I’ve been relatively silent on the decision by Little League International to strip the 2014 World Championship from Chicago’s Jackie Robinson West squad, mainly because of the boiling rage the prospect has enkindled in my heart. The indispensable Dave Zirin manages to explain better than I ever could the heart of the problem: race and gentrification of cities like Chicago.
As for the decision itself, ironies abound. Jackie Robinson West was the first entirely black team to represent the United States in the Little League World Series. And yes, waiting until Black History Month to strip JRW of their title is at best tin-eared. But that insult shouldn’t blind us to the greater injury. Recall their damnable offense: Jackie Robinson West didn’t use 16-year ringers or cork their bats. They had players suit up who lived “beyond their geographical boundary”. The fact that the adults in charge of JRW felt the need to breach this rule perhaps has something to do with the fact that today’s urban landscape supports baseball about as well as concrete makes proper soil for orchids. A plurality of Major Leaguers is made up of people from either the US suburbs or the baseball factories of the Dominican Republic. Many of the few African American players on Major League rosters actually come from the suburbs. This is because 21st century neoliberal cities have gentrified urban black baseball to death. Boys and Girls Clubs have become bistros. Baseball fields are condos and in many cities, Little League is non-existent. The public funds for the infrastructure that baseball demands simply do not exist, but the land required for diamonds are the crown jewels of urban real estate. That’s what made JRW such a profound anomaly. In Chicago particularly, which under Mayor Rahm Emanuel has seen school closures and brutal cuts to physical education programs, their success made people believe that—with apologies to Tupac—flowers could in fact grow in concrete.
And the fact that these boys had a championship ripped away from them because of literally where they lived just has me seeing red.
I’m glad Zirin wrote this column. Give it a read.
Buddy H
Thank you for posting this. I saw the news mentioned briefly last night on TV, and my first impressions was that it was wrong and unfair.
Mnemosyne (iPad Mini)
I haven’t heard anything about the story, so I don’t know the details. Is the problem that they brought kids in from the Chicago suburbs, or from further out?
Punchy
I’m torn on this….part of me says the adults knew the rules, and absolutely knew they were breaking them. If no punishment for rule-breaking, then that sets an ugly precedent. But punishing kids for stupid/greedy adults is horrific and unnecessary. Part of me thinks this so f’s the kids that a “co-champion” crown should be awarded to them and the Vegas team.
I would love to know how much ESPN makes off broadcasting these games, and how much (if any) of it goes back into LL support and/or building/maintaining baseball fields for LL.
Served
And don’t forget that a lot of teams are made up of players whose parents had the resources to move them into a different district. JRW’s families weren’t able to do this. They got the same result as the well-off teams, but got burned by the “boundaries” that others can so easily leap. Pretty symbolic when you think about it.
EDIT: And the investigation was spurred by a father and coach from a Chicago suburb. Guess how bad JRW beat his team.
Mike Furlan
Same story different players.
“The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.”
Plenty of ways to stack a team “legally” if you have the money.
c u n d gulag
Zirin’s terrific – at sports AND political writing. He merges the two.
And he points out one of the greatest problems that Major League Baseball has – and that’s that in urban areas, they’ve either organized baseball to death, or, that it’s hardly played at all because there are no baseball fields.
Basketball courts take-up a fraction of the space a baseball field does.
But, that’s the same problem as when I was a kid growing-up in the 60’s in Elmhurst, Queens, in NY City.
But back then, baseball was still king, and hoops were a minor sport.
Sure, the Police Athletic League had organized leagues, and took kids to fields in the outer reaches of a borough to ply, but most of us weren’t in those leagues.
We played punchball on playgrounds and in the streets – less cars, back then.
We played stickball anywhere there was a wall – and sometimes, without a wall, out in the streets – and your prowess was determined by how many manholes the ball you hit went over.
We played stoopball against steps.
We played kickball – with any large ball, and played with baseball rules.
The only things we didn’t play, were wiffleball – I didn’t even know about that until we moved to the suburbs when I was 11 – and actual baseball and softball – too much damage to cars and windows.
I remember once, we decided to play with a baseball in my parents tiny driveway.
I hit a ball across the street – where there was a Catholic Church with, of course, stained-glass windows.
As the ball rose, I realized its trajectory, and saw it was headed straight for the biggest window.
Not yet an Agnostic – since I was only about 9 or 10, I said a prayer.
And, apparently, though the ball hit the window, it must have hit on the metal holding the pieces of stained-glass together.
That made it harder to become an Agnostic later on, in my teens.
My point is, we adapted the games, depending on where we were playing, and how many kids showed up.
We played a variety of baseball with whatever was available, wherever possible.
It was part of the NY kid culture.
Now, it’s basketball.
And it’s understandable.
Smaller courts, and more of them.
Plus, you don’t need mitts or bats (but then, we rarely used either of them, too).
You can practice alone.
Or, play one-on-one, or however many against however many.
The main problem for baseball, is that basketball has supplanted it in NY City kid culture.
And I don’t know how you overcome something like that.
Now, basketball, a great game, is king.
But I still love baseball more.
It’s still my favorite sport – by far.
srv
Rahm didn’t need to be a resident to be Mayor.
SiubhanDuinne
This story makes me so sad. Those poor kids. What kind of life lesson are they going to take away from this?
SatanicPanic
I’m a uh… gentrification skeptic? I just don’t see it happening all that often in the way people commonly think of it happening. Yes there is Brooklyn, but other examples are fairly rare. And while I’m not an expert on Chicago, I looked up the area where this team is from on a map, and just offhand I don’t recognize this as an area I’ve often heard of as gentrifying. Zirin brings up school closures which I’m also not sure are all that related to gentrification. It seems like if the city is complaining about not having money for schools, it’s because those parts of the city are not gentrifying.
