White River Junction
Ammel’s daughter, Kylie Curtis, said she expects as many as 100 extended family members to gather at the Maxfield Sports Complex for the 6:30 p.m. game. Admission is free, but donations will be solicited and used to start a scholarship in Ammel’s name, funds from which will be dispersed to local baseball players by the family.
Ammel, 62, died last fall in a motor vehicle crash on Route 4 in Bridgewater. The Hartford High graduate played four sports for the Hurricanes and farmed before he joined a local home heating company, for which he was driving when he was killed. Players and coaches from posts 84 and 22 attended his funeral.
“For kids on both teams, he was a part of their baseball family, just not on their team,” said Post 84 assistant coach John O’Hara, who’s also president of the post’s baseball organization. “He was a fixture, whether it was high school or summer ball.”
Post 84’s Hunter Perkins threw a no-hitter for Hartford High with Ammel umpiring. Post 22 coach Rob Woodward remembered that the arbiter never began a game at Lebanon High without noting to coaches that, should a batted ball strike a particular part of the outfield fence, it would be ruled a home run. One day, not long after the usual explanation, such a play occurred and Ammel called Will Smith’s fly ball a ground-rule double.
Before Woodward could get too worked up, Ammel broke in.
“He said ‘Go easy on me; I’m totally wrong here,’ ” Woodward said on a local sports radio show not long after Ammel’s death. “What are you going to say to that? I said, ‘Don’t ever let it happen again,’ and walked back to the dugout. We were laughing to ourselves.”
Smith’s mother, Ann Marie, said Ammel apologized to her son after the game. It’s that type of personality his family will look for in dispersing the scholarship funds each year.
“They want to find guys who demonstrate the values Bob lived,” O’Hara said.
Post 22 started the season 4-0 in New Hampshire play and Post 84 began 3-0 in Vermont action and 7-2 overall. The latter squad has an ambitious 11-game nonleague schedule that includes tournament appearances in Essex, Vt., and West Point, N.Y.
Given that each team faces a league foe on Sunday, it’s unlikely either side will throw its top pitchers for more than an inning or two. But O’Hara said his players are excited to face friends and longtime rivals in Saturday’s tilt. Hartford- and Lebanon-area senior teams have scrimmaged in recent years but haven’t played an official game.
“Nonleague games aren’t practice games,” O’Hara said. “Everybody’s available for us that day, so we’re not just going to throw a bunch of young kids.
“Lebanon’s a good team right now and if we take them lightly, we’ll get run off the field. Everybody’s grown up with everybody else and there’s been chatter over the last few years about who has the better team.”
The contest could include two pitchers who haven’t taken the mound much in recent months. Lebanon’s Caleb Broughton recently got a cast off his wrist and hand and Hartford’s Perkins has played exclusively in the field to rest an injury.
A couple of players who might have been in Saturday’s game will not be there and two others have played for the opposite side in the past.
Hartford’s Codi Smith, who had a standout freshman season at Lyndon State this spring, narrowly missed the age cutoff to remain eligible for Legion ball, and Seth Balch, a rising senior at Windsor, decamped for Bellows Falls Post 37. Both played for Post 84 last summer.
O’Hara said Balch tried out for his team, but chose to join Bellows Falls for the promise of consistent playing time. The depth and talent on Post 84’s 17-player roster made that unlikely in White River Junction, the coach said.
Post 84’s Moises Celaya, a Hanover High student, began his Legion career with Post 22, which this season features Rivendell’s Dashiel Fukushima, who previously played for Post 84.
Rule changes are in the news, particularly for Vermont Legion teams, which were to have switched to using wood bats this season. That didn’t happen, but Legion’s national leadership did create pitching limitations, something that affected Post 84.
A senior Legion pitcher may make no more than two appearances in three consecutive days and may throw a maximum of 120 pitches during any one appearance. If he throws 31-45 pitches, he must take the next day off. If he throws 45-60, he must take two days off. The numbers climb from there.
The rules were even more strict when first announced last October, which prompted Post 84 to decide it didn’t have enough pitchers in its organization to field a junior team for a second consecutive season. Junior pitchers may not throw more than 105 pitches during an appearance.
Up through last summer, there were no national pitching-limitation rules and Vermont allowed hurlers to make appearances totaling no more than 12 innings on three consecutive days. There was no pitch count involved.
“If you have doubleheaders on Saturday and Sunday, you need an awful lot of pitchers,” O’Hara said. “We thought it was best to try and be successful with one team and not be mediocre with two. Part of why we have so many nonleague games is to get everybody playing time.”
O’Hara said the post hopes to bring back a junior Legion team next season or join an Essex-based circuit that includes squads in Vermont, New York and Canada.
Post 84 will host the Vermont senior Legion tournament at Maxfield from July 22-26, welcoming seven other teams to the competition, assuming it qualifies as one of four teams from the Southern Division. O’Hara said he’s growing increasingly concerned with the absence of a promised building that was to have housed a press box and concession stand at the field by now. The Upper Valley Nighthawks raised funds for the project, but had not been granted town approval to break ground as of midweek.
“Having a facility with that included was part of what we based our bid upon,” O’Hara said. “I don’t know much about the permitting process, but I can’t figure out why it’s taken this long.”
The tournament has been hosted by Rutland in recent years and required the use of two sites. At Maxfield, which features lights, games can go all day and into the night. There will be a tournament banquet at the nearby Veterans Administration hospital for all competitors on the night of June 22.
“Getting the Nighthawks out of town for a week could have been a big hurdle,” O’Hara said. “But as soon as I mentioned it to (general manager Noah Crane), he didn’t even hesitate. He told us to go get it and they would make it work. You can’t host something like this without good partners.”
Tris Wykes can be reached at twykes@vnews.com or 603-727-3227.