Aug. 20, 2026, 7:05 a.m. ET
Every player in the Little League World Series is 10, 11 or 12 years old. Little League ignores a player’s birthday during the season and looks at one date instead. How old is the player on Aug. 31?
That number, what the organization calls “league age,” decides who is eligible. If a player turns 13 on Aug. 30 then they are ineligible, but if the player turns 13 on Sept. 1, they are eligible. The cutoff moved to Aug. 31 from April 30 for the 2018 season, which pushed 13-year-olds out of the tournament for good. They used to be eligible.
In 2015, 67 of the 209 kids in Williamsport were teenagers. Little League said the point was to match school cutoffs so kids played alongside their classmates. The 2021 tournament, held without international teams, went further and took only 11- and 12-year-olds. Eligibility has produced the worst scandals in the sport. A world championship has been taken away. A U.S.
championship has been vacated. And a third-place finish was erased over one pitcher’s birth certificate. What is the age limit for the Little League World Series? Players had to be league age 10, 11 or 12 as of Aug.
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31, 2026. Age isn’t the only test. Players also have to live inside their league’s boundaries or go to school there. How league age works A kid born Sept. 15, 2013 is considered “league age” 12 all season, because the player doesn’t turn 13 until after that Aug. 31 cutoff date. A kid born July 1 of the same year is considered league age 13 and isn’t eligible to play at Williamsport.
The league age is also used to determine the pitch counts for players. A 10-year-old can throw 75 pitches in a day. An 11- or 12-year-old gets 85, according to the rules Little League put in place to prevent injuries. Danny Almonte and the 2001 Bronx scandal Almonte threw the first perfect game in Little League World Series history in 44 years, striking out 16 of the 18 batters he faced in a 5-0 win over a team from Apopka, Florida. His Bronx team, the Rolando Paulino All-Stars, finished third and he was a star.
ESPN reported that Almonte was the main reason the 2001 tournament drew better ratings than that year’s NBA All-Star Game and Game 7 of the Stanley Cup Final. A day after it ended, however, a Sports Illustrated reporter gave Little League a document showing Almonte was born April 7, 1987 in Moca, Dominican Republic. That made him 14 at the time of the tournament and ineligible. Dominican officials confirmed it. The wins were forfeited.
The third-place finish was gone, the perfect game came off the books and league founder Rolando Paulino was banned for life. Almonte’s father was charged in the Dominican Republic with falsifying the birth certificate. The 1992 Philippines title Zamboanga City beat Long Beach, California, 15-4 in the final and became the first Asian champion from outside Taiwan, South Korea or Japan. Then Little League found age and residency violations and took the title back.
Eight players were declared ineligible and the team was ordered to forfeit its title run. The rules turned a 15-4 loss into a 6-0 Long Beach win. Only six of the 14 players were from Zamboanga at all. The Philippine Daily Inquirer had also reported allegations that some of the replacements were older than 12.
Little League had to vacate another championship in 2015. It took away the U.S. championship from Chicago’s Jackie Robinson West, but that case turned on residency. It was found to have used players from outside its district.
Uganda 2011 A team from Kampala won the Middle East and Africa Region in 2011 and was set to become the first African team to play in Williamsport. The State Department, however, denied the players’ visas to come to Pennsylvania for the tournament. Officials said some of the birth records submitted for the players had been altered to make the players appear younger and therefore eligible. The team was disqualified and its berth went to a team from Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, which Kampala had beaten in the regional.
A year later, a Ugandan team from Lugazi became the first African team to reach the Little League World Series.
