Haven, 16-7, to win the title at Original Field. Although it is called the "World Series," 11 of the 12 teams in the tournament are from Pennsylvania; the outlier is a team from Atlantic City, N.J.
One of Maynard's stars was outfielder Jack Losch, who became a standout halfback at the University of Miami. Losch was the eighth overall selection in the 1956 NFL draft and played a season for the pre-Vince Lombardi Green Bay Packers before joining the U.S. Air Force. After Losch died in 2004, Little League Baseball named the World Series Team Sportsmanship Award in his honor.
Maynard's run total in the six-inning championship game stood as a record for 40 years. When reflecting on that game for Sports Illustrated in 1997, Charlie Scudder, who co-managed the Marynard team with Harry Berry, said, "I picked 14 kids who could hit."
Nearly the entire Maynard team went on to college, most of them the first in their families to do so, Sports Illustrated reported in 1997. Added the magazine: "...all [the players] seemed to grow from that hot, sweaty August day."
"After winning the semifinal, we went across the street to Bowman Field, where the Williamsport minor league team played," Maynard outfielder Ed Jones told Sports Illustrated. "We were able to have chocolate milk and peanut butter sandwiches in the clubhouse. I said it couldn't get any better than this."
Within 15 years, the Little League World Series featured teams from Canada, Mexico, Europe and Asia. The first non-U.S. team to win the title was a team from Mexico in 1957. The World Series has become a summer staple on national TV.
