The Cranbury Plainsboro Little League, which started out with a handful of kids playing on land where cows used to graze, is celebrating its silver anniversary this year — 25 years of serving the children in the two neighboring towns. Hundreds, even thousands of children, have grown up playing baseball and softball through the ranks of CPLL. The cow pastures have long given way to housing developments; the players from that very first team in 1986 are now in their mid-30s; and many players today are parents who are reliving their own Little League experience by coaching children of their own.
And yet, through it all, through the entire last quarter century, there has been one constant in the CPLL universe: Peter Zanghi, affectionately known to the players as “Mr. Z.” Back in the days when Plainsboro and Cranbury had separate youth leagues with no formal rules, Mr. Z was a young father raising three little boys in the town of Cranbury. He had started to become involved with the youth league in the 1970s when his two oldest sons played T-ball.
And then, in 1982, came the event that would forever change his outlook on the world and alter the course of local Little League. In the middle of the night, his youngest son, Matthew, then six years old, suddenly stopped breathing. His parents called the Cranbury First Aid Squad. A police officer named Robert Joyce happened to be doing a late night patrol down the street, heard the call, and rushed over to the house. Matthew had stopped breathing because of an obstruction in his throat. Officer Joyce cleared the obstruction and got him breathing again. Members of the Cranbury First Aid Squad then arrived to stabilize him.
“I was so grateful to everyone who helped save my son’s life,” says Zanghi. “I didn’t belong to the First Aid Squad or the fire company, but I wanted to give back somehow, and I felt that my way of giving back to the town would be to work with the kids. The police all had kids who played baseball in the youth league, so I wanted to do something with that.”
Zanghi, Bob Gluck, a Plainsboro attorney, and Jerry Levine, another local father, recognized the fact that both Plainsboro and Cranbury were growing considerably and the children all wanted and deserved a higher level of play. It was time for the towns to form an official Little League team.
Little League is a national organization governed by local districts, with Cranbury and Plainsboro falling under District 12. “We went to the president of District 12 and told him we wanted to formalize our youth leagues into an official Little League organization,” recalls Zanghi. “He asked if we had fields. We didn’t. All we had were cow pastures, no lights, no dugouts. But we told him we have kids. We love baseball, we have an interest, and we want to get in. He said okay, I trust you guys and I’ll let you in. But we had to build from there and start everything from scratch.”
While other fields would follow in both Plainsboro and Cranbury, the first CPLL field was located just off Brainerd Lake in the heart of Cranbury. The field had to be fenced in and Zanghi was one of many people who helped build the first dugout, literally digging it out with their bare hands.
“Little by little, every year, it was a partnership, with people from Plainsboro and Cranbury who loved baseball and loved the kids working together to make things better. We had to get our field up to regulation and finally, in 1989, we held our first official CPLL home game on that field in Cranbury. Our first uniforms were red, white and blue — I liked the patriotism — and they lasted for about eight years.”
In establishing the Cranbury Plainsboro Little League, Zanghi was driven by one clear goal that guided not only what he did, but what he demanded of everyone else. “It’s the children I care about. I want them to have a positive experience that stays with them for the rest of their lives. There’s so much potential for negativity, not just with baseball but with other sports; there are so many nightmare stories about how kids are treated. I wanted to make sure we were going to be different.”
Zanghi says he set expectations and standards of behavior that applied to everyone on and off the field. “There would sometimes be parents who would run out on the field or yell and even if it was their own child, we let them know that was unacceptable. If there was a manager or coach who was abusive, their equipment was in their driveway the next day.”
Always, it was about the kids coming first. “I wanted a child to be able to play in our league, feel good about it, and leave with a positive feeling. They’re going to have plenty of time in life to suffer. I didn’t want for any child who came through CPLL to feel bad.”
Zanghi served as the first president of CPLL from 1986 to 1989. Even after he stepped back from official administrative duties, he continued working with the league to help it grow. He helped coach and he sponsored teams under the banner of his entrepreneurial efforts, an international trade and consulting business called Z Enterprises.
