Presented by BACON BOISE.
This Day In Sports…August 27, 1994:
Venezuela wins the Little League World Series for the first time, with the team from Maracaibo defeating the U.S. representative from Northridge, CA, 4-3. The footnote was a 10-year-old named Yusmiero Petit, a backup second baseman who spent most of the Series on the bench. It was 20 years later that Petit became the first player to win a Little League World Series and an MLB World Series when he helped pitch the San Francisco Giants past the Kansas City Royals in seven games.
Three players have lost in the LLWS championship game and gone on to win a World Series. Carney Lansford’s team from Santa Clara, CA, fell to Taiwan in the 1971 final, and he captured a World Series ring with the Oakland A’s in 1989. Gary Sheffield and his Tampa teammates lost to Taiwan in the 1980 Little League World Series title game, and he won the 1997 World Series with the Florida Marlins. And Jason Varitek was a LLWS runner-up with Altamonte Springs, FL, in 1984 before winning the World Series with the Boston Red Sox in 2004 and 2007.
Petit continued to play youth and amateur baseball in Venezuela before signing with the New York Mets as an international free agent in 2001. He made his major league debut in 2007 with the Florida Marlins. Petit played a big role in the Giants’ 2014 championship season, setting a major league record by retiring 46 consecutive batters over eight games in 37 days during July and August. In the playoffs, he pitched six scoreless innings and earned the win in the longest game in major league history, San Francisco’s 2-1 victory in 18 innings over the Washington Nationals in the NL Divisional Series.
And Petit won Game 4 of the World Series that year by throwing three scoreless innings against the Royals. He took the mound in the fourth inning with the Giants trailing 4-1 and held Kansas City to just two hits while San Francisco stormed back to win 7-4. Petit also stepped up to the plate in the fourth and rapped a single, becoming the first relief pitcher to record a hit in the Series in 21 years. He’d play seven more seasons in the majors before finishing his career with the Oakland A’s in 2021.
(Tom Scott hosts the Scott Slant segment during the football season on KTVB’s Sunday Sports Extra. He also anchors four sports segments each weekday on 95.3 FM KTIK and one on News/Talk KBOI. His Scott Slant column runs every Wednesday.)
