Carl E. Stotz founded Little League Baseball and served as its commissioner through 1955. He developed the Little League idea in 1938, and in the next year three teams played 24 games. At this site he established field distances for pre-teenage players. The first 12 Little League World Series were held on this field from 1947 to 1958, and during these years the number of teams grew from 60 to thousands in many nations.