Lifelong love of baseball leads Westmoreland County Junior Legion president to hall of fame

John Doyle never played a ton of organized baseball while growing up in Plum. He spent most of his time playing pickup games on the local field with friends.

“My father made it a point to make sure that we had a field to play on,” Doyle said. “He would come home from work and make sure the local field was always mowed.”

It was on that field where Doyle sparked an interest in baseball.

“I really liked the sport and was always studying the game and how it was played,” he said.

When he was 7 years old, Doyle was hit by a car, and the damage was so severe, he was unable to play until he was cleared by a doctor when he was 13.

The highest level Doyle ever reached was Pony baseball, but he never stopped studying the game, learning as much as he could about the sport. His drive to learn continued as he got older took him down a more successful and fulfilling path.

It has been a long and winding journey, one that will make its way to the JPT Convention Center in Erie on July 25 as Doyle is inducted into the PA American Legion Baseball Hall of Fame.

“I was totally blown away when I found out,” Doyle said. “I originally thought it was a joke, but when I asked my wife Debra, she said, ‘They contacted me, let me know, and I wasn’t allowed to say anything to you.’

“It’s a real honor for me. I know a lot of the people from this area who have already been inducted, and it was something I was never working toward or tried to make happen. It totally came out of the blue and was something I never expected to happen.”

Doyle, who is retired after 29 years as an IBEW electrician for Curtiss Wright in Cheswick, spends the majority of his time helping local veterans by buying groceries and assisting in maintaining their homes.

He and his wife have been married for 49 years and raised five kids, two daughters — Kelly and Elissa Anne — and three sons — James, John and Benjamin — on a farm in Washington Township. All five children are graduates of Penn State.

All three of his sons played baseball at some point and were coached by Doyle along the way.

When his oldest son, James, was 7, Doyle took a page out of his father’s book, channeled his inner Ray Kinsella and built a baseball diamond on one of the fields closest to the house.

“It became a place for the local kids to play and practice,” said Doyle, who is always ready to pass along his knowledge of the game, as his critique on how the Pirates’ Oneil Cruz catches a fly ball with runners on base shows.

“You can see when he catches the ball that he’s not in a good position to make a quick transfer to throw a guy out,” Doyle said. “He’ll catch the ball over his left shoulder when he should catch it over his right. Those fractions of second matter, especially when you have a fast runner.”

Doyle acquired such a depth of knowledge about the game in two ways.

First, as he started coaching his son’s Washington Little League teams beginning in the early 1990s, Doyle attended coaching clinics at Monroeville Convention Center, where local college coaches taught the intricacies of the game.

“I really found out how a team has to play,” Doyle said. “You don’t always have to have the best or the smartest players, but you need players who play with a lot of heart and play the game the correct way.”

He took that knowledge with him in 1996 when he saw an advertisement for the Kiski Valley junior Legion team out of Saltsburg looking for players and signed John up. It was only a matter of time before he began to coach those teams as well.

He coached for Kiski in the Westmoreland County Junior Legion league until 2009, when he left to begin coaching for Lower Burrell on the Senior Legion level and was in that position until 2012.

In his time as Lower Burrell’s coach, Doyle faced off against the Kiski Valley team coached by the Montgomery brothers, Dennis and Dave, who were inducted into the PA American Legion Hall of Fame in 2018.

“I had met them a couple of times when my son played for them when Penn State New Kensington had a team for a couple of years,” Doyle said. “That’s when I learned I didn’t know as much as I thought I did.”

What Doyle saw was how Dennis and Dave were able to take a team that was losing late in the game by four or five runs, for example, and relay signals to execute a successful pickoff attempt and end up winning the game.

“I said to myself, ‘I have to learn how they were able to get something like that accomplished,’ ” Doyle said.

When he approached the Montgomery brothers for guidance, he didn’t expect them to offer him an opportunity.