It may have been his son’s brush with death that served as the catalyst for Zanghi to launch CPLL, but the motivation to give children a positive life experience sprang out of his own hardscrabble roots. Zanghi grew up as the oldest of four children, big brother to two younger brothers and a sister, in a small coal-mining town near Johnstown, Pennsylvania, the site of the Great Flood of 1889 that killed 2,200 people. His mother stayed at home, and so did his father, a coal miner who was unable to work because he had cancer.
Zanghi was only nine when he entered the mines for the first time. Too small to cut coal, his job was to monitor the other workers. He would work in the mines for the next eight years to support his family. In 1962, when he was 17, he finally left the mines to work for a construction company. But then, disaster struck.
“I was standing on a platform and somehow gasoline had spilled down my arm,” says Zanghi. A spark from an exhaust pipe hit his arm and caused an explosion. “It blew me off the platform. I was a human torch, on fire from my waist to my neck. People around me put out the fire with sand, but I was covered with burns.”
Zanghi was in the hospital for almost eight months, enduring multiple surgeries. He says that experience, along with his work in the coal mines made him determined to give other children the opportunities he never had. “I didn’t play baseball as a child,” says Zanghi. “At nine, working in the mines, I never had the chance to be a kid. I know about sacrifice and hardship and it’s not something I would ever want these kids to know.”
By the time he recovered from his accident, his father had died and Zanghi decided to move to New Jersey to find more work. He learned how to build houses, and that’s how he supported his family back home. But during the winter, construction work was scarce, so he had to scramble to find another way to make a living. Johnson & Johnson hired him in 1964. He worked in purchasing for almost four decades until his retirement in 2002. Along the way he married his high school sweetheart; Peter was born in 1969, Mark in 1971, and Matthew in 1977. All of them played in the baseball youth league and Matthew played in the Little League his father helped create.
From North Brunswick, the family moved to Cranbury in the early 1970s, a time Zanghi recalls when the area had lots of farms, wide open spaces, and a very tight, friendly community of people. After a divorce, Zanghi was married to Betsy, whom he met at Johnson & Johnson, and who is very supportive of his continuing involvement with CPLL. His own kids aged out of Little League long ago, and he’s hung up his coaching hat. But he has remained active as a sponsor, and he has a long relationship with coaches Jim Caracappa and Ray Cella, both of Plainsboro.
Plainsboro residents Maureen and Tim Hitchings have a son, T.J. now an 8th-grader who plays Babe Ruth, who played on Mr. Z’s teams for his final two years with CPLL.
“Everyone knows about parties after the games for both teams and the end of the year party. They know about the beautiful book of photos he gives each boy — a “yearbook” of the season, pictures he takes himself, and each photo has a caption or a funny anecdote about each boy. He’s able to do this because he takes the time to get to know each one of the kids.”
Mike Mazzeo, a Plainsboro resident and freshman baseball player at WWP High School North, played for Mr. Z’s regular season team twice and had him as his all-star team’s sponsor for four years running. “Mr. Z is the best. He was more than a sponsor — he was a member of the team.”
“His support for the kids was evident in everything he did,” say John and Mardi Mazzeo. “He was there at almost every game — cheering them on in victory, consoling them in defeat, and even occasionally providing a necessary ‘tough love’ lecture. Kids who get a chance to play on Mr. Z’s teams learn more than how to play baseball. They learn what it means to be responsible citizens and a generous, caring human being.”
Though all these years, Zanghi has remained dedicated to his players. “There is a tremendous amount of pride in knowing that you can contribute to such a positive experience for children,” he says. “CPLL is like a family and once they come through, they’ll always be family. The kids can feel confident that I’ll always be there to support them.”
CPLL is celebrating its 25th anniversary with “Friday Night Lights,” games on successive Fridays in May. Remaining games: Friday, May 13, and Friday, May 20, at 7 p.m. at Plainsboro Community Park.
