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Go! Go! Tuckahoe! Author recounts history of 1968 all-star baseball team that nearly won it all

The 1968 Tuckahoe National all-star team advanced to the Little League World Series championship game, losing 1-0 to a team from Japan. (Contributed photo)

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The Tuckahoe Little League 12-year-old National all-star team will begin its quest for a District 5 championship June 20, and in the back of the minds of each player and coach likely will be one question: “What if?

As in: “What if?” the team gets hot at the right time, its collection of talented players rises to the occasion and produces timely hits, clutch defensive plays and dominant pitching? “What if?” that combination of factors carries it to a district title, and then to a state championship? “What if?” it advances to the Southeast Regional tournament and the run of good fortune continues?

What if?” in a couple months, this team finds itself at the center of summer’s baseball universe, in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, playing for a chance to win the Little League World Series? And “what if” it defies the odds, wins the United States championship and advances all the way to the championship game to face the international champion on national television?

The questions are fair, if only because 57 years ago, this team’s distant predecessor did all of those things.

The year was 1968, and the Tuckahoe National all-star team (TLL is divided into two leagues – National and American – each of which selects its own all-star team) was stacked with talent. With excitement still fresh from TLL’s move just months earlier to a new three-field complex off Starling Drive (now the site of a BJ’s Wholesale Club), the team capitalized on growing community interest by blitzing its four District 5 all-star competitors by a combined score of 45-0, then won the state championship by outscoring its three opponents 23-3.

Next: trips to West Virginia, for a divisional tournament, and then to St. Petersburg, Florida for the Southeast Regional tournament, where it would earn a 3-0 win in the final to claim a trip to the Little League World Series – and a chance at history that slipped agonizingly away in the championship game, a 1-0 loss to a team from Japan (see below).

Now, nearly 60 years since it took the field, the story of arguably the greatest sports team Metro Richmond has ever known is being told in a comprehensive way, through the publication of a new book by Tim Thompson.

Thompson’s 336-page effort, Go! Go! Tuckahoe!, is as thorough a depiction of the Tuckahoe Nationals’ summer-of-’68 run (signified by the catchphrase cheer that is the book’s title) as you might expect from its page count. He weaves personal anecdotes, a detailed history lesson about the league, and individual mini-biographies of team members and others who have contributed to Tuckahoe Little League around the main course: an in-depth account of that summer and the all-star team that etched its mark in the history of the league – and the region.


'A really fun summer'

“It was a really fun summer, as every summer was in the West End back then, growing up and playing Little League baseball,” recalled Jim Pankovits, a member of the team who went on to play Major League Baseball. The team's success that summer prompted an overwhelming number of Western Union telegrams sent in support, “from everyone – residents, Tuckahoe Little League parents and coaches, businesses, governmental positions, as well as teams that we had beaten along the way wishing us good luck. It was eye-opening to say the least.”

The book, now available on paperback through Amazon, recounts the beginnings of the league – from its formation in 1958 by Joe Rapisarda, Ken Miller and Mel Quinn in 1958 and its initial iteration at a single field at Maybeury Elementary School, to its state championship and Southeast Regional appearance in its first year of existence, to a one-run loss in the Southeast Regional final in 1963.

Thompson paints a complete picture of TLL’s place as a calling card for the growing West End during a time of national unrest and its role in shaping that community in the subsequent years – which included a return trip to the Little League World Series by a TLL National all-star team in 1976, where it finished tied for third.

For more recent members of the TLL community, the book also brings to life the men whose names may be known only as those that adorn various structures at the current TLL complex, like Joe “Boots” Guedri, Jr. (a top manager in the early days of the league whose prize player in the early 1960s was Barty Smith, who later would go onto stardom on the football field with the University of Richmond and a seven-year NFL career with the Green Bay Packers) and Francis “Bud” Hare, a longtime TLL volunteer and jack of all trades.

But its focus, undeniably, is the ’68 all-star team and a desire to commemorate – in a meaningful and detailed way – its impact. More than half a century after that magical summer, no one had written a thorough account of it all. Thompson had kicked around the idea for years, but he was busy caring for his ailing mother, then running the Chesapeakeville magazine at the Bay for a decade.

Eventually, though, “I decided it was time to write the book,” he said.

Thompson had vivid memories of the team himself; he was a 10-year-old playing at Tuckahoe Little League at the time and still had a collection of TLL memorabilia.

“It was electric,” Thompson recalled of the team’s run. “They went viral in 1968, they just covered the airwaves, the newspapers.”

