For one day, anyway, the Little League World Series looked as if it had been taken over by big leaguers.
The ultimate global baseball tournament for kids ages 11 and 12 produced a game in which a pitcher who stands 1.93m (6ft 4ins) and weighs 75kg was opposed by a pitcher who touches 1.90m and weighs 99kg.
No wonder Tom Mazzola spent extra time at the photocopy machine before his team headed off to play in the most important tournament of their lives.
Mazzola is the manager of one of the big kids, the 1.90m Chad Lorkowski, who at age 12 stands a head taller than most of his Grosse Pointe Woods, Michigan, teammates.
Mazzola made extra copies of his star pitcher’s birth certificate to hand out to sceptics suspicious that his star was over the age limit. Incredibly, Lorkowski is not the tallest kid in the annual tournament, held in Williamsport, Pennsylvania. Grant Holman from Chula Vista, California, is 3cm taller.
Holman and Lorkowski faced off in a battle of giants, and it was Holman who emerged victorious, 3-0, throwing a no-hitter in the six-inning game, with 13 strikeouts.
"That kid throws hard," Mazzola said of Holman in an interview with Sports Illustrated.
“He’s 6-foot-4, he has a nice curveball and he hits his spots. We haven’t quite faced a pitcher like that, but the same goes for our big fella.
“Chad for his size and weight is remarkable.”
Both pitchers intimidate the opposition, with fastballs clocked around 120kph – not as fast as professional pitchers throw, but the Little Leaguers stand 20 feet closer to the batters. Jimmy Mazzola, the Michigan manager’s son, said the reaction that Lorkowski prompts is always the same - shock and awe.
"You see other teams, and their eyes get really big and their mouths go open at the plate," the younger Mazzola told the New York Times.
Lorkowski has come to expect the gawking, and uses it to his advantage.
"I know all eyes will be on me, because that's the way it always is," Lorkowski told the Times. "I'm used to it by now and I like it. I like that it intimidates them."
The tournament includes teams from eight regions of the US, as well as an international division of eight teams from around the world, including the Asia-Pacific champion, Chung-Ping Little League from Taiwan.
