Aug 3, 2013 3 min read

When you’re a 61-year-old, you’re entitled to be a little behind the times.

You don’t have to download the latest Beyonce hit, pick Jay-Z out of a crowd, obsess over who Taylor Swift is dating, text every minute and tweet every other minute.

That’s fine for everyday, corporeal human beings. But if you’re a 61-year-old enterprise trying to stay alive in 2013, staying locked into a 1953 mode of business could prove to be a death knell.

In advance of the Pony League World Series this Friday in Washington Park, a story is set to appear in Monday’s edition of the Observer-Reporter by Business Editor Michael Bradwell detailing what he describes as “one of Washington County’s most venerated summer events” has created a website and is taking to social media to promote the tournament, which draws players ages 13 and 14 from around the country and the world. These efforts are worthy of commendation, if somewhat overdue. They are one component in a multi-pronged push to arrest swooning attendance and keep the Pony League World Series in Washington, as other suitors vie for its presence and the prestige and economic boost it delivers.

We hope it stays here. Washington and its surrounding area have been engaged in a continual struggle over the last 30 years or so to drum up commerce and generate community support for everything from festivals to concert venues and, more recently, the Washington Wild Things, the Frontier League squad that has called North Franklin Township home for over a decade. To lose the series would, on an abstract level, hardly be a morale booster and, on a more concrete level, deprive the area of dollars and cents it can ill afford to pass up.

And this could be Washington’s last chance. In our story Monday, Nate Voytek, a board member of World Series Tournaments Inc., a local nonprofit that sponsors the series, said that after seeing a $25,000 decline in operating funds at the end of 2012, they seriously considered whether the plug should be pulled, but they decided to give it one more try. So, if attendance isn’t adequate this year, there might not be a next year.

The Observer-Reporter does have a sentimental attachment to the series, we admit. The concept of PONY Baseball was born in a front office of the Observer Publishing Co. on South Main Street in Washington in the early 1950s. According to an essay by Bob Gregg, the president of World Series Tournaments Inc., which appeared in the Observer-Reporter last year, “Civic and business leaders made a promise to baseball-playing youth – there would be an organized baseball program for them after they were too old for Little League, itself formed just five years earlier.” Since then, the series has brought players from Mexico, the Caribbean, the Pacific Rim and Europe to our area. A few future major leaguers have passed through, too.

“Here in its hometown, the World Series isn’t just a baseball tournament, but rather a part of the fabric of who we are as a community,” Gregg said.

Estimates have it that the series generates somewhere in the vicinity of $1 million in economic activity. And then, as team members and their chaperones return to their hometowns, they tell friends and families about what they found here and the reception they received.

It would truly be a shame if they said the games happened before rows of empty seats.