Dr. Creighton Hale — helmet inventor rose through ranks to lead Little League
Creighton Hale, who in the late 1950s invented a batting helmet that gave Little League Baseball players better protection, and who later rose to the top ranks of the organization as it grudgingly accepted girls, died Oct. 8 in Williamsport, Pa., where the league has its headquarters. He was 93.
His son, Tad, confirmed the death.
When Dr. Hale, a physiologist, arrived at Little League as its first director of research in 1955, he began to compile data that he hoped would improve the safety of the game and help him understand its players better.
He measured the reaction times of pitchers, which led to moving the mound back 2 feet to reduce the frequency of their being hit by batted balls. Taking the pulse rates and blood pressure of players, coaches and managers before, during and after Little League World Series games he determined that youngsters handled competitive pressure better than the adults.
His analysis of injuries led to changes like eliminating the on-deck circle, where players were at risk of being hit by foul balls.
To develop the helmet, Dr. Hale wanted to simulate the pitcher-tobatter confrontation. He built a compressed-air cannon with parts he had bought in a local hardware store. Working from his laboratory in the basement of Little League’s offices in Williamsport, he used the cannon to fire baseballs at various speeds at a plastic helmet mounted on a wood model. Testing showed that it could absorb a direct hit from a ball traveling at 90 mph without cracking or being driven into a batter’s head.
In addition to being able to withstand pitches thrown at high speeds, the helmet had a flap on each side designed to protect the temples, ears and cheekbones.
Major League Baseball had experimented with helmets before Dr. Hale’s work. When he formally introduced his Little League helmet in 1958 at the Little League Congress in Chicago, he staged a demonstration of a helmet that was being used in major league games. When his cannon unleashed a 95-mph fastball, the helmet split from top to bottom.
Dr. Hale’s dual-earflap helmet became mandatory for Little League batters and runners in 1961. At its World Series that year, he later recalled, a boy was struck in the helmet by a pitch and fell to the ground.
“After being examined by a doctor, he hopped up and ran to first base,” Dr. Hale recounted in “More Than a Bat and a Ball: My 60 Years at Little League,” an autobiography, written with Mary Ellen Gardner, that was published by Little League Baseball in 2015. “No one wants to see a child in peril, but for me that was the ultimate field test and outcome.”
Dr. Hale also invented a catcher’s helmet with a mask attached to it and a chest protector that guards the catcher’s throat. He worked with Alcoa and other companies to develop aluminum bats as a cost-effective alternative to wooden bats, which often shattered and had to be replaced.
Aluminum bats became controversial for the speed with which balls leave them, compared with that of wooden bats, and for the injuries that have been caused by them. Aluminum bats and others made of composite materials are used at youth, high school and college levels. Little League bats are moving toward meeting a standard in which they would perform like wooden ones.
In the 1970s, Dr. Hale was chairman of a committee of the National Academy of Sciences that developed a new military helmet made of Kevlar.
Creighton J. Hale was born on Feb. 18, 1924, in Hardy, Neb. (He was given a middle initial but not a middle name.) His father, Russell, was a farmer, teacher and school superintendent. His mother, the former Anita Fay Farthing, was a teacher and homemaker.
As a boy, he played baseball but was more interested in boxing, football (he wore a leather helmet), basketball and track. He was so competitive, he wrote, he entered a state typewriting speed competition as a teenager and won the 15-minute contest.
After serving in the Navy, he graduated from Colgate University in upstate New York, then earned a master’s in physiology at Springfield College in Massachusetts, where he taught for five years and worked on military research, including testing a more ergonomic infantry pack. He received a doctorate in the physiology of muscular activity from New York University.
While at Springfield, he was asked by Branch Rickey, the renowned Brooklyn Dodgers executive who by then had become the general manager of the Pittsburgh Pirates, to develop a way to measure a player’s skills and predict his performance. (The tests he devised did not provide many answers.)
The Little League was a boys-only organization when Dr. Hale became its executive vice president in 1971. A case brought to the New Jersey Division of Civil Rights by the National Organization for Women changed that; a hearing officer ruled in 1973 that the prohibition against female players violated state and federal anti-discrimination laws.
Dr. Hale testified at the hearing that studies showed that the bones of females were weaker than those of males.
Girls began playing in the Little League in 1975 after the league’s charter was amended.
Stephen Keener, the Little League’s president and chief executive, said in a telephone interview that while Dr. Hale “defended the Little League position in the early 1970s that girls were not permitted to play,” he “would later say, ‘If I knew then what I know now, we were defending the indefensible.’ ”
Dr. Hale became president of the Little League in 1973 and its chief executive 10 years later. He retired in 1994.
During his tenure, Little League greatly expanded around the world.
“When I started here in 1980, we were in 18 or 19 countries, and we’re in 84 countries now,” said Keener, who succeeded Dr. Hale. “That’s largely due to his commitment to grow the game globally.”
In addition to his son, Dr. Hale is survived by his wife, the former Beverly Gray, who worked at Little League for 50 years; his daughter, Kathy Dumanis; 10 grandchildren; nine great-grandchildren; and his brother, Russell. Dr. Hale’s first marriage, to the former Rita Hugo, ended in divorce.
“Little League is not a baseball program, it’s a leadership program,” Dr. Hale told the Sioux City (Iowa) Journal in 1992. “We use baseball as a vehicle to do other things. There’s no place for 2.6 million kids on major-league teams.”