A good day for baseball in Auburn

If noise could win baseball games, it would have been Auburn all the way.

About 150 Little League fans – the ones who couldn’t make it to Williamsport, Pa. – packed the tiny Auburn Avenue Theater on Friday to watch the first game of the 2010 Little League World Series streaming live on the big screen.

The Auburn All-Stars, representing the Pacific Northwest, played Fairfield, Conn., representing the Northeast, in the opening game of the tournament.

“Let’s be as loud as we can from the beginning of the game until the end,” Chris Fox, Auburn Little League’s vice president of operations, told the crowd before the game started.

They did their best, whooping, hollering and clanging a cowbell for most of the six- inning game.

The Little Leaguers even had little cheerleaders.

Christina Thompson, 10, Lauren Friis, 11, and a handful of others hopped up on the stage during ESPN’s commercial breaks and led fans in cheers that included, “Auburn is hot! Red hot!” and a version of the Wave, which worked surprisingly well considering the theater is only about 75 feet wide.

Mayor Pete Lewis was there, in his baseball hat and an Auburn All-Stars T-shirt under his suit jacket.

“Isn’t this a good day for baseball in Auburn?” Lewis beamed. “The support you’re seeing reflects the heart of this community.”

Lewis said people at Auburn City Hall contributed $1,400 toward families’ expenses on Wednesday alone, dropping money off at the government center.

“It’s an odd thing,” Lewis said. “Auburn is a very tight community. Seventy thousand people live here, but they know it in their hearts as a small town. What you see here today is a reflection of old, small town America that comes together for baseball.

In the lobby, Little League supporters did a brisk business selling commemorative hats, visors, T-shirts, baseballs and bats.

“All the money will go to help the players’ families out,” Fox said.

The Little League organization pays the 11 players’ travel expenses, Fox said, but the families are on their own.

All 11 families made the trip, he said, and he estimates their costs, for the regional tournament in San Bernardino, Calif., and then Williamsport, ranged from $10,000 to $15,000 per family.

Closer to home, the noise volume in the theater dropped to a tense hush in the bottom of the fifth inning. With the game tied 1-1, Fairfield’s Jack Quinn rapped a double to right-center field, driving in two runs.

The Auburn nine did not recover, and the game ended 3-1, Fairfield.

Tyler Friis, 14. a former Auburn Little League player, now graduated to the city’s select league, took the loss in stride.

“I thought they played a really good game,” Friis said, pausing with his mom outside the theater after the game. “They had a chance to win it, but then there was that big hit in the fifth inning, and that did it for them.”

The tournament is double-elimination, so it’s still possible Auburn could win, Friis said.

But he acknowledged that’s a long shot.

“It’s a long way back,” he said. “They’d have to play like six more games to win it.”

The Auburn team plays again today, and, as cheerleader Thompson put it: “It’s not over till it’s over.”

Rob Carson: 253-597-8693

rob.carson@thenewstribune.com