“They said that they liked how I ran my program and asked if I could take care of their Junior Legion program,” Doyle said. “They liked the idea of the Junior Legion being a feeder program for the Senior Legion so that when the kids got up to the senior level, they knew their system.”

Both Montgomery brothers will be in attendance for Doyle’s induction.

“They were inducted a while back,” Doyle said. “I was their protégé, and they told me they’re so thrilled that I’d been selected.”

In Doyle’s six years as the coach of the Kiski Valley Junior Legion, the team made the playoffs five times.

“That’s what kept motivating me to come back every year, seeing how the kids didn’t have it at the beginning of the season, but by the end, we were making the playoffs and we had the belief we could take down those bigger teams from Murrysville, Hempfield and Penn-Trafford,” Doyle said.

When asked what his overall record as a coach was, Doyle said he couldn’t recall what the numbers were, only that he remembered going 63-3 at one point, including two straight undefeated seasons while coaching at the Washington Township Little League.

“As you move up in the higher levels, you’re not necessarily going to win all your games. You just want to win the big ones,” he said.

In 2013, Doyle accepted the vice president/secretary position of the Westmoreland County Junior American Legion, and he began to work with director Dick Clawson.

“It was through his mentoring that I began to learn the registering and rostering rules for the teams in the league as well as the rules for having a team qualify for the regional and state tournaments,” Doyle said. “His patience and diligence can never be overstated.”

Then, in 2020, Doyle took over the position as president of Westmoreland County Junior Legion baseball.

“Mr. Clawson had a lot of patience and diligence with me, and that allowed me to observe all the work he was doing and, in that way, I was able to move from the vice presidency to the presidency,” Doyle said. “That really helped me to garner what I needed to in order to stay with the league for as long as I have.”

In his time as president, Doyle has overseen the expansion of the number of teams in his league as other leagues were shrinking because players opted for travel ball.

“I always wanted to be sure that I had at least 11 teams,” Doyle said. “The more teams you had, the likelihood of you having multiple teams at regionals increased.”

In his more than 20 years of coaching, one season in particular stands out.

When John was in Little League and James was in the minor-league level of Little League, Doyle was diagnosed with thyroid cancer and lymphoma.

“It was all through my neck,” Doyle said. “I ended up getting my thyroid removed, and, at that point, my doctor recommended that I make out a will.”

During that baseball season, Doyle was enduring chemotherapy and radiation treatments, which sapped him of energy and forced him to sleep a lot of the day.

John’s team wasn’t doing well to start that season and was being managed by a parent who was on the administration side of the Washington Little League, had a son on the team and decided to coach the team just to prevent it from folding.

“I called her up and asked if she wanted any help,” Doyle said. “She was very receptive to assistance from anyone, and we worked it out to where I took on a supporting role.”

Doyle attended games and assisted from a folding chair as he was still too radioactive from his treatments to have contact with anyone, let alone young ballplayers.

“I was able to teach them from that chair, and one of the things I noticed was that they weren’t having any fun,” Doyle.

So he came up with a system of 21 “cup rules.” If a kid made a great play in the field or had a strong at-bat, he would be allowed to dump a cup of water on Doyle.

“I told them it didn’t matter if they won the game but that they made the plays,” Doyle said. “They ended up getting out of hand a little bit. They started making up their own rules, you know, if they turned a double play, that meant two cups.”

The system worked, and the team ended up turning its season around, making the playoffs and winning the championship game behind the arm of the coach’s son.

“When they won, I fell to one knee,” Doyle said. “A lot of the people thought I was praying, but I was actually so weak, I couldn’t stand any longer and was trying to catch my breath.”

Doyle’s cancer has been in full remission. He did make out a will stipulating he wants his body donated to UPMC, finding one more way to pass on knowledge.

“I don’t care if they’re first-year medical students. Let them study my body and learn from everything it went through and all the synthetic thyroid hormones I take every day,” Doyle said.