Doyel: Can Indiana's oldest Little League make a comeback? They're trying to find out
INDIANAPOLIS – The sign is still here, weather-beaten and wooden, saying exactly what this place is. It doesn’t say what this place used to be, back when it was one of the most important parcels of land on the southside of Indianapolis, back when parents in pickups would drive down McFarland Road with kids in the back of the truck, throwing candy to the crowd. One day a year that happened, always in April.
Sure, the sign’s still there, right next to the foul pole. Look down the row of fencing. See that wooden box perched behind the backstop, closed now, the opening covered with plywood? That’s where Dick Winzenread used to sit and keep score, when he wasn’t cutting the outfield grass or selling 10-cent snow cones or hoisting his little boy onto his shoulders, tall enough to see those beautiful fields, and saying:
“You’ll be out there next year.”
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Things have happened to those fields, to this way of life. Time happened. Change happened. Progress? Not sure we’re calling it that. Not when the grass is 30 inches tall and the fields are empty for years and this priceless piece of property on the southside – seriously, thousands of you drive past every day with no idea it’s here – is visited only by vandals who dump trash beneath this warning: No dumping – violators will be prosecuted.
But the other sign is still here, weather-beaten and wooden:
Home of Indiana Central Little League.
Dick Winzenread, like the youth league he nurtured, has been gone for years. But try to imagine, if you can, the old man saying something not just to his kid, but to kids all over the southside. He’s picking them up, scores of them, setting them on his shoulders and saying:
“You’ll be out there next year.”
Next year is here. Indiana Central Little League, the oldest little league in the state, is making a comeback.
Do you drive past ICLL every day?
The pandemic happened.
It’s what you want to know, right? What happened to Indiana Central Little League, which started in 1952 on land donated by UIndy and was still going 67 years later? The coronavirus happened. The league shut down in 2020, like so many around the country, but when ICLL officials tried to restart it in 2021, they couldn’t.
Word didn’t spread far enough last summer, and youth baseball is on the wane. Not in the affluent communities on the outskirts of Indianapolis, not in the suburbs, but in grittier neighborhoods like this one, tucked among mobile homes and apartment complexes on the southside corner of I-465 and I-65? Baseball doesn’t resonate here as it once did. It was July of 2021, the tail end of failed summer at Indiana Central Little League, when Indiana’s Little League District 7 assumed control of the complex. It wasn’t a hostile takeover.
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“We tried to work with them in early 2021,” says Derek Lisby, administrator of District 7, “but in July the owners called and said: ‘Hey, we can’t handle this financially.’ They gave me the keys to the property, and we’re trying to to reopen it this year.”
ICLL officials received a grant from Dick’s Sporting Goods and a sponsorship from American Legion Post 500, and hosted a cleanup a few weeks ago. They’ve spoken with people at the NCAA offices downtown about getting a large group of volunteers for another cleanup session. Registration is ongoing through April 23 for kids ages 4-16,and as of this week ICLL has enough for three teams in T-Ball (ages 4-6) and one in Minor Leagues (8-10).
“We’re going to play this year with what we get,” Lisby says. “Try to grow this year, and push out information for the future.”
More: Sign up for Indiana Central Little League here
Word spreads slowly. Full transparency, here’s the only reason you’re reading this story: I first noticed those fields northwest of the convergence of I-65 and I-465 in 2020. Don’t ask me why – stuck in traffic, probably – but I was looking around one day and there they were, a handful of fields, empty. Every time I drove past, I’d look. Still empty. For two years, empty.
So a few months ago I pull off Exit 2 and start looking for the complex. Not easy to find from that direction, but finally there they were. A few of fields. Yellow foul poles. Boarded-up press boxes and concession stands. The garbage, dumped in the grass. The ruined batting cages. That sign, weather-beaten and wooden.
Who played here, and where did they go? What was this place? Turns out, this place was making a comeback. Registration remains open. Give it a shot. Maybe ICLL will do for your family what it has done for others.
'That place was family'
All these years later, Rich Winzenread remembers his first ballcap. This was 1971, and the hat was green. He remembers turning 8, old enough to join an ICLL league, and going to UIndy’s Nicoson Hall for signups. Someone gave him a green hat, and there goes little Rich Winzenread, running up the bleachers to show his parents.
All these years later, he remembers the score of his first game.
“We lost 33-22 and we were in those hot flannel uniforms and I had the best time in the world,” Winzenread says.
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What did ICLL do for the Winzenread family? Well, it gave Rich’s old man a purpose, even a line of work. When the recession of the 1970s siphoned off Dick Winzenread’s construction work, he was talking with another ICLL parent, Dave O’Malia. Heard of O’Malia’s Food Markets? Same family. O’Malia connected Winzenread with a friend, Dave Mason, who had a car dealership. Winzenread became body-shop manager for Dave Mason Lincoln Mercury.
