Manager Says Experience Outweighs the Disappointment
WILLIAMSPORT, Pa. — Cypress Manager Greg Novy said he was happy with the way his team performed, despite losing two of three games.
“I believe we had a team that was as good as any other team here,” Novy said. “We were definitely capable of winning. Obviously, we didn’t show as well as we could and we aren’t pleased not to be playing [today] and Saturday, but we had a great run and we accomplished a lot.
“I feel better than I thought I’d feel after losing. We’re here in Williamsport, we had a record of 18-2. We’ve had a great two months together. What more can you ask?”
Cypress players will remain at the complex to participate in Friday’s home run hitting contest. Highlights will be shown on ESPN2 immediately after the Little League all-star game, which will be shown at 5 p.m.
Cypress is expected to participate in closing ceremonies Saturday, before the World Series championship game, and leave Williamsport Sunday morning for the return trip to Southern California.
For the last eight years, from his position at the end of a stadium tunnel to the left of home plate, usher Gary Spies has one of the best views of the action at Lamade Stadium.
Like so many volunteers who work the series, he is an avid baseball fan with a keen sense of Little League Baseball. When he isn’t showing people to seats, he is analyzing play. Asking for his assessments has become an annual ritual and he is usually dead on.
Spies, for instance, correctly noticed during the 1992 series that players from the Philippines appeared to be more mature than the other 11- and 12-year-old boys. They walloped the opposition en route to winning the series title, but a few weeks later, the Philippine team was disqualified for falsifying ages of several players who were actually teenagers.
Other Spies predictions: He said Yorba Hills of Yorba Linda would lose to Spring, Texas, in the 1995 United States championship game and last year, after the first day of competition, he said Guadalupe, Mexico, which beat South Mission Viejo, 5-4, in the title game, was the team to watch.
So what does Spies think of this year’s teams? He says the overall talent level isn’t as high as he has seen in past years.
“I don’t think the East team is as strong as its 3-0 record indicates,” he said of Toms River, N.J., which faces Greenville, N.C., in the U.S. title game at 5 p.m. today. “There is no one big standout on any team, as we have seen in other years.”
Before Wednesday’s game, Spies predicted that Greenville would beat Cypress, saying Greenville hits better than any team in the tournament.
“Someone in his position in the stadium has been watching a lot of games over the years,” Little League spokesman Lance Van Auken said. “He sees the trends and the players each year and it’s probably not that surprising that he can make all those kinds of predictions because he is very well informed.”
South Mission Viejo fell short of winning the series last year. But South made a lot of noise.
With noisemakers, that is. Those plastic bottles filled with pennies are still being shaken in ballparks across the nation. They were evident at each of the four U.S. regional finals and they’re back in Williamsport again. Most notable: Supporters of Saudi Arabia, who on Monday gave the crowd a taste of the clattering. Canadian fans picked up on the idea and supported their team on Wednesday--against the Saudis--with several dozen shakers.
Each series has had a distinctive, unofficial signature by which it is remembered most. There were the South Mission Viejo shakers, for example, or the troll dolls that Long Beach kept in the dugout during back-to-back titles in 1992 and 1993.
A rage this year is T-shirts with the names of players emblazoned on the back. Greenville, for example, had 450 shirts made. Saudi Arabia fans did the same, adding forest green and gold lettering. They didn’t match the team’s orange jerseys, but parents said they chose to stick with the league’s usual color scheme.
Cypress fans, however, accustomed to wearing their traditional deep blue T-shirts trimmed in red, adjusted when the team was given yellow uniforms for the World Series. Unhappy with the color, parents begrudgingly donned mustard-yellow look-alikes. But after Cypress was defeated by Toms RiverMonday, the first loss of its all-star season, several spectators refused to wear the shirts, claiming they were bad luck.
