On Saturday morning at Walter Victor Park, Kaha Wong stood alongside the first base line, under cover from a light drizzle, his eyes trained on a Memorial Day Weekend baseball tournament he had organized for teams in his local league.
“There wasn’t anything here, really,” Wong said of the holiday weekend scheduling, “so I thought, ‘These kids should be playing ball.’ It all fell in place.”
On two fields Saturday morning at 10, there were 40 or 50 high school-aged kids playing baseball instead of playing video games or watching television, sleeping, or whatever.
At the same time in Pittsburgh, the first pitch was being thrown in a National League game against St. Louis, the team Wong’s son Kolten plays for. If your son were in the majors, playing on television, would you be down at Walter Victor, watching other dad’s sons playing?
“I could be home watching, sure,” Wong said, “but I put this thing together …”
The words trailed off, but the implication was clear. This is where Kaha Wong needed to be, nurturing and encouraging youth baseball in Hilo, indoctrinating youngsters with time-tested fundamentals on hitting a baseball, which stimulates learning in other areas of the game and builds better ballplayers.
Kaha Wong is a significant piece, but far from the only one that makes Hilo youth baseball stand out across the state.
This is an area of sports in Hawaii that had always been dominated by Honolulu-area teams until recently when Hilo teams have challenged that tradition, and then some.
More recently, Hilo teams have won state PONY League championships at ages 9 and 11 and the 12-year-old PONY team has won four of the last five state titles. A Hilo Little League team reached regionals last year, and when these kids get older, they keep playing.
Hilo and Waiakea trade off BIIF titles and go on to reach the state finals, as often these days as do the bigger schools on Oahu, the Hilo team Nobu Yamaguchi won last year’s RBI World Series, and on it goes.
There might be no better example of the strength of sports in Hilo than what you find here in youth baseball.
At the moment, there are six Hilo-raised players in professional baseball — Kolten (Kamehameha), and Kean Wong (Waiakea), Quintin Torres-Costa (Waiakea), Kodi Medeiros (Waiakea), Joey Jarneski (Hilo) and Jodd Carter (Hilo), which is a lot.
Is there another city of 40,000 in the United States that can currently boast of six professional ballplayers? Maybe you’re a better internet researcher, but I couldn’t find anything.
In 12 years of writing newspaper columns in South Carolina since the turn of the century, nothing like this in those more populated areas occurred. The University of South Carolina won back-to-back NCAA championships, and minor league teams fill ballparks in Greenville, Columbia, Charleston and Myrtle Beach, yet there was never a time when any of those cities produced as many big league players as Hilo has, just now.
“We have a lot of good youth coaches and that means something,” said Wayne Yamaguchi, a Hilo PONY official who also runs the championship Nobu Yamauchi RBI team. “Of course, we play all year around. The wood bat league really helps, I think and we have that going October, November, December, January is off and (the kids) all start playing school ball in February.”
It’s a fair point, but there are a lot of places on the West Coast, the Southwest and Southeast where baseball is available 12 months a year.
“You know what?” said Baba Lancaster, who helped coach the Hilo Little Leaguers to a regional tournament last summer, “we have a pretty good organization here and I think that gets overlooked.
“We have opportunities for kids to play from 2 years old to 14, so it’s available, we know what we’re doing and we are all about fundamental baseball, learning techniques that help.”
Lancaster is one of the Hilo youth baseball coaches whose own career reached the professional level and as such, the usual assortment of interested fathers who come around and offer help wind up getting solid advice from someone who knows the game from the inside.
“It’s the teacher role,” Lancaster said “We know what baseball can do for you and all we want, all any of the guys I know who coach youth baseball here want, is to try to help kids get a college education, and if they become stars or whatever, hey, that’s good, too.
“Mostly,” he said, “you want a kid who learns how to learn to get better in baseball and maybe that rubs off on school and other phases of life. Basically, a lot of what we do is talk about life skills.”
If they become stars, well, it can happen and it probably helps explain why Wong didn’t mind missing seeing the Pirates and Cardinals on Saturday.
Consider that Kolten was drafted in the 16th round by Minnesota out of high school in 2013, but passed on the opportunity for a scholarship at the University of Hawaii-Manoa, which cost his father not a single penny. In 2011, Kolten was the 22nd overall selection in the draft, signing a $1.3 million bonus to join the Cardinals organization. He later signed a five-year, $25.5 million contract that has two years remaining after this season, in which he’s being paid $4 million. He’ll make $6.5 million next year and $10.25 million in 2020.
Kolten Wong is struggling at the plate this season and didn’t start Saturday in what has been a tumultuous week for him after Major League Baseball made him remove a rainbow-colored sleeve on his left arm that he wore to call attention and raise awareness about the lava eruptions in Puna.
“It’s hard to even be worried about the game when I’m worried about everything else going on at home,” Wong told a St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter after hitting his third home run a week ago.
He will survive, and probably prosper.
Things change day-by-day in baseball, but at 27, in the prime of his career with at least one more contract to sign, Kolten Wong doesn’t need dad’s eyeballs on every move he makes in every game.
It’s the same for younger brother Kean Wong, tearing things up for the AAA Durham Bulls, batting .368 over his last 10 games heading into the weekend. He signed for a reported $393,500 out of high school and blossomed quickly, becoming last year’s MVP of the AAA championship series. At the level he’s been playing, nobody would be surprised if he’s with the struggling big club in Tampa Bay sometime this summer.
“I’m proud of both of them, of course,” Kaha Wong said of his sons, “but I’m not the one responsible for the high level (of youth baseball) here in Hilo. For that? It’s the parents, their coaches, the teachers they have in school, the umpires who work to give them fair games, everything is a part of it.
“It’s not all me,” he said, “I’m happy to be a part of it because this is what I love to do, but it’s not about me, it’s about them.”
He makes an important point. There is no dotted line or direct path from the teaching of Kaha Wong to the major leagues. While the impact of Kolten and Kean Wong may be traced directly to their father, it’s now more about the two sons.
“It’s a good level of play here and it’s definitely shot up in the last several years,” said Shon Malani, a standout high school player here who had a college career at the University of Southern California. Beyond, that, like Lancaster, he has become a kind of baseball evangelist in his own way, as president of Hui Aumakua baseball club, he coached on the PONY team that won the 11-12 state title last season, and also coached on PONY teams that won state titles at the 9- and 11-year-old age groups.
“It definitely isn’t any one thing,” Malani said, “it is a combination of a lot of things. I attribute a lot of it to youth coaches who aren’t just into coaching their kid, but they really want to learn more.
“Kaha is great, but right now? A big part of this is Kolten and Kean. They have a lot of friends, you know? A lot of good ballplayers, and everyone who was in youth baseball got motivated by those guys, it always happens that way.
“Those two have really spiked things for us, in a good way.”
The consensus is that youth baseball here has reached a new plateau. State championships and beyond are reasonable and achievable pursuits.
With summer leagues beginning to take center stage, it might be a good time to sit back and let them learn and continue to grow.
Comments? Questions? Whistleblower tips? Contact Bart at barttribuneherald@gmail.com