“That place was family,” Rich Winzenread says of ICLL. “You knew everybody, and they knew you.”
Dick Winzenread started as an assistant coach on his son’s team, moved to the grounds crew, became president of the whole damn league.
“You can really get addicted to it,” Winzenread told the IndyStar of his longtime association with ICLL in 1989, when he helped raise the $10,000 – it took seven years – to purchase seven nearby acres for more fields. By then ICLL had more than 500 kids ages 5-18, playing on 44 teams. Some of them played on Dick Winzenread Field. Girls were playing baseball until Winzenread’s wife, Leah, started ICLL’s softball leagues.
Dick Winzenread died in 2019, at 80.
“I spent my whole childhood there,” says Rich Winzenread, who still wears a green hat. Does the name ring a bell, Rich Winzenread? He’s been the baseball coach at Lawrence North for 31 years. His son, Jake, is a senior third baseman. He’ll play in college, maybe even be drafted like his dad, by the Baltimore Orioles in 1986.
But Jake didn’t get the full ICLL experience. Not like his old man, who played in ICLL because that’s what even the southside’s most talented kids did in the 1970s, before the world changed and travel baseball was invented – progress, right? – and the best young players had to play travel ball to keep up with their peers.
“I’m sad my son never got to experience that,” Rich Winzenread says of his ICLL childhood.
Here’s what so many kids are missing, now. Here’s what ICLL leaders are trying to bring back.
Life, death and Little League baseball
Opening Day at Indiana Central Little League? You should’ve seen it. The ICLL went all out, starting with the parade down McFarland – turn left on Thompson, right on Keystone, over I-465 and into the ballpark on the left. This is just a coincidence, but the parade passed a quarter-mile from the Carson Avenue home where the best ballplayer the Southside ever produced, Hall of Famer Chuck Klein, lived his final years in the late 1950s.
“You’d hear the parade coming, and we’d run out there to see,” says Mary Pat Tully, who lives off McFarland. “The kids were throwing candy, but I think the parents were having more fun than anyone, waving and honking their horns.”
More magic was waiting at the ballpark, where the first pitch might be thrown by former Major League star Carl Erskine of Anderson or future Major League manager Joe Altobelli, then a pitcher at Triple A Indianapolis. In 1991, shortly after the Gulf War ended, four paratroopers landed on the field and Lt. Sabrina Dixon, a Desert Storm veteran from Bloomington, threw the first pitch.
“There’s so much history there,” says Lisby.
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It wasn’t just baseball or softball. This was a way of life on the southside, with ice-cream socials for the local firehouse and fish fries for local churches and Halloween Haunts every October for the kids. The community gave back, with a carnival at the South Branch YMCA and an “ICLL Night Demolition Derby” at the Indianapolis Speedrome to raise money for the league.
In those days ICLL players got their names in the paper. Don Hubbell, for example. He didn’t have the career of his cousin, MLB Hall of Famer Carl Hubbell, but he did fire three no-hitters in 1955, striking out 15 of 18 batters in one of them.
Kent Hosier got his name in the paper, too. There’s a picture of him with his cousin and grandpa, shortly after the season ended in 1966. Three months later, another story: “Kent Edwin Hosier, 9, died of leukemia yesterday in Riley Hospital. Kent was a fourth grade pupil at Edgewood Grade School. He was active in Indiana Central Little League.”
This league mattered. In 1971, Clark Criggar made the paper for striking out 14 batters in Southside Cash Pal’s 1-0 win against National Bank. Five years later, William Criggar died at age 53. Survivors included his son, Clark. From the Jan. 13, 1976 IndyStar: “He was an Army veteran of World War II. During the war he received the Bronze Star medal with two clusters. He was active in the Central Indiana Little League program.”
This is how it was. In 1983, the nursing home on Raymond Street sponsored an ICLL team. Dozens of residents rode buses to cheer for the Fountainview Place Yankees, ages 8-10, but with so many residents unable to travel, the Yankees came to them, bringing gifts like cologne and manicure sets. At Fountainview, they carved a field into the grounds. That’s where the Yankees took batting practice while residents cheered.
It was a different time, and ICLL was a different place. But the league is attempting a comeback this summer, and some things don’t change. Baseball is still baseball, and the sign is still there, weather-beaten and wooden, jutting proudly above the foul pole:
Home of Indiana Central Little League, the sign says, but it’s been home to more than that.
INDIANA CENTRAL LITTLE LEAGUE
For more information or to support the league, it can be reached the following way:
Website: www.icll.info/indianacentralll
Email: indianacentrallittleleague@gmail.com
Call: (317) 965-4313
Find IndyStar columnist Gregg Doyel on Twitter at @GreggDoyelStar or at www.facebook.com/greggdoyelstar.
This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Historic southside Little League baseball complex makes comeback
