A star in bowling and horseshoes, Donat Arel was involved as a baseball player and coach in Warren for more than sixty years.  His Braves nines in Little League Baseball won ten championships.

Donat’s first connection with championship baseball came when he played for the Warren Athletic Club team that won the state-wide Narragansett Baseball League title in 1916.

In the Warren versus Bristol Baseball Little World Series he played in 1916, managed from 1927 to 1929, and coached in 1930.  Between 1917 and 1932 he was associated with a number of other Warren baseball teams, as a player, manager or player-manager.  Donat was the player-manager of the Independents team that captured the 1923 and 1924 Warren Twilight League titles.  He also managed the Warren Independents who had success in the 1932 Rhode Island Championship Series.

In the middle of the Depression he was the player-manager of the Warren Horseshoe Pitching All Stars of 1933.

Donat both competed and served as an officer in the Warren and Bristol County Duckpin Bowling Leagues from the 1910s to the 1970s.  In 1947 his 394 led the Berkshire team to a Warren record.  At the age of sixty-nine he rolled a 162 string in a Rhode Island-Massachusetts tournament.  And in 1969 he was still good enough (at the age of seventy-three) to have a 118 average in the Bristol County Duckpin League.  The Warren Duckpin League honored him for his achievements in 1971.

Outside of town Donat had the sixth best average in the National Duckpin Congress’ Eastern Division in 1936 and rolled a 213 string in the 1953 Fall River Merchants Bowling League.

When Little League Baseball came to Warren in 1952, Donat became the coach of the Braves, a position he held until 1966; he then served as the team’s manager for five more years.  During that period, as noted above, the Braves won ten championships.  Manager of the 1967 All Stars and coach of many other All Star teams, he was honored by the league on Donat Arel Day in 1983.

Picture from Hall of Fame archives (1923 Twilight Baseball League Champions Independents)