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

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

“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. The highest level Doyle ever reached was Pony baseball, but he never stopped studying the game. That 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.”

Doyle 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 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 and built a baseball diamond on one of the fields closest to the house.

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 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.

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.

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.”