ETA- that being said, it kind of seems like they are stripping this title on a technicality and that’s sad for these kids
raven
Little League Baseball sucks. I ran youth sports programs for 20 years and the notion that you schedule the regular season so that it ends before school is out so you can do this “all-star” crap is bullshit. That said, this is nothing new.
Violet
This is a terrible thing to happen. The parents chose to break the rules and the kids suffer. And there are so many issues at play–income level, race, resources in general. It’s just awful.
raven
@SatanicPanic: It’s not a technicality, it’s a rule, in a voluntary organization.
raven
@c u n d gulag: And baseball is fucking boring compared to hoops or soccer. Go to any LL field and walk the outfield and you’ll find holes dug by kids standing out there waiting for something to happen. The other worst thing about baseball is that every dickhead parent that ever played is an expert on the game.
raven
@Violet: From the above:
gene108
@Mnemosyne (iPad Mini):
From what I understand each team gets assigned areas, where they can get players and/or some of them can petition the PTB for changes in areas, if what they were assigned may not make sense.
Either the coaches or parents pushed this too far and poached talented kids from other areas, i.e. other Little League Teams that should have had those kids on their roster.
There’s a lot to this that is not just racial.
The Taney Dragon’s (who JRW beat), from Philadelphia, were predominantly black and drawn from Philly, not the suburbs and featured 2014 surprise super star Mo’ne Davis.
It is terrible for the kids, who played, but the parents or coaches, who should have known the rules did not follow them.
SatanicPanic
@raven:
That’s what I like about it
raven
JoeShabadoo
I wouldn’t give anyone the benefit of the doubt in this situation because Little League coaches don’t just stumble into the world series. The coach was probably recruiting from other districts to get an amazing team. This isn’t exactly the first time that a Little League team was found to be illegal.
Its a shame kids that worked hard don’t get the trophy because they certainly didn’t set it up but you can’t let coaches just recruit kids from a huge area or you will be stuck with unstoppable teams and regular players who then either don’t make the team because of it or are stuck on constantly losing teams.
If the districts were open make no mistake that it would be a recruiting bonanza and it would not be a good thing.
raven
@SatanicPanic: And that certainly is your right.
SiubhanDuinne
@raven:
How did it not come to someone’s attention during the season, or during the playoffs? If it’s such an important rule that the egregious breaking of it strips the title from the team, isn’t it important enough to have been flagged and dealt with months before the LL World Series? You know, so the adults could address the problem and, I dunno, FIX it?
raven
raven
CHICAGO (WLS) — The decision to strip JRW of its national title is raising questions about how widespread cheating may be throughout Little League.
raven
lamh36
@gene108: oh. Believe you me, certain people were/are probably still combing through trash to find someone on MoNe Davis.
Peale
@raven: Later it wsa revealed that even those 6 players were ineligible because of age. That is a slightly different case, however. In that case, the kids were selected after they team had won the asian championships. I can’t imagine that. Playing on a team that beat taiwan and japan, only to be told that starting tomorrow, some other kid was going to be using your name.
SatanicPanic
@raven: dude, point taken, but I still kind of feel bad for the kids.
raven
It’s a fucking cesspool:
That’s what “The World Series” gets you.
raven
@SatanicPanic: Me too
gene108
@Served:
I’ve heard JRW beat local teams by scores of 43-2, i.e. they ran it up on the competition.
trollhattan
Have related the story before of my kid’s soccer team being defeated in a tournament by a team who were caught substituting older players. They returned to replay the match with the 3rd place team.
Those coaches, parents and, yes, players had to have been aware of it to some degree. In the baseball incident the players may not have known anything was amiss but the grownups surely did and on their shoulders goes the responsibility. Another team of kids who worked just as hard was robbed of the experience.
Shame on them.
JoeShabadoo
Recruiting particularly hurts poor children. Rich kids and teams who are willing to pay to have poor kids driven large distances are the only ones who can recruit. Poor children are stuck playing on the local team while all the talent is sucked away to other areas or they are stuck being on a team that has all-stars from all around making sure they never play.
Violet
@SatanicPanic: Yeah, I feel bad for the kids too. The parents and coaches and any other adults in charge are the ones who broke the rules.
Gin & Tonic
I dunno, my experience with Little League has been pretty positive, maybe because my town/region knew it wasn’t very competitive, and everyone seemed to concentrate on kids’ having fun. It seems fairly decentralized in terms of control, so neighboring towns might take it very (excessively?) seriously — I remember 2-3 times in the last 15 years or so when nearby towns have gone to Williamsport — but that’s not always the case. A co-worker’s son played on a team that went to Williamsport about 10 years ago, and he (the dad) spoke highly of the camaraderie and the overall experience.
c u n d gulag
@raven:
That’s all true, raven.
But when we played in the city, it wasn’t organized at all – and no parents.
Unless, of course, they were out drinking on the stoops, hanging our their windows, or sitting on some tiny porch, watching us play.
Maybe it’s my memory, but not too many parents gave advice. Probably, because like mine, they came from another country, in the neighborhood I lived in.
And we made it so that no one stood around for long.
We didn’t always have 9 players – as a matter of fact, I don’t remember ever playing a full squad no matter what form of baseball we played.
We didn’t need all of the positions, because if you hit it to an empty field, you had to get the ball – AND, you were out.
That, of course, made pull-hitters of us all.
Baseball’s a very adaptable game, if you use your imagination, and adapt it to wherever you CAN play some version of it.
Kids today, because of parents, play too many sports in a very structured environment.
I was a pretty decent player when I moved Upstate, and finally played real baseball.
I had taught myself the basics.
Then, I was lucky enough so that most of the coaching I got, was when they decided to make me into a Catcher.
It’s dangerous back there!
But also, imo, the most fun!
The whole game is in front of you.
Mike Furlan
@gene108:
Wow.
