Stepping up to the plate

Friday

BEAVER FALLS - Three Potter Pirates were rooting for the home team recently at PNC Park. 

If the Pittsburgh Pirates should lose to the San Diego Padres, it will be a shame.  But Chris Shurtz, Joe Cordell and Nick Kaszer won't dwell on the loss. 

Baseball, these three area teens learned this month during the Potter Pirates East Coast Tour, is about winning, about losing and about how you play the game. 

As is life, which is what tour director Jeff Potter hoped to impart to 16 young boys on and off the field since the 25-day tour began July 1 in Ellwood City. 

By tonight, the Potter Pirates, all 16 years old or younger, will have played 20 baseball games in such Pennsylvania towns as Brockway, Clearfield and Reading, as well as Frederick, College Park, Aberdeen and Kent Island, Md.

At each, the team spent time in the community - teaching little boys how to play baseball, cooking breakfast at a senior citizens center, washing cars. " Giving back" is what Potter calls it. 

For today, though, the local trio is most concerned about where the team is playing its final game: on the grass field at Pittsburgh's PNC Park.  After the Bucs' game, the Potter Pirates will take on a team from the Ellwood City, New Castle and Neshannock area.  The game should start around 6 p.m.

"The best of the best play on there," said Shurtz, a 15-year-old sophomore pitcher at Lincoln High School in Ellwood City. 

Outfielder Cordell, a junior at Ambridge Area High School, didn't play when the school's baseball team played at PNC during his freshman year. 

"I can't wait to play there," the Ambridge resident said Tuesday morning, when the team toured Geneva College in Beaver Falls. 

"I'm going to feel like a real Pirate out there," said first baseman and catcher Kaszer.  Though the Pittsburgh Pirates haven't had a winning season during his life, the 16-year-old Blackhawk High School junior is a loyal and avid fan. 

"I love the Pirates," the Chippewa Township resident said. " I think that it's going to be like a dream come true." 

The dream to play baseball in the major leagues beckons these young boys. " I want to go as far as I can," Cordell said. 

It beckons millions to baseball diamonds despite long odds.  Forty years ago, it beckoned Potter, a standout outfielder and pitcher for Lincoln High in Ellwood. 

The 56-year-old Overton, Md., resident helped lead the school's Wolverines to the 1971 WPIAL championship game that Lincoln lost at Three Rivers Stadium in Pittsburgh.  After graduation, the Detroit Tigers drafted the southpaw pitcher.  During a minor-league intramural game in Lakeland, Fla., Potter, then 19, ran into a concrete wall.  A broken left wrist shattered any hope of a big-league career. 

Life deferred Potter's baseball dreams for decades.  The latent passion surfaced when his son Eric, now 20 and a pitcher at the University of Maryland, became interested in the game.  Potter became a coach and a teacher.  But his love of baseball wasn't about winning World Series rings. 

It's about this tour, about teaching kids how baseball was played during his childhood, when coaches explained how to throw, catch, field and hit a ball between the white lines.  They gave lessons in respect, confidence, team pride, sportsmanship, success and defeat.  His book "Whatever Happened to Baseball?"  relives that time and compares it with youth and high school programs today. 

Plans for the tour began in April 2009.  Sixteen players - 11 from Maryland and five from Pennsylvania - signed on.  Communities and businesses from each of their hometown areas raised $2,400 to sponsor a player. 

"This isn't a showcase team," Potter said. " They're good, but more important, they're good kids.  Most have average talent, but they work hard and they hustle.  They don't throw bats, and they don't scream at umpires." 

Early Tuesday morning, the team arrived at Geneva in two long white traveling vans.  They wore dark-blue sports shirts with emblems and khaki shorts.  They listened to Geneva head baseball coach Alan Sumner expound on the school's sports and academic programs.  They asked questions. 

That afternoon, they played a game in Canfield, Ohio.  On Wednesday, they played host to a youth baseball clinic in Freeport, followed by a game that evening. 

Among the many community programs, Cordell said he liked teaching kids baseball fundamentals best. 

"They thought we were superstars," he said. 

Kaszer remembered two brothers, Drew and Dylan, who hung out with the team during the day, and then were bat boys for the game that evening. 

In College Park, Md., the team played baseball with handicapped kids. 

"It shows you how much some people take for granted," Shurtz said. " Those kids loved the game, and they played even though they were in wheelchairs." 

At Kent Island, Md., the team cooked a pancake-and-sausage breakfast at a senior citizens complex and by 9 a.m. were line-dancing with several of the seniors.  Late that afternoon, they played a 60-year-old-and-over team. 

"They were good," Shurtz said. " We only beat them by one run." 

The tour, the three said, made them better players.  They used wooden bats, saw how they were made at the BWP bat factory in Brookville and, with practice, learned how to bunt with a wooden bat.  Hitting a ball with an aluminum bat, they said, is much easier. 

"There is a humongous sweet spot on the aluminum bat, but not on the wood.  It's just not big at all," Shurtz said. 

This, they said, proves how good, how talented players who make it to the big leagues are. 

On the field, certainly.  And when the Potter Pirates play at PNC Park today, off the field, too. 

Patti Conley can be reached online at pconley@timeonline.com. 

THE POTTER PIRATES

Tour director Jeff Potter, 56, a former standout baseball player for Lincoln High School in Ellwood City, formed the under-16 team a year ago.  Eleven boys from Maryland and five from Pennsylvania signed on for the traveling team, and sponsors from their hometowns kicked in $2,400 for each player to participate. 

Besides their baseball games in Pennsylvania, Maryland and Ohio, team members have taken part in such community activities as youth sports clinics, car washes, and senior citizen breakfasts and dances. 

Potter has written a book, "Whatever Happened to Baseball?" 

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