The Greatest Little League Player Ever Was from Michigan

Hamtramck — Since Little League Baseball was founded in 1939, more than 40 million kids worldwide have played the sport.

The best to ever do it was a kid from Michigan.

The title of “Greatest Little Leaguer of All Time” belongs to Art “Pinky” Deras, who led Hamtramck to the Little League World Series championship in 1959, and in so doing, had the greatest season the sport had ever seen. No one has come close since then.

He was the Shohei Ohtani of his time—a great pitcher and a great hitter—and his statistics and accomplishments from the 1959 season are mind-boggling. As a pitcher, he was 18-0 with 298 strikeouts in 108 innings. He had 10 no-hitters on the season, and at one point, he had five straight no-hitters. He had two perfect-perfect games, in which he struck out all 18 hitters he faced.

At the plate, Pinky batted .641 on the season, with 33 home runs and 112 runs batted in.

As a Little Leaguer.

“People have asked me, who’s the most dominant player in Little League history?” said Lance Van Auken, an author and Little League historian. “It’s that kid.”

Yes, it’s that kid. In a state that has no shortage of sports legends, Pinky Deras ranks at the very top. As we all watch this year’s Little League World Series on TV this week, it’s a good time for all of us to learn his story.

So here’s the fascinating, inspirational, and somewhat complicated story of Art “Pinky” Deras, the best there ever was.

I’ll start with this. I’m very proud to say that Artie Deras, who passed away in 2022, was a good friend of mine. I got to know him in 2010 when my filmmaking partner Brian Kruger and I did a documentary called “The Legend of Pinky Deras.” The film aired on TV both regionally and nationally (on the MLB Network), and for many people, it was their first time hearing the story.

We got to interview Pinky and some of his Hamtramck teammates for the documentary, and we became good friends with him as a result. Artie called Brian and me every year on Christmas Eve, to check up and wish us happy holidays. I looked forward to that call every year.

The Legend of Pinky Deras began sometime in the late 1950s, back when Hamtramck was a blue-collar Dodge factory town and almost everybody in town was of Polish heritage. Hamtramck is one of the most fascinating cities in Michigan—an enclave inside the City of Detroit where the houses are all just a couple feet apart.

These days, it’s the only city in America with an all-Muslim city government, but back then, it was almost all Polish.

Baseball was king in Hamtramck back in 1959, and long before the Little League tournament began that year, everybody was already talking about the tall kid with the rocket right arm.

The Little League World Series takes place every August in Williamsport, Penn., where the best teams from around the world come to compete for the championship. The team from Hamtramck had made it to Williamsport in 1955 but lost early in the tournament.

In 1959, though, with Pinky leading the way, they thought they could go all the way. They were right.

The Little League World Series was a single-elimination event back then, in which the top eight teams from around the world qualified. To win the tournament, you had to win three games in a row.

With Pinky pitching in the opener, Hamtramck beat Puerto Rico, 5-0.

“He struck out the first 17 batters,” said teammate Mark Modich. “You can only face 18 batters, because it's a six-inning game. He had two strikes on the 18th batter, and he got a little bloop single over the second base bag. And then the next kid came up and he struck him out. I mean, that's how dominant he was.”

Hamtramck beat the team from Honolulu in the second game, 7-1, with a kid named Sidney Cline pitching. Pinky couldn’t pitch every game, but he chipped in at the plate by hitting a grand slam.

Then in the championship game, with Pinky on the mound again, Hamtramck beat Auburn, California, 12-0. He actually gave up three meaningless hits, which made him mad, so he made up for it by hitting a three-run homer. It was a dominant end to the most dominant season in Little League history.

Hamtramck came back to Michigan as champions of the Little League world, and they were treated like kings. The town honored them with a parade down the main drag, and a few days later, the Dodge corporation flew them out to Hollywood to be on “The Lawrence Welk Show.”

It was heady stuff for a bunch of working-class kids. “We got to sit in an area on the side of the stage and Lawrence Welk came over, asked us a bunch of questions,” Pinky said in the documentary. “One of our players got to dance with the Champagne Lady. It was a thrill.”

In addition to winning the championship, one of the other things that happened in Williamsport was that Dr. Creighton Hale, the Little League director of research, was so fascinated with Pinky that he asked to conduct a few tests on him.