“In Little League Baseball and Softball, rules call for the game to end if the winning team is ahead by 10 runs after four innings (3½ innings if the home team is ahead).” Wikipedia
43 runs in 4 innings.
Eric U.
@gene108: they don’t have a mercy rule at that level? It’s amazing that American teams are competitive against the teams from countries where the players are taken from a much larger population
I like baseball, especially our summer league where you can go and drink beer and relax. I can’t stand to watch baseball on tv any more, it’s just too boring to even have on as background noise
JoeShabadoo
@Gin & Tonic: I like Little League and think it was pretty positive in my town. Despite being from a small town we still had one coach that tried to cheat though. I see the cheating with Little League more as a human nature/coaching problem than it is a problem with the whole organization. We don’t expect a kids league to have to do backgrounds checks on their players and most people probably don’t want them too so this isn’t going to end.
Violet
@raven:
This was me in mandatory softball in P.E. class or in summer camp or other places softball was played I always went to the outfield because I hated the game and sucked at it and didn’t want to be responsible for missing some big play and everyone being mad at me. So I’d go to the outfield, which was usually really boring.
rikyrah
Great article, Zandar.
I, too, am livid.
Livid, because living in the city, I know how few places there actually are for Black kids to play quality baseball.
Livid, because of the pure-D RACISM behind all of this.
Pogonip
I am firmly against picking on kids for the offenses of adults ( see the rehash of the dog-rescue story in “Pupdate,” below).
That said–good heavens, don’t you people realize there are kids in Ukraine who don’t even HAVE baseballs?
SatanicPanic
@Mike Furlan: My comically terrible high school baseball team lost of game 52-2, even with the seventh-inning mercy calling. I actually didn’t see that game, but the year I did play we had some innings where we might as well have just not had an infield.
Elie
My biggest complaint is that all the participants and their addresses and pertinent rules needed to be vetted before the play-offs began. My reading of the details of how the rules are enforced and when leads me to conclude that the Little League has some problems with having a stable process that everyone can follow. This would be needed as it is not that uncommon for players to move away and need to be replaced or other issues involving the selection of replacements. That should be completely transparent. We also need to be sure that such rules haven’t been flouted by other teams in the past.
It is extremely unfortunate that this decision was made so late in the process, causing so much humiliation for the team. I would urge the league to do this before the playoffs and to disseminate the results of the vetting to one and all to avoid this in the future. Something about the timing of this is very fishy.
Amir Khalid
@Pogonip:
Malaysia’s not much better off. You never see baseballs and bats and mitts in proper sporting goods stores here, only in Toys’R’Us. Ask people if they’ve ever played baseball, and they just look at you funny.
raven
@c u n d gulag: We played all day during the summer. In LA it was “over the line” and you could play with 4 people. I’ll always remember when I was catching and my dad was pitching. The batter threw the bat and hit me in the head and my old man knocked the kid down from the mound with the glove! Great throw it was.
Violet
@Amir Khalid: Would expect you can find cricket bats.
c u n d gulag
@SatanicPanic:
Yeah!
After golf, baseball is a guy’s a favorite sport to nap to!
You can nap for an hour with both sports, and not miss too much.
And if a player in either sport does a great thing, the cheers will wake you up in time to watch the replay.
In the other sports, people cheer and scream all of the time, so you can’t nap well at all.
Just dose a few minutes, and then you get awakened.
Elie
@SiubhanDuinne:
I totally agree with you and think that the process sucks… something that needs to be better and consistently enforced BEFORE the playoffs.
jl
Murky story. How many other teams broke this rule but it was not looked into because no reason to for the losers? Sounds like somebody with an ax to grind sniffed around until he found something.
But, sad and unfair as it seems, the rules are the rules.
I have read before about the problem of lack of places to play certain sports being a big factor in which groups go into which sports. So I believe it is a real issue. And we live in a “to hell with the lesser people’s kids’ age, and it’s too damn much trouble to give them sports fields and grass. Interferes with the crony capitalist money machine.
I also notice, at least when I go back to the Central Valley suburbs to visit family, every school I see locks up their whole grounds whenever school is not in session. Was not like that when I was a kid. So that limits access. City parks have basketball and tennis courts, but most do not have baseball or soccer field.
Sucks, IMHO. But big time amateur sports for kids is kind of twisted also, IMHO. Is it reallyfor the kids or is it for the parents and local boosters and academic varsity sports macine?
raven
@Elie: How about don’t HAVE fucking playoffs and “world series” for kids??>?
cmorenc
@raven:
The last sentence is true of soccer as well, except that most of the dickhead soccer-parent “experts” did NOT ever play the game themselves. That is starting to change as the legions of kids who did play the game as it became a far more popular youth participant sport are beginning to get old enough to have kids in the younger age groups at soccer clubs, but a little knowledge does not necessarily cure the dickhead component. I’ve refereed competitive-level youth soccer for going on 18 years, and you need a thick skin and wry sense of humor to shed the verbal poo off your back to endure very long doing this, without quitting or giving in the urge to strangle some of these loudmouths.
Elie
@JoeShabadoo:
There are apparently different rules for different school systems. The Catholic league and private schools can recruit from anywhere. Only the public schools are forced to have rigid boundaries.
If my superficial reading of this is correct, the whole damned systems for Little League or the like needs to be examined in the light of day.
japa21
Game called after 4 inning due to score. Of course, you can always tell 12 year olds to go up and strike out.
raven
This oughta freak ya’ll out, Jenny McCarthy is from Evergreen Park.
raven
@cmorenc: Yea, I should have qualified that to say “when I was in it”. I got out of municipal recreation almost 20 years ago and soccer is probably just as bad, if not worse, than baseball now.
