50 years ago, Tuckahoe reached the Little League World Series

The kids from Tuckahoe gathered on the bleachers after practice one day and listened to their coaches. It was summer 1976, and they had just been selected to form a Little League all-star team. 

One of the team’s coaches held up a photo of a venue located more than 300 miles to the north: Howard J. Lamade Stadium in South Williamsport, Pennsylvania. 

“Hey, guys,” the coach said, “this is where we’re going.”

On that day, no one could’ve imagined the run that would lead the 14 baseball players on the 11-and-12-year-old Tuckahoe Nationals into the national spotlight. But it was about to become a reality. 

Now, 50 years after their magical World Series appearance, that squad from the West End of Henrico County is reminiscing about its journey. 

“The baseball people in the league, they felt like we had a really good team that year,” said Brian Smith, a pitcher and first baseman who batted third on the team. 

At the time, Tuckahoe was a baseball powerhouse and became home to “one of the most successful and winningest Little Leagues on the planet,” according to Timothy Thompson, author of a book about the Tuckahoe Little League. 

The West End produced top-notch high school players, some of whom went on to play college and pro ball. Tuckahoe had already made its mark eight years earlier, in 1968, when it advanced to the Major Division championship game and fell to Japan 1-0. Now the ’76 team was carrying the torch. 

They weren’t the only ones from the West End doing so. 

While the Nationals were winding through district, region and state rounds on their way to Williamsport with players like Smith and standout pitcher and catcher Bob Dement, the Tuckahoe Seniors — comprised of 13-, 14- and 15-year-olds — was making its way toward the Senior League World Series in Gary, Indiana. 

Two teams destined for the World Series, both from the neighborhoods that lived and breathed baseball. 

“We were just the latest iteration of the Tuckahoe Little League All-Stars,” said Connor McGehee, an outfielder on the Senior team in ’68 who would go on to a pro career. “There were so many great teams and standout players every year.”

So for Major Division coaches to have a feeling their club was capable of greatness, that was saying something. 

They believed it so much that they took catchers to a local sporting goods store at the outset of the campaign and bought them new gear, a gamble of a move because the format was single elimination. Lose, and all that effort, and money, would only be for a matter of innings.

Smith, now 62, has been pouring over clippings and memorabilia from Tuckahoe’s Major Division run, things his father put together decades ago. He’s been posting some of it to Facebook. “I’m not a Facebook guy,” he said, but someone convinced him to start posting about the World Series run.

His timeline is filled with pictures and local articles, from district to state and regional championships. One details how Tuckahoe advanced to five World Series in its history. Another article recounts the team’s trip to St. Petersburg, Florida, for the Southern Regional tournament and includes a picture of each boy in the starting lineup: Dement, Smith, Jeff Foster, Sammy Burgess, Mike Bryant, Mike Thornton, Chris Tiller, Oscar Talley and Curtis Boyd. Their hats are pinstriped, with a capital T in cursive between two stars. The boys wear wide grins. The team’s manager, Eddie Blankenship, notes that the team is confident, playing with a loose but serious demeanor. When he speaks, he sounds like he knows something great lies ahead. “They really want to get to Williamsport,” he tells a reporter from Richmond. “That is every kid’s dream. … You set it as your goal from the beginning, and now for us, it’s a reality.”

Tuckahoe began its trip at the World Series with a 4-3 win over Des Moines, Iowa. Dement — who a few years later would star at Douglas Freeman before pitching at UVA — struck out 15 (he never lost a game all summer), hit a home run and drove in Talley from second with a sixth-inning single, the game’s deciding run. Talley threw his arms high over his head and leaped for joy after crossing home plate. 

It was Tuckahoe’s 12th win of the season. The boys had reached the semifinal round, where the final two teams from the U.S. faced off. 

In Indiana, the Tuckahoe Senior squad had already won a first round game in the Senior World Series, then had fallen into the loser’s bracket of the double-elimination tourney after an 11-4 defeat against Hawaii.

The team was led by Mark Meleski — the series MVP who would go on to play at UVA and in the minors before briefly coaching with the Richmond Braves — and Mike Gordon. 

“They were the studs,” McGehee said. “People all around Richmond knew their names.”

McGehee rattled off a list of his teammates. Many of them went on to play baseball and football in college. Guys from both Tuckahoe teams also suited up for talented squads at J.R. Tucker and Douglas Freeman high schools. 

But in the summer of ’76, all they cared about was Little League. 

“There wasn’t a big discussion about it,” McGehee said when asked about the area’s baseball tradition. “It was just an assumed thing. You wanted to be like the other teams.”

The Senior squad defeated Canada 11-5 but then was eliminated by eventual champion Taiwan, 7-1. 

Tuckahoe had made history. Never before had two teams from the same Little League organization advanced to the Majors and Senior World Series in the same year. Tuckahoe held that distinction until last year, when teams from Irmo, South Carolina, accomplished the feat.

“It was just fun to be able to go out and put on that uniform and represent Tuckahoe and have the people come out and watch us and admire what we did,” said McGehee, who was drafted by the Pittsburgh Pirates and enjoyed a minor league career.

In Williamsport, the Tuckahoe Nationals were set to face a team from Campbell, California, in the finals. The West End boys were playing with aluminum bats forged locally, at Richmond Metals Company on Broad Street. But the bats were stifled in the semifinals. California won 3-0 on its way to the championship game, where it lost to Japan.

The team gathered after the game. “We can’t complain,” Foster told his teammates. Assistant coach Bud Hare embraced Smith, who had taken the loss despite giving up just three hits. Hare then summed things up this way: “They’ll get over it pretty quickly. They’ve had an outstanding season.”

Gotten over it, yes. Forgotten it, no. Players from Tuckahoe have stayed in touch over the years or reconnected in recent times. They talk about the old days and catch up on the years. Life has thrown its curves. They can reminisce, too, about the neighborhoods they grew up in, baseball havens every one. 

“We didn’t play soccer and we didn’t play other sports. We played baseball,” Smith said. “And that makes it more special, too, when its your neighborhood and surrounding neighborhoods, right? Like, it’s all about community.”

Times have changed. Kids often play with travel baseball organizations in the summer now, leaving many Little League and American Legion squads handicapped. But for years, Little League teams from the Richmond area thrived each summer. 

“I believe the story had a lot to do with the culture of the West End of Richmond and that period of time,” Smith said. “That culture really produced a lot of very successful baseball that really dominated the state.”