He had Pinky swing a bat and timed it and found that he was swinging it at 105 miles an hour. Mickey Mantle, the best Major Leaguer back then, was timed at 115 miles an hour. Pinky Deras, who had just turned 13, was almost as fast.

When Hale timed his pitches, they came in at 71 miles an hour. Taking into account the shorter distance between the pitching mound and the plate in Little League, that equates to a 100 mph Major League fastball.

Hale couldn’t believe what he was seeing. Speaking to a reporter afterward, he said, “Deras rates in a class by himself. I've never seen a boy of his age who could match him. He simply can't miss continuing to be an exceptional athlete.”

Little League is for kids ages 10-12 when the season starts, so after the 1959 season, Pinky and the guys had to move up to the next level of baseball, Pony League. And in 1961, with mostly the same cast of players, they did it all again. They won the Pony League World Series, with Pinky Deras leading the way once again.

One of the few new teammates on the Pony League squad was a future Major Leaguer named Tom Paciorek, one of Detroit’s legendary Paciorek brothers (brothers John and Jim also played in the Major Leagues).

Tom Paciorek loved being Pinky’s teammate, and nobody was better at describing just how great he was.

“As a pitcher, I would compare him to Nolan Ryan,” Paciorek said in the documentary. “He was strong and threw the equivalent of 100 miles an hour, I’d say, with a very good curveball. As a batter, he had an open stance, stood right on top of the plate with his back foot, and God bless you if you threw anything on the inside corner of the plate. It was definitely a home run. If you threw it on the outside, made a perfect pitch, he might hit a line drive to left center for a hit. But you couldn't get him out. It was an impossibility.”

Following the Pony League World Series world championship in 1961, that’s when Pinky’s story gets a little more complicated. He was a star at Hamtramck High School in both football and baseball, and when he graduated in 1964, he had a full-ride offer in football to play quarterback at Michigan State.

He also had an offer from the St. Louis Cardinals in baseball to sign with them for $80,000 (about $860,000 in today’s dollars), and even though he really wanted to play football at MSU, his dad pressured him to sign with the Cardinals. So he did.

The expectations that everyone had for Pinky Deras as a kid never materialized as an adult. He spent five seasons in professional baseball, all in the minor leagues, and when spring training rolled around in 1969, he just didn’t show up. He didn’t call the Cardinals or anything. He just didn’t show up. “They might still be expecting me,” he said with a laugh years later.

He joined the Army National Guard, and when that ended, he decided that he needed a career instead of just a job, so he became a police officer in Warren, a job he held for 29 years until he retired.

“You talk about baseball players being heroes,” Paciorek said in our documentary. “Those guys are the real heroes.”

He got married a couple times, had three kids, and mostly lived his life in anonymity. Artie Deras was so quiet and unassuming that most of the young cops he rode with in Warren had no idea they were sharing a squad car with the greatest youth baseball player who ever lived.

He also stepped away from baseball almost entirely. He never played it again, threw away most of his trophies and memorabilia, and always had in the back of his mind that he had let down the folks in Hamtramck by not becoming a Major League star.

This is the part of the story where it goes from being kind of sad to being really, really cool.

In 2010, Brian Kruger and I tracked down Art Deras and asked if we could do a documentary about him. He was thrilled that someone wanted to tell his story.

What he discovered when the documentary came out, and in the years that followed, was that people in Hamtramck and throughout Michigan weren’t disappointed at all. Instead, once they heard his story (many of them for the first time), they were damn proud and happy. They were so happy to hear of his heroics in 1959 and 1961, and so proud that he was one of us.

They didn’t care one bit about what he didn’t do. They loved him for what he did do.

In 2011, the City of Hamtramck named a street for him. His whole family was there for the dedication. Brian and I were there, too, and it was a great day. He was inducted into the Polish American Sports Hall of Fame. In 2017, the entire Hamtramck Little League team was honored by the Michigan Baseball Hall of Fame. He was invited to ride in parades and throw out first pitches.

Because of all that, Art Deras was able to enjoy being Pinky Deras once again. And that makes me so happy.

My friend died on June 5, 2022, and at his funeral, his son Kevin said that the documentary had given his dad a new lease on life—or at least the baseball part of his life.

That’s the way it should be. Art “Pinky” Deras was a Michigan original. We celebrate toughness and grit and determination in this state, and we certainly celebrate greatness.

When it comes to Little League Baseball, the best there ever was was a kid from right here. And you’re damn right we’re proud about that.