Elie
@raven:
I get your point but people like to compete — hence the existence of games. Once you have games, there are going to be winners and losers. Pretending that a “master game” somehow is wrong does not fix the underlying issue with how rules of any kind are observed and enforced. Kids learn about this in various ways while growing up. Avoiding a “world series” type of exposure doesn’t address it.
Tommy
I think at 45 close to the median age of people here. As a kid it was all about baseball. You wanted to be Stan the Man or Lou Brock. Ozzie Smith. Now nobody I know younger than myself played baseball as a kid in a pick-up game or watches it. You’d think MLB might be seeing something is going on here.
SatanicPanic
@c u n d gulag: I like the cut of your jib. My routine- arrive at the park, grab a beer and hot dog, sit down for innings 1-3. Then take a break and walk around the park. Have a conversation. Go grab another beer. Because not much happens in innings 4-7. Then sing Take Me Out to the Ballgame. 8th and 9th are usually the best part of the game. Makes for a nice afternoon or evening.
Football on the other hand- damn, people, calm down it’s just a game!
gene108
@Mike Furlan:
Yeah, 43 runs in 4 innings. I had heard it on the radio, and just looked it up to make sure.
http://www.sbnation.com/mlb/2015/2/11/8018071/jackie-robinson-west-2014-little-league-title-vacated
raven
@Elie: “Isiah Thomas commuted from Chicago’s West Side North Lawndale neighborhood to play high school basketball at St. Joseph High School in Westchester, Illinois for Gene Pingatore.[1] He would wake up at 5:00 am and commute 90 minutes to attend the private school.[1] During his junior year, he led St. Joseph to the State Finals and was considered one of the top college prospects in the country.”
raven
@Elie: Baloney, like there is no way to compete without the “World Series”. It’s an adult invention. I do appreciate you explaining sports and competition to me.
jl
@raven:
” How about don’t HAVE fucking playoffs and “world series” for kids??>? ”
I agree.
I listen to Madden’s local sports interview most days, and I was surprised to see that he agrees too. Kids should be free to try all sorts of competitive and non-competitive sports in a low pressure environment. Madden throws in some egghead comments about young kids playing high intensity level at only one or two sports causes developmental problems, increases orthopedic and muscle injury risks that I do not understand, also too in addition.
shortstop
My heart breaks for those kids. BTW, Zandar, it’s the US championship, not the WS. They lost to South Korea.
shortstop
@raven:
Yes, so you’re always telling us in baseball threads, where you stop by to whine whenever you’re not in hoops threads screaming that people don’t have to read threads that don’t interest them.
raven
@jl: It’s repetitive stress:
Pitching is the worst but imagine being a catcher. Squatting and throwing from that position is very difficult. If kids are able to play various sports there kinds of injuries can be minimized.
Tommy
@Elie: High school sports can be strange. The town my parents live in their high school football team plays in three states. They won the conference title 20 years in a row, so somehow they got kicked out of said conference. I keep asking how this is possible. They are an Illinois school. How do you kick a school out of a conference in one sport because they are good at it?
Elie
I would like to add, that if anyone is doing a serious job of looking at the whole junior sports league stuff, they had better be ready for a trip to the dark side under that hood. Me thinks that if the coach who opened this up is not clean, all his stuff will be opened up as well as other coaches and their practices. As I said upstring, the process seems unclear and more than a little dirty. I am sure parents and participants in other “junior’ sports are also not so cool.
raven
@shortstop: So what? You don’t like it there is a pie filter.
Elie
@raven:
Settle down… no dis intended. Just saying its hard to stop the desire or this sort of competition.
jl
Madden went on some rant about how young kids specializing too much in some sports causes a habit to bend from the waist when you should bend from the knees problem that he said is extremely difficult to correct. I did not understand it. I think the local radio people interviewing him did not understand it either, since the more they pretended to understand, the more confused it got. They should have just admitted they were not sure what he was talking about and asked him to explain.
He’s also gone on ‘what ever happened to dancing?’ rants about K12 school PE.
Violet
@raven: I’m not sure having the “World Series” makes that much difference, though. A relative of mine growing up was extremely competitive in track and the pressure on her and the stretching of rules that happened around public school girls’ track and field was kind of astonishing. It’s not a major money sport except for a few people at a very high level. Certainly not like football.
Some other relatives put their daughters into gymnastics. Talk about obsessive parents. Not my relatives–they just did it because the girls wanted to do what their friends were doing. But some of the other parents were crazy and it upended families.
Music isn’t immune either–bands and choirs and orchestras compete as well.
The rules are there to make it fair for everyone and also to protect the kids. Parents and other adults in charge are at fault for not following them, but there can be so much pressure at times I can see how people succumb. It’s wrong, but I can see how it happens.
raven
@Elie: I posted a link to an article where a mom says Evergreen Park cheated too. Of course, they are just “competitive”.
jl
@raven: thanks for the info.
jl
@raven: The whole business is ugly.
Elie
@raven:
Yep… just the beginning… watch.
Wally Ballou
@SatanicPanic: Roger Angell once said that baseball is for people who aren’t afraid of being bored. He absolutely did not mean that as a knock against the game.
buddy h
@Tommy: http://www.theonion.com/articles/lastever-baseball-fan-born,37995/
JoeShabadoo
@jl: The only thing I don’t like about the Little League World Series is that for it to exist it means there is basically a stranglehold on young children’s baseball by a single league.
raven
@JoeShabadoo: And, amazingly, Dixie Youth Baseball has a much saner approach.
Gindy51
@SiubhanDuinne: You cheat, you lose?
Elie
@jl:
Just in case you hadn’t noticed, the pressure on kids who dance is not trivial either. Ask any aspiring ballerina.
Violet already mentioned gymnastics as brutally competitive.. Lets face it, folks like to compete and competition intersects all our deepest values to become ‘winners”. You have to manage it with rules best you can, but “winning” frequently becomes the only objective.