To tell the team’s story, Thompson spent six years researching, gathering information and talking with dozens of people who were connected to it, including all but one of the players; the other, star pitcher Roger Miller, had died in 2009.

The stories included in the book read like the framework of a movie. Miller and catcher Tim Reid (whose throwing error in the World Series championship game and lack of sight in his left eye both contributed to the game’s only run – on the same play) both died young. Reid, Thompson said, was still consumed by feelings of guilt decades later.

“He would cry and act like a child [when discussing the play],” Thompson said. “He couldn’t get over the emotion of talking about it 40 years later.”

Reid taught for a time for Henrico Schools but later in his life was undone by drinking. He died in March 2020 at 64.

Miller, who thew five no-hitters during the team’s run to the championship game and hit three home runs in the LLWS semifinal game, was critically injured several years later when the car he was driving crashed. He received blood transfusions that saved his life but also contributed to its early ending by infecting him with hepatitis C.

Pankovits, the team’s steady “alpha male,” according to Thompson, was the product of an overactive dad who expected perfection from his son.

“Every time his son had a baseball accomplishment, his dad's first reaction was often — But can you do it at the next level?” Thompson wrote in the book.

Pankovits went on to play collegiately at South Carolina – where he was on the 1975 team that lost the College World Series championship game to Texas – and then became the only member of the TLL team to play in the major leagues, where he spent parts of five seasons with the Houston Astros in the 1980s and two games with the Boston Red Sox in 1990 before embarking upon a 17-year managing career in the minor leagues.

Outfielder Hank Stoneburner had childhood aspirations of becoming a heart surgeon – and he did. First baseman Gray Oliver became a top salesperson for Procter and Gamble before returning to the Richmond area and revitalizing abandoned properties. He later coached at TLL.

Famed Richmond broadcaster Frank Soden broadcast a number of the team’s games live on WRNL radio at a time when the idea of doing so was foreign. The coverage helped the entire Richmond region feel as if Tuckahoe was its home team that summer.

And although that summer didn’t quite end the way the locals would have hoped, “Not one of the guys would trade it for anything, even though they lost,” Thompson said.


Go! Go! Tuckahoe! author Tim Thompson

A lasting community impact

Tuckahoe’s miracle run had a wide-reaching impact. Within a few years, people were telling their real estate agents to find them a home in the neighborhood surrounding the TLL complex, said Thompson.

“The team did that — they changed perceptions about the Far West End of Henrico County,” he said.

To Pankovits, though, the team was merely the product of a community that cared.

“The main thing Tim hit on with the book was how it was just a huge collective effort – not just the players. The support of families in the community, they made Tuckahoe Little League,” he said. “We brought it some notoriety, but even if we hadn’t played, every kid who came through that Little League had just an unbelievably positive experience that they would never forget.”

Though his book is mostly filled with nostalgia, history lessons and biographical details about the team and TLL, Thompson doesn’t shy away from injecting his opinion about the state of matters in youth baseball and TLL today, either. And it’s clear that he yearns for the simpler days of youth sports past.

“The shocking statistic is that Little League baseball has been co-opted into a $19-billion industry per year,” Thompson said. “The priorities are wrong. ESPN is going to continue to popularize Little League baseball in way that is positive but mostly negative.

The pressure on youngsters and their families to move away from Little League baseball and other so-called “house” leagues to more structured and competitive year-round travel baseball at a young age, he believes, is ruining the innocence of what Little League baseball should be about.

“Kids are missing the chance to play baseball and have fun,” he said.

Thompson also openly laments in his book about Tuckahoe Sports, Inc., the nonprofit entity originally formed by TLL in the 1980s to acquire, develop and manage its present-day site off Copperas Lane but that now operates its own private training facility and travel ball organization on the site. The nonprofit, now unaffiliated with TLL, in Thompson’s words embodies “the cancer that is the professionalism of youth baseball.”

Thompson also is critical at times of TLL, which he said did not participate in his book and which celebrated its own 50th anniversary one year too early, he wrote – in 2008, rather than 2009.

“The league's established date error hinted at a blind spot,” Thompson wrote. “Research conducted for this book revealed other issues. Notably, a half-century of Tuckahoe Little League historical artifacts, such as scrapbooks, photographs, uniforms and trophies were not being preserved. Nor the archives of the storied 1968 team.”

But despite his complaints, Thompson’s Go! Go! Tuckahoe! reads mostly like a love letter to a community, a league and a group of unassuming kids who loved playing baseball – a letter more than 50 years in the making.