Yankees star Brian McCann grew up playing baseball at Huntington’s League 6.
By Keith Morehouse
HQ 85 | SPRING 2014
The road serpentines through the East End of Huntington, past cemeteries and plenty of moderate-to-above ordinary homes, never letting on that on warm summer nights it leads to an honest-to-goodness hidden gem at the bottom of Ferguson Road. Unless you grew up around youth baseball in this town, you probably have no idea a field existed here. Think “The Sandlot” but only with real bases. It’s wedged between houses and hillsides, a place where finding a parking spot was a sport unto itself.
To add to the mystique of this oddly configured diamond comes one more curveball. Brian McCann, a seven-time Major League Baseball All Star and new catcher for the New York Yankees, learned the game here at League 6.
“Back then it was a gold mine,” McCann recalls with obvious fondness. “A lot of my great friends, we played every single day there. We played basketball, we played football, we played baseball. We’d invent games. I feel like I was one of the luckiest kids in the world to grow up the way I did and have the friends that I have.”
Brian McCann and his family spent five years in Huntington while his dad, Howard, was the head baseball coach at Marshall University. It was an idyllic situation for Brian and brother Brad, two baseball-crazy kids, whose father just happened to make a living at the game.
“I think about my time at League 6 quite often,” McCann says.
If that sounds dubious, ask anyone you know who’s played baseball about his or her favorite memories of the game. Chances are, they’ll tell you of their Little League days. And, yes, that goes for the catcher of the New York Yankees too.
“They were my first memories of baseball, the competition, what it’s like being part of a team,” McCann recalls. “My memories of Little League baseball in West Virginia are some of my fondest memories.”
It’s 73 steps from home plate down the right field line to the outfield fence. As a left-handed batter, McCann used to look longingly out there, wondering if he had what it took to knock one out of the park.
“I remember it like it was yesterday,” McCann recalls. “I was 9 years old and asked my dad, ‘Dad, you think I can hit a home run?’ He said, ‘Let’s go down there and see.’ He pitched to my brother and me until we hit a home run. Once we hit it we knew we could do it. A couple of weeks later I was able to hit my first real one.”
McCann made plenty of friends during his wonder years in Huntington. Some of them are still his best friends today.
“Our kids wore the path out between our houses,” former neighbor Greg Hawkins remembers.
Hawkins was a pretty good athlete in his own right, a member of the N.C. State Wolfpack basketball team that won the NCAA Championship in 1974. His three kids made fast friends with the McCann boys – son Luke Hawkins was the youngest of them all. Unfortunately, Luke suffered from a debilitating illness called Batten disease that affects the nervous system. It confined him to a wheelchair and also slowly robbed him of his eyesight.
As the story goes, Greg and his then-wife Peggy had heard that some of the kids at Meadows Elementary School had been teasing Luke on the school bus. Howard McCann and his wife Sherry only had to tell their boys this story one time.
“My wife called up Sherry to tell her about it, and Sherry said ‘Don’t worry about it,’” Hawkins recalls. “Brian and Brad rode the bus with Luke the rest of the year, and nobody bothered him again. They loved Luke and they wanted to help him.”
“That’s the way my brother and I were raised,” McCann says, “to look out for others. That’s the way we were brought up. I don’t want to use the word mentor, but whatever he needed we were there for him. He was such a special person … such a sad turn of events.”
Luke passed away in 2000 just prior to his 13th birthday. Mixed among the neatly landscaped bushes and trees outside of Meadows Elementary is a commemorative stone, a tribute to his life well lived.
You are smarter than you think,
stronger than you seem
and braver than you know.
Beloved servant of the Lord,
son and student
Luke McGregor Hawkins
1987-2000
We tend to attach such importance to the numbers that baseball players put up. But don’t judge Brian McCann on his $85 million dollar contract, his 176 career homers, his five Silver Slugger Awards. Wouldn’t it be better to measure virtue, honor and character?
“The best part about knowing Brian McCann is the type of person he is,” Hawkins says. “A lot of athletes you can’t get real interested in because of the way they act. Not Brian.”
McCann’s playground now is in the Bronx at fabled Yankee Stadium. He’s manning a position in pinstripes where players like Bill Dickey, Yogi Berra, Thurman Munson and Jorge Posada have crouched before him.
“It’s an honor to put this uniform on,” McCann says. “Especially being a catcher, to share the same dirt as some of these guys who are going to go in the National Baseball Hall of Fame and definitely go in the Yankees Hall of Fame. It’s an honor, and I hope when my career is over they can put my name in the same breath as those guys.”
League 6 is showing its age these days. Tall grass camouflages where the outfield ends and the base paths begin. Trash litters the infield. In fact it’s not known as League 6 anymore, and they don’t play Little League games there now. The modern-day consolidation craze – where people think bigger is better even when it’s not – has signaled that the field’s better days, like a Brian McCann home run, are long gone.
But McCann’s memories remain untarnished by time. All he remembers is playing in the dirt and wondering what time he could come back the next day.
Good thoughts of a town, and a ballpark, that made him feel like a big leaguer.