Starfish
@Elie: A rule that eliminates players during the season for moving away is going to have a bigger impact on people who do not own their own homes.
Violet
@JoeShabadoo: No, there are elite travel leagues that the really good players compete in. Little League is generally a step down from those.
jl
@Elie: Madden was talking about various kinds of social dancing. But I agree, and have heard stories from women who injured themselves in ballet. But how many K12 schools have ballet programs? (serious not rhetorical question, since i don’t know)
MCA1
Couple thoughts from someone who was a couple wins from playing in the LLWS a million years ago:
1. This whistling about kids moving and schools closing and racial vendettas and sore losers is distracting bullshit. The league organizers/coaches falsified documentation. End of story. It is not difficult to pre-clear a kid who shuttles between divorced parents’ houses or moves in the middle of the school year. Little League deals with this sort of stuff all the time. And who cares who’s ratting out JRW and the timing of it and their motives? JRW cheated in order to create a superteam. And Little League is not the NFL, with billions of dollars and a huge staff to go investigate shit like this within a week. There’s no subpoena power here. There’s no conspiracy.
2. I fully understand being sympathetic toward the kids involved, but to say their title shouldn’t be stripped is fucking ridiculous. That’s like saying of a bunch of NBA players who win the NCAA tournament “Yeah, they were cheating, but they still won. You can’t take that away from them.” Yeah, these kids won the games they won, but they shouldn’t all have been on a team together in the first place. The illegal rostering robbed other innocent children of opportunities by creating a team that was better than it should have been. Their “accomplishment” is hollow. The class shown by the individual kids while in Williamsport? Great, and that can’t be taken away and should be celebrated. But their onfield wins were ill-gotten, period. Where’s the outpouring of sympathy for the Nevada team, who should have had a shot at the Korean squad for the big trophy?
3. I get all the ancillary issues here. That baseball is a great activity for kids in areas who might otherwise be tempted to spend their summer afternoons going down bad paths. The dearth of quality fields to play on in most cities. The community involvement with and pride about a team like JRW last summer. It doesn’t change what the league powers did. All anger should be directed at those who undermined all of that – the cheating parents.
4. The idea behind the foundation of Little League Baseball was to foster neighborhood and community ties through an organized kids activity, not to encourage recruitment. Those of you upthread talking about how wealthier people border hop for sports all the time: not for fucking Little League, they don’t. Most towns don’t even have a Little League charter, and even those that do often have a separate option for the more serious kids who want to do travel baseball at a young age. That the neighborhood where JRW is located can’t compete with that world, where parents will drop two grand a year on little Johnny’s baseball career, is the problem that should get more focus.
5. On a related note, as with most problems in the world of sport these days, some blame can be placed directly on the shoulders of ESPN (and Little League Baseball, for reacting to the issues of their own slide toward irrelevance in the hypercompetitive at really young ages sports landscape of the 21st century by allowing ESPN to do this to their signature product). The fact that a national broadcaster shows baseball games played by 12 year-olds for a solid two weeks constantly is ABSURD. I’m not going to pretend there wasn’t cheating going on 30, 40, 50 years ago – of course there was – but back then the big payoff wasn’t television time and national fame and glory, it was a trip on a bus to Pennsylvania to meet kids from Taiwan and Connecticut and whatever. Getting there was a two week tournament process, not a multi-year odyssey of collecting talent from a 20 mile radius to form a core and practice together for 4 years.
Tommy
@Elie:
I played golf and tennis. Went to college on a Division I golf scholarship. My parents were not the asshole parents. But not sure my mom missed a single tennis match of mine. I can assure you I felt pressure to always win.
Not sure if put that on myself or my parents did.
Elie
@jl:
Not many,
Keith G
It would have been nice if cheating adults had not made choices that led to this. But, the kids really are not “poor” (not my word choice) in any meaningful way. They had a marvelous experience last summer. A wonderful experience. And that cannot be taken away from them. At this level, it is about the journey after all. It’s not about the ribbon thaChester can be pinned on a chest.
If anyone should feel burned by this it should be the kids on the teams that did not cheat and lost to the Chicago team. They’re the ones who were robbed of even the experience of tournament success.
raven
@Elie: We had the Royal Academy of Dance as part of our recreation program and the dour tyrants would come from UK and scare the shit out of the little girls.
Elie
@MCA1:
I hear your points, but why is the documentation etc investigated after the championship and not during the playoffs? Surely that is possible!
Big ole hound
@MCA1: Right on. The kids I feel sorry for are those who played on this team all season and were replaced by “ringers” for the tournament. Imagine how they are laughing now.
raven
@MCA1: You got it goin on.
raven
@Tommy: Being there and putting pressure on you to win are very different. I used to have a youth sports coaches training video where Arthur Ashe talked about one of his teammates at UCLA. He said the guy was made to play and practice all his life and, after his last match at UCLA, he put his racquet down on the court and never played again.
Kipling said “If you can meet victory (winning) and defeat (losing) and treat those two imposters just the same. . “
Zach
When I played some of the kids from “Big City” Winona (25k) played for Minnesota City instead of their designated geographic team, Goodview. Minnesota City had to forfeit all their games and knew it going in and did it anyway.
raven
@Zach: I played Pop Warner football in the 60’s in “suburban” Chicago and we would play the Ravenswood Y team in the city. They had a cinder pocked field and they would beat the dog shit out of us!
tam1MI
This is really beginning to remind me of what happened to soapbox racing back in the day. Once the cheating arms race gets started, it’s damnably difficult to stop.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@MCA1:
Given that there are now accusations that the complaining team participated in the same kind of cheating in 2011, I have a feeling this is going to turn out like the Tour de France — everyone is going to have to be disqualified because everyone was cheating.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the coaches of the Las Vegas team are sweating a bit right now and hoping no one looks too closely at their own roster.
