Little League: In a Classic Photo, Players Demand Their Pants, 1954

July 31, 2013 3:27 PM EDT

While its primacy as the national pastime has occasionally been challenged over the years — by football, by basketball and, increasingly, by NASCAR — every spring, the arrival of baseball somehow manages to stir the hearts of men and women who have convinced themselves that they’ve long outgrown the sport’s singular charms. Grownups, in other words, often greet the season with a welter of complicated emotions; but for boys and girls fortunate enough to have fallen in love with baseball early in life — and who have been waiting all winter just to get out on the diamond — the defining urge in the early days of spring can be summed up in two words: play ball!

It’s somehow fitting, then, that one of the greatest baseball photos ever published in LIFE was, and remains, a picture not of Hall of Fame legends like Mays or Mantle or Berra or Musial, and that it doesn’t capture big-league action on the field at Yankee Stadium or Wrigley or Fenway, but instead focuses on Little Leaguers. In fact, for some fans, Yale Joel’s marvelous 1954 portrait of young players in a kindergarten classroom Manchester, N.H., trying on uniforms and (as LIFE noted in the original caption) anxiously awaiting the arrival of “missing parts of outfits” remains one of the best pure baseball picture any LIFE photographer ever made.

The engaging, charismatic hub of the photograph, of course, is the kid standing in the center of the frame. Pantless and formidable — no small feat! — young Dick Williams appears ready to rip into the coach, the equipment manager, someone, for keeping him and his teammates waiting for the rest of their uniforms to arrive. The other players on the Manchester Boys Club team look bored, or anxious, or perhaps just a little bit unsure of themselves. Williams, on the other hand, looks like he’d gladly go out and play in his socks and his underpants — and, by sheer force of will, would probably get his teammates to follow him on to the field, with or without the other halves of their uniforms.

But beyond the deep appeal of Joel’s now-classic picture — and of so many of his other photos that ran in the June 28, 1954, issue of LIFE — the article that his photos accompanied is noteworthy for its own quite surprising focus: namely, exploring how the competitive nature of organized sports affects the children who play them.

“Youngsters getting into the Little League,” LIFE noted to its readers, “run head on into the world of competition.

Each step — matching skills with other kids to make a squad, vying to make the starting lineup, playing against other teams — brought aches to the losers and joy to the winners. Little League critics have charged that the small-fry athletes are not mature enough emotionally to stand the excitement of these tense situations. But in Manchester the program has shown that intelligent adult supervision of all phases of the competition eliminates the problem. The coaches and parents alike avoid overemphasis. As result, despite all the tension and disappointments, the youngsters showed no tendency to crack under any strain. Instead they seemed to thrive on competition, growing more poised, more relaxed and more confident as they went along.

Here, as baseball season gets into full swing around the country — and in countries around the globe — LIFE.com celebrates Yale Joel’s classic photo and the players, coaches, moms and dads who make the entire Little league phenomenon so reliably, sweetly thrilling each and every year.

Play ball!

Liz Ronk, who edited this gallery, is the Photo Editor for LIFE.com. Follow her on Twitter @lizabethronk.