While I was at a Babe Ruth baseball game recently, someone approached me about one of the Mifflin County records.
It concerned the longest winning sreak in league history. The person said the record was 44 games.
I have never heard that number - ever. And I have been working with Babe Ruth numbers for the past 40 years.
In fact, when I started in 1970, I spent a lot of hours in newspaper offices or in libraries looking up Mifflin County Babe Ruth facts from 1955 to 1969.
I thought I had covered all aspects of the league in the regular season and in the postseason.
Currently Lewistown has a 39-game winning streak, with four games remaining in the regular season and also could play games in the Bob Reigle Memorial tournament.
But, something kept nagging at me about the 44-game winning streak.
So on Tuesday, I spent the afternoon in the Pennsylvania State Library in Harrisburg looking at microfilm of The Sentinel for the years from 1962 to 1965.
After missing the article years ago, this time I found it.
Burnham Green had a 44-game winning streak from 1963 through 1965. It was stopped by Belleville in 1965 by a score of 2-1 in nine innings.
Some of the players that day who performed for Burnham Green were Mike Keister, Junior Varner, Steve Stewart, Mick Lucas, Dan Picketts and Tim Reese. On the Belleville side were Bob Sharp, Steve Durst, Tom Wills, Henry Marburger, John Stroup and Dave Stroup.
It was not only an historic game, but it was also filled with plenty of Babe Ruth All-Stars of that year and of future years. Burnham's six all-stars were Keister, Reese, Varner, Stewart, Lucas, Picketts and Belleville's six were Sharp, Durst, Wills, Marburger, John Stroup and Paul Sitch.
There can be a lot of lessons learned from something like this: Never think that you are always right, because you could be wrong; A good reporter or researcher should turn over every stone even if its 20 years later and just be man enough to say "Oops, I made a mistake."
With the end of the regular season in the Mifflin County Babe Ruth League comes the Bob Reigle Memorial Tournament.
This year's tournament is scheduled for June 27 and June 28 at Rec Park, weather permitting.
Not many of today's players - or for that matter, the parents of those players - remember Bob Reigle. They probably know that he had an association with the Reedsville Babe Ruth team.
He coached 30 years in Reedsville and was a manager of a Mifflin County All-Star team 15 times. He won more than 500 games at Reedsville and as an All-Star manager including winning league titles for Reedsville four times, and was the manager of the 1983 Mifflin County 13-year-old All-Stars that won a state championship. He also managed three other teams to second-place finishes in the state tournament. He was in the first class of the Pennsylvania Babe Ruth Hall of Fame.
Reigle last coached in 1997 in Weatherly, where his 13-year-old All-Stars finished second in the state. He died in May of 1998.
If the 1960 Mifflin County 14-15-year-old All-Star team that won the first state title and finished second in the Mid-Atlantic Regional, losing to the eventual national champion in the regional title game, is considered the cornerstone of the Mifflin County League, then it was Bob Reigle who put down the foundation.
The former Reedsville manager set the tone for managers to stay for many years. Reigle started coaching in 1968 when his son was 13, but he went way beyond 1970 after his son left the playing field.
But, even more important, it was Reigle who impressed upon the league to expand the schedule from 14 games to more than 20 in the mid-1970s.
That is why the tournament at the end of the year memorializes him. The league title comes from the 27 regular season games that each team plays.
The tournament gives all the teams one last opportunity to have one more weekend on the playing field.
It was Reigle's philosphy of playing more games that started the league toward better play and more opportunities to win on the tournament trail.
Today, Reedsville is managed by Scott Reigle, son of Bob, and his grandson, Kevin, is now on the Reedsville coaching staff. In 2002, it was Scott who led Mifflin County to its first World Series and in 2003 Kevin was a member of the 15-year-old All-Star team that won a state title and was part of the "sweep" when Mifflin County became the first and only Babe Ruth league in Pennsylvania to sweep all three state titles (13,14 and 15) in one season.
I'm sure Bob would have been smiling about the events of 2002 and 2003, but he also would be proud to know that the league has named a tournament after him that keeps the players on the field for another game of baseball.
Ray Wilde reports on Babe Ruth baseball for The Sentinel.