Steeplejack
@c u n d gulag, @c u n d gulag:
Good points, which jibe with my own memories from ’60s kidhood.
Baseball requires more organization and “personnel” than football or basketball. I grew up mostly on Air Force bases—big quasi-suburban neighborhood pools of families with kids of all ages—and we could always get a football game going, often quite large, sometimes only two on two. And we played almost all year round. Ditto for basketball. There was usually an outdoor court somewhere in the housing area, but quite often someone had a backboard in their driveway. In a pinch you could play one on one or just shoot hoops by yourself.
But for baseball you had to get a lot more kids together to have a real game—eight or ten kids at a minimum, even with “hit it to right field and you’re out” rules and such—and what I remember most is all the times we couldn’t achieve critical mass and we ended up shagging flies or playing catch. I do remember being on a Little League team one or two summers, but even then it seemed kind of “overproduced” compared to our neighborhood pickup games, and we were usually more excited about going to A&W after the game for hot dogs and root beer.
Of course, this was back in the days before everything about kids’ lives became overproduced—all sports organized, parent-chauffeured, etc.
I support kids playing baseball, but it does require more “infrastructure” than football or (especially) basketball.
satby
@raven: she went to high school with one of my exchange students. Evergreen is integrated now but used to be a white flight ‘burb. Go figure.
raven
@satby: My old man taught in the Bellwood Berkeley District, 88 I think. I know it is true but it’s hard for me to think of anything East of the tollway as a “suburb”.
kc
I’m kind of starting to hate Rahm Emanuel.
Steeplejack
@shortstop:
LOL.
Mike E
cnn breaking -Philly won the DNC in 2016.
http://www.cnn.com/2015/02/12/politics/democratic-national-convention-2016-philadelphia/
kc
@raven:
Soccer blows, imo. The other worst thing about soccer is that every dickhead parent that never played is an expert on the game.
satby
@raven: yeah, it all just blends together. But I’m Sout’ side girl born and bred, and those are burbs to me.
opiejeanne
@Tommy: The PTB dropped my HS football team down to AA. The school had the right number of kids to make it AAA, 1100-1200, but at issue were the several other schools in their league with too few students, like South Pasadena with 700-800 kids, and Bell Gardens, an impoverished district who could barely field a football team. The HS football PTB (CIF) dropped the whole Rio Hondo League down to AA because of the size of most of the schools, and my school went on a tear in the 70s. I am not sure, but I think they realized they couldn’t have that boosted them all back to triple A. Why they didn’t just assign them to a proper AAA district in the first place and drop the rest of the Rio Hondo down to AA is beyond me. It’s not like Bell Gardens or South Pas were nearby.
SatanicPanic
@Wally Ballou: that’s a perfect encapsulation. I find baseball relaxing to watch, unlike other sports, which make me tense. That’s not always a bad thing either, just depends on the day.
raven
@kc: But it’s so much better for the kids in terms of movement.
raven
@opiejeanne: My old man coached the Cal-Hi Condors many many moons ago!
trollhattan
@MCA1:
What you said.
Darkrose
@raven: This is a big part of the problem. We’ve been told over and over again that baseball is boring compared to football (handegg version), and so people don’t get interested in baseball.
As for football (soccer), I’ve tried to like it, I really have, but if you want to talk boring…at least hockey has a good chance of a fight to break up the monotony.
raven
@Darkrose: Told? I’m not sure who you are talking about but no one had to tell me zip. And, for the record, I watch or listen to baseball all summer long unless there are Olympics or World Cup. It’s just my least favorite. I’m talking about it being boring for kids to play organized baseball.
MCA1
@Elie: I suppose, but by whom? They clearly can’t investigate every roster that’s submitted to them every year, in advance. It’s not like the NCAA, with an army of investigators and compliance officers. I would imagine it’s no picnic to show up in Chicago and follow kids around and pore over maps and all that, and I would also imagine Little League Baseball as a general matter doesn’t investigate until someone rats on someone else, and even then only if that team made an actual impact. They don’t have the resources to be disqualifying the team that finished in 17th place in the Michigan tournament (although, per my point upthread, they must be getting a lot of $$ from ESPN – how about putting it into monitoring?).
To mnemosyne’s point, perhaps there is an epidemic of stretching boundaries and using players from outside your district and the like. That would certainly be reason for LLB to take a step back and figure out something to fix it. I guess that wouldn’t lessen what JRW did or change my opinion re: the punishment handed them in the meantime. I don’t want to go casting aspersions on the Nevada team with no basis, either.
Darkrose
@Keith G: It can be taken away from them, and it has. Now everyone’s going to be calling them cheaters because of decisions that they had no part in. I wouldn’t be surprised if none of those kids has any interest in baseball going forward…and MLB, which has fewer and fewer African American players every year, will keep getting whiter.
trollhattan
@Darkrose:
You’re channeling my bride, word for word. Also, too, yelling “sieve!” at the goalie.
Mike E
@kc: Your sport blows! ;-) True, parents (dads more likely) make it an ordeal for the kid athletes… my daughter had an overall good experience with her half dozen years of soccer but I kept flashing back to my little league days when the dads probably showed up drunk to our games. Sucked.
Tripod
12 year old kids shouldn’t be on ESPN
opiejeanne
@Elie: My girls danced and were competitive (because they liked competing), and we saw parents who had just lost their freaking minds all of the time. We carried copies of birth certificates available for just about every competition they attended because of age cheating. My youngest was tiny (and still is) and we had parents come to us and ask if she was really in the right division, because they were afraid she was younger which sounds weird but I think they were hoping she belonged anywhere except against their kids. She won a lot, as did her older sister, but they had a very good studio teacher who was very explicit in her instructions, insisted that all the kids take some ballet class to develop good technique and discipline. The Sf bay area offered a smorgasbord of walk-in ballet classes on the weekends, including a Sunday class with Sally Streets in Berkeley and various classes downtown. She didn’t particularly like having kids in her class but liked my two because they took corrections as a compliment, unlike so many kids who just get defensive when their flaws are pointed out. My youngest was and still is a bit of a firecracker, but she was careful not to piss off Ms Streets.
