Twenty years ago this summer, the Rochester A’s American Legion baseball team went on an ultimate three-month winning ride that finished in the 100-degree heat of Bartlesville, Okla.
It was an unprecedented ride that hasn’t been matched since by a Rochester team.
And it actually didn’t end in Bartlesville. There was one last stop two months later for that bunch: A two-day stint at Yankee Stadium in Bronx, N.Y.
That was the prize for accomplishing what they did, winning the American Legion baseball World Series. The A’s received a paid trip to watch Games 1 and 2 of the Major League Baseball World Series between the New York Yankees and Florida Marlins.
Two months after they’d beaten Cherryville, N.C., 5-2 on Aug. 26 in the Legion championship in Bartlesville — longtime A’s taskmaster and beloved coach Keith Kangas finishing things off by telling his guys to “get their shirts tucked in” before shaking hands with the runner-up Cherryville players — the A’s sat in the lower bowl of Yankee Stadium.
To the victor went the spoils and the A’s collection of Dan Lyons, Ted Garry, Lee Anderson, Jay Kasner, Justin Grant, Cris Collins, Nate Bower, Ronnie Olson, Tom Lyons, Aaron Craig, Mike Badger, Alex Kangas, Drew Zafft, Jordan Kangas, Ben Olofson and Tom Sheehan could never have imagined being spoiled quite like this.
“We got to go onto the field before the first game (of the World Series) started,” said A’s pitcher/right fielder Kasner, who was by then two months into college at St. John’s University in Collegeville, Minn., but broke away to be with his A’s teammates. “When the game started, we got to sit deep down in the stadium. It was one of the last World Series games ever at Yankee Stadium.”
For the A’s players, winning the American Legion state tournament in Rochester, then the Central Plains Regional tournament in New Ulm and finally the World Series in Bartlesville was not a hat trick any of them were predicting. At the same time, this was a group that bet on itself every step of the way.
And they had the perfect man directing them in Kangas — who died in 2019 at the age of 62 — a coach they revered for his ability to get every ounce out of them.
Their World Series championship was long in the making and one that became more plausible with every passing season. For the bulk of them, their time together started in the fifth grade when so many of them were already playing travel baseball together as a select group of Rochester north-siders.
“We had set out to play for that (World Series) moment not just in the 2003 season but long before that,” said A’s shortstop Lyons, who played a rare four years for the A’s and would later star at the University of Minnesota before having a long minor-league career. “Starting in fifth grade, we had a great core of guys who were already playing together. This World Series was eight years in the making.”
All but two of the A’s were from Rochester Century, the other two — Kasner and Garry — from Rochester Lourdes.
There was a hint that something special might be brewing in 2002. That spring Kasner and Garry starred on a Lourdes team that won a high school baseball state title. Century followed that the next year by winning the 2003 big-school high school baseball state championship.
The bulk of those Century players immediately went from winning that state crown to within days rolling right into the A’s season.
“After winning the state (high school) tournament, we kind of wanted to just bask in that,” said Lyons, an All-State player for that Century team. “But because Legion started right away, we had to go back to work. But as far as focus, we were even more motivated to (win) again. We knew what we had and we knew what we were adding to the team.”
