D.C.'s Major Player

The uniform pants hanging off the waist of 10-year-old Emmanuel Burriss had been bleached and pressed, his cleats buffed and shined, his ball cap straightened just so. He was still in the city, still in the District -- but Friendship, out in upper Northwest, seemed as far away from Burriss's Logan Circle neighborhood as the moon.

He was there, among all those white kids, on this pristine field, at the invitation of John McCarthy, a onetime college and minor league pitcher turned inner-city youth-baseball guru, who had discovered young Emmanuel at an after-school clinic he put on a couple of weeks earlier at Garrison Elementary, practically across the street from the Burriss's house. There weren't many kids at that clinic who were any good, but Emmanuel was different. This kid knew the game. He felt the game.

And by the end of the day, McCarthy was sitting at the kitchen table in the Burriss home, asking Allen and Denise Burriss if they wanted to bring Emmanuel up to Friendship, where he could play Little League with players and coaches who loved the game the way he did.

"Emmanuel was very unusual," McCarthy said. "His 'baseball IQ,' as I call it, was exceptional, but what separated him from others with that same baseball IQ was his talent. He was just a gifted kid who was highly coachable and had a tremendous work ethic."

Hearing that his boy had big-time talent filled Allen Burriss with pride. The former starting catcher at Roosevelt High back in the early '60s, he had tried to instill a love of baseball in young Emmanuel, all the while knowing it was probably a losing battle -- because kids simply weren't into baseball anymore in the inner city, the way they were in his own day.

"I loved the game. It was my heart and soul," Allen Burriss said. "Back in the '50s and '60s, we had these Walter Johnson leagues that the rec department ran, and there was so much pride and prestige if you made one of those teams. There'd be hundreds of kids -- and I'm not exaggerating -- trying to make a squad of no more than 15 [players] a year."

In the part of the city where Emmanuel and his family lived, there were few baseball fields to speak of, and the ones that did exist were not fit for kids to play upon.

"They were just crummy -- rocks all in the infield. I always say they had more glass than grass," Allen Burriss said. "The city had just stopped taking care of the fields. It was cheaper to put a basketball court there. Even now, the rec fields are all just nothing -- destroyed."

Unlike many of the kids Emmanuel grew up with, who gravitated toward football and basketball, his first love was baseball. He remembers being riveted by the 1993 World Series, the one that ended on a walk-off home run by Toronto's Joe Carter, and he constantly watched the baseball videotapes his dad kept stacked next the television -- one of which, called "Greatest Shortstops in Baseball History" or some such, featured a segment on Wills.

"Look at that, son," Allen Burriss would say, "that's Maury Wills. He's from the District."

With McCarthy as his mentor, and with two parents willing to drive him to the farthest reaches of the city -- and out beyond the city line, out into the Maryland and Virginia suburbs -- young Emmanuel discovered a wonderful new world that revolved around baseball. And he noticed something else: Almost no one he played with, or against, looked like him.

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