A friend and I would drive into SF several times a year so our girls could take a Master Ballet class with various ballet companies who were recruiting for their summer programs. $10 for a 90 minute class with a famous teacher or ballerina seemed like a fabulous deal, and if you were invited to a program that was just the cherry on top. The youngest was invited to the Joffrey and a program in Walnut Creek, and I couldn’t afford to live all summer in Greenwich Village, nor send a 13-yo there by herself to take ballet classes in an un-airconditioned studio on the 4th floor ( friends were appalled) but Walnut Creek was just the ticket. There we saw the truly whack parents of lovely thin girls who would brag at 4pm that all they had eaten all day was half a peach. I had a mother tell me I was a bad mother for sending some potato chips in my daughter’s sack lunch, and the girls in the class told my daughter the same thing. When I took her for lunch to a drive-through hamburger joint one day because we were in a hurry and she was starving, it was a major scandal among the other students. And yet the instructors adored her because she had pretty feet and worked hard, and she had “musicality” which is just a fancy ballet term for rhythm (thanks be to tap class). This ended when they’d already seen her the previous two years and the directors realized she wasn’t going to get any taller and she didn’t get invitations from the big places. The one in Walnut Creek always asked her back, though.
opiejeanne
@raven: Oh, I remember those people. The little contact we had with them was frustrating, bordering on enraging.
opiejeanne
@raven: Almost a small world.
opiejeanne
@Darkrose: And Torii Hunter got into trouble for pointing this out, although he did so in a way that was intentionally misunderstood, by saying that most of the black players in the MLB are not African Americans.
Darkrose
@raven: It’s a cultural meme, and has been for years. Look at the attention given to baseball as opposed to football and basketball by ESPN. Twelve years ago, I remember shrugging and saying “baseball is boring” when my then-girlfriend asked me if I liked it. At that time, the last baseball game I’d watched was the 1983 ALCS. But I’d grown up hearing that it was boring, so I assumed that to be true.
Darkrose
@opiejeanne: Torii Hunter said it in about the most offensive way possible, though. Calling black Latino players “fake” and saying that “they can sign them for a bag of chips”? Seriously? Like I needed more reasons to think he’s an ass.
c u n d gulag
@Steeplejack:
That’s why MLB should hand-out free wiffleball bats and balls in cities.
You don’t need much space.
Like I said, I never even heard about it until I moved to the ‘burbs.
But, man, we used to play ALL day, every day, ALL Spring, Summer, and Fall. Often, we played 2-on-2 or 3-on-3 games – if we couldn’t find more kids to play.
We used imaginary runners, and if a ball was a fly to the outfield or the side of the infield where there was no one, it was an out. Any line-drive – unless caught by a fielder(s) – was considered a hit.
We often got to bat 50 – 100 times a day.
And if you can hit a guy who can really curve a wiffleball, you can probably adjust and hit a baseball curveball.
Wiffleball can easily be played in the city.
I wish we’d known about it when I was a city kid!
Darkrose
@Big ole hound: My understanding is that this wasn’t the case. The problem is that there aren’t enough interested kids in the area defined by the boundaries. If Evergreen Park is considered a separate district, then I can see why this is a problem in a city the size of Chicago.
Tree With Water
Adults cheated, and some other adults with nothing better to do busted them. The kids had absolutely nothing to do with it. And a writer can tie virtually any subject under the sun to race in America, strain as they might doing it..
Karen in GA
@raven: When Mone Davis started getting all that publicity, I posted here about how ambivalent I felt about Little League kids getting media attention. I’m still glad Mone Davis exists and other girls know about her, but at the same time I’m also still not nuts about kids that age being on ESPN, you know?
another Holocene human
@raven: sick, sick, sick
I wanted to play little league so bad and my parents wouldn’t do it. Oh well I enjoyed soccer and cyo
Paul in KY
@Elie: Catholic schools can generally get anyone within their Archdiocese boundary..
another Holocene human
@Mike E: There were some bad parents and coaches in soccer and I remember a day we went up against an abusive coach and got a careless, distracted ref. The other teams’ forwards kicked our goalie in the head. That’s outrageous.
another Holocene human
@raven: I found stupid ass inter mural basketball more boring than the diamond. ymmv. Only reason i didn’t quit basketball was bc I loved sports and when indoor soccer became available I quit.
another Holocene human
@kc: STARTING TO?!
opiejeanne
@Darkrose: He didn’t say they were fake, he said they were not actually African Americans.
Here’s the quote: “As African-American players, we have a theory that baseball can go get an imitator and pass them off as us,” Hunter says. “It’s like they had to get some kind of dark faces, so they go to the Dominican or Venezuela because you can get them cheaper. It’s like, ‘Why should I get this kid from the South Side of Chicago and have Scott Boras represent him and pay him $5 million when you can get a Dominican guy for a bag of chips?’ … I’m telling you, it’s sad.”
If you think the “bag of chips” comment is off-base you might look up a little movie called Sugar. The comparison is apt.
MCA1
@Darkrose: Hogwash. No one’s actually calling the kids cheaters, and any disappointment they feel can and should be directed at their own parents/coaches/trusted adults. Would you suggest that we all just let cheating slide in this case, for the greater good of possibly getting a few more black kids out onto the diamond next summer? And if any of the kids on that team are going to be turned off of the game of baseball in its entirety because of something like this, then they weren’t going make it to the Show, anyway. They’re not going to be banned from the next level of play, and their individual skills are not in question. And again, if they’re frustrated or pissed, they should go talk to the guys who ran the league.
raven
The news conference with the JRW attorney is very interesting. Unlike other people he wants to know the facts before he makes a judgement. What a concept.
