Last year, Long Beach’s proudest moment didn’t come from one of the city’s historic high schools, or from a big Long Beach State program—it came when Long Beach PONY, a group of talented Long Beach baseball players led by manager Ken “Mr. Baseball” Jakemer, went to Pennsylvania and came home with the PONY World Championship trophy.  This week, that team will try to go back to back, and fellow Long Beach ballers Heartwell PONY will try to make a trip back to the World Championships (which they won in 2006). 

But the road will be steep—and it will be steep from the beginning.  LB PONY is hosting the tournament at Whaley Park, right next to Long Beach State.  But coming to town will be a host of talented teams including Norwalk, Lynwood, and Santa Monica.  Three of the past ten worldwide winners will be represented in the tournament, which will feature twenty games and twelve games spread out from now through July 20th.  Even if a team gets out of this Section tournament, the road wears on, as our LB PONY teams know.  The top three teams will make it out of the Sectional bracket, to advance to the Regional tournament in Whittier.  Two teams will make it out of that brackets and travel to the Zone tournament in Anaheim, in which everyone from Colorado and west will compete for the right to send one team to Pennsylvania to the World Series.

We’ll be bringing you full coverage of our local teams’ attempts to add some more hardware to their collection—LB PONY kicks off on July 15th, at 7:30pm, and Heartwell wil begin on July 16th, at 7:30pm. 

Jakemer says his team may be the most depth and talent top to bottom he’s ever seen come out of Whaley.  But with so many games, and so many intangibles, nothing is certain.  “Can we make it back?” he asks.  “Yes.  Will we?  Who knows.  We might not make it out of our Sectional tournament.”  Come out and support the local youth movement this week at Whaley, and of course check LBPostSports for info on any games you’ve missed!