Major leaguers trade balls for cardboard in Little League hill slide

Nathan Eovaldi and John Schreiber used their sliders without throwing a pitch. The Boston Red Sox pitchers grabbed their hunks of flattened cardboard and took flight for the traditional slide down the outfield hill outside the Little League World Series stadium.

Orioles manager Brandon Hyde hit the hill and raced head-to-head against his 14-year-old son in the cardboard challenge.

“I wasn’t sure,” Hyde said with a laugh.“but once I saw people going down, I wanted to try it. You never know when you’re going to be back.”

Oh, and Hyde won the fatherson competition.“a little more mass rolling down,” he said.

On a sunny Sunday morning, the Red Sox and Baltimore Orioles preparing to play in the Little League Classic acted like kids again as they mingled with Little League stars from around the globe at the site of the pinnacle of youth baseball.

Orioles outfielder Austin Hays said it was the kind of experience he would have loved growing up. Few kids can say they reached the Little League World Series. Now, they get the added perk of meeting baseball stars. The lucky few raced against the O’s.

“I made it about halfway down. Fell off my piece of cardboard,” Hays said.“the kid I was racing fell off his, too. So I ran back up, hopped on mine and he tried to go down without his, so I think I won by disqualification.”

Hays added,“this is our job now. We get paid to do it. But at the end of the day, we were in those kids shoes and we started playing the game because it was fun. Something we liked to do. And it led us to here.”