Heliopause
Hate to be a downer, but have you thought through the implications of using ringers? It means that eligible kids who did everything right were left off the team. So much for the children’s game played for fun.
raven
@Heliopause: The Little League World Series is made up of All Star teams. Getting left off is what it is all about.
Darkrose
@opiejeanne: “Imitators” certainly implies that they’re not “really” black. And I don’t necessarily think the “bag of chips” comment was off-base as much as it was rude and tactless, and not the best way to make your argument, especially since it can be read–and was, IIRC–to be saying that black Latin players either don’t know or don’t care that they’re being exploited. The way he said it made it an us/them thing between players.
Darkrose
@MCA1: I’m trying to see where I said anything about letting cheating slide, or for that matter, anything about the appropriate sanctions. I did note that the kids are being punished for what the adults did, but that’s not really the same thing.
And for the record, I have seen plenty of people calling the kids cheaters, usually in the context of “well what would you expect from chicago and obummer”.
I think the whole thing sucks. I think it sucks for the kids. And I think that it’s especially unfortunate because it reinforces the image of baseball as something that African Americans don’t do. I have no idea what the answer is, and I’ll thank you for not putting words in my mouth to imply that I did.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@MCA1:
Here’s a link that includes the full statement from the Little League detailing what they claim happened:
http://tinyurl.com/ox5cw2b
The issue seems to be that JRW submitted a boundary map that not all of the other teams in their region agreed to but their LL region administrator DID agree to. There doesn’t even seem to be an accusation that they brought kids in from outside their region. It’s an intra-region dispute.
another Holocene human
@jl: oh bs, there are lots of reasons Westerners have issues with squat position but if anything athletes should be better off, short stop or catcher is a modified squat, the problem maybe is pushing stretching over weight training, my class did none bc that was the gateway to steroid abuse. But chairs as well as some cultural issues are the basic problem here.
Darkrose
The thing that breaks my heart is that the kids on JRW may lose any interest in baseball. More and more, baseball is a thing American black folks don’t do. Every year, the percentage of African American players in MLB drops. My team–the team of Willie Mays, Willie McCovey, and yes, Barry Bonds–had a grand total of zero African-American players on the 40-man roster going into the World Series. Two of the “faces of MLB” are on that team: one is a blandly attractive white guy from a tiny town in Georgia, who’s the prototypical “boy next door”; the other is a big white farmboy from rural North Carolina with a drawl you can cut with a knife. I love them to death, but I can see where a kid from the South Side might look at that and feel like baseball just isn’t a black thing.
There are certainly systemic issues that make baseball a much less attractive way out of poverty than football or basketball: few available college scholarships, fewer endorsement opportunities than the other two big sports, working years for less than minimum wage before you come close to any real money unlike other sports where you can go to the big leagues straight out of college. And the lack of infrastructure in urban areas is a huge problem. Perception does matter, though.
And no, @MCA1, I’m not saying anyone should let cheating slide. I think the whole thing sucks for the kids, and for baseball, and I wish there were a way to sanction the adults without the kids paying for it.
raven
@another Holocene human: that’s just goofy
kc
@Darkrose:
What you said, all of it. It is sad.
kc
@another Holocene human:
Well, in my defense, he’s been out of my sight and mind for the most part since he left the Obama administration.
jl
@another Holocene human: Thanks for your attempt to enlighten me. I still have no idea what this squat versus knees versus waist thing is all about.
MCA1
@Darkrose: Fair enough, maybe I overread your post above. There isn’t an obvious way to punish the adults without impacting the kids, though. As I noted above, at the end of the day, it appears the kids shouldn’t have been playing on the same team together, so whether they individually intended it to be so or not, they were a team that was disproportionately talented and therefore their “wins” weren’t on a level playing field and need to be expunged. Yes, they recorded all 18 outs in every game, but they shouldn’t have had the opportunity to.
As to the issue of discouraging AA kids from playing baseball, I think we need to think about the mentality of kids. Putting myself back in my 12-year-old shoes, still basking in the afterglow of finishing in 4th place at the Midwest regional tournament, had someone come along and declared my team illegal and taken away our state title, the idea of that making me not care enough about baseball anymore to continue playing is, to put it lightly, preposterous. It’s even more preposterous to think that another 11-year-old in Oakland or somewhere is going to be affected negatively by this. They’ll likely not even hear about it. These are naive children, not cynical adults or even sullen teenagers. Their love of baseball will barely even be diminished by this episode, unless they hear too much of the adults wailing about it. I bet you every single kid on that team plays organized baseball this summer.
MCA1
@Mnemosyne (iPhone): Thanks for that link. It looks to me like (a) the district is a mess of mismanagement, and (b) JRW took advantage of the situation.
This seems pretty damning to me, and indeed states pretty clearly that they did go plundering other towns: “Jackie Robinson West Little League knowingly expanded its boundaries to include territory that belonged to other leagues in the district without approval from the other leagues or the Little League International Charter Committee…Little League International also found that Jackie Robinson West Little League used a falsified boundary map for their 2014 tournament, and that Jackie Robinson West Little League officials met with other leagues in Illinois District 4 to try to get the territory they wrongfully claimed was theirs for their 2014 tournament…The decision is based on falsifying documents…”
I’m open to re-evaluating my stance as things go forward if there’s evidence that this was all innocent. Maybe the entirety of IL District 4 should be punished, or perhaps LL Int’l is estopped from casting blame on JRW because someone on their staff gave the thumbs up in advance to all of this. But “knowingly expanded its boundaries to include territory that belonged to other leagues in the district without approval from the other leagues” sounds like raiding to me, and “falsifying documents” makes it sound like they tried to hoodwink the higher ups into approving something that shouldn’t have been approved.