| OT Column | The problem isn't the Little League World Series, it's that we watch it

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It’s easy to blame parents who, according to documents and photographs, had their son play baseball for powerhouse Park View Little League while living and attending school outside its official boundaries. Or, in the case of another player, allegedly used a relative’s address while not actually living there. Or, in the case of yet another player, allegedly moved within Park View boundaries after the official roster deadline.

It’s easy to blame the parents of neighboring Eastlake Little League for paying a private investigator thousands of dollars to follow kids home, snap surreptitious photos, access property records, dig up website pictures of them from the cafeteria of a school miles from Park View’s area.


It’s easy to blame local Little League officials for not issuing sanctions when confronted with pages upon pages of detailed, compelling evidence.

It’s easy to blame Little League International for acting like the IOC or soccer’s FIFA and insisting, cough-cough, there’s nothing to see here when confronted with scandal that might taint sacred television ratings.

Don’t.

Blame you. Blame me. Blame the rest of us for glorifying 12-year-olds whose greatest achievement might be winning the genetic lottery and hitting puberty early, for showering them with fame and adulation, for watching in sufficient numbers that ESPN paid $60 million for eight years of TV rights and will televise 233 Little League baseball and softball games this summer alone.

For clicking on newspaper links. For tuning into radio interviews. For attending pep rallies before tournaments and parades after them. For treating it less like Little League than World Series.

All youth sports have gone off the rails to a certain degree, with travel teams and academy programs and $100 per hour “privates” and pre-pubescent specialization and overuse injuries and burnout. (Do we really need to know who has the state’s best under-9 girls soccer team?) The Little League World Series is merely the extreme.

It mixes apple-pie Americana and summertime nostalgia with our two greatest obsessions: our kids and our egos.

The first myth about competitive youth sports is they’re just for the kids, building character, teaching teamwork, imparting life lessons. They’re not. They’re really for the adults, making them feel worthwhile as parents, allowing them to boast to co-workers at the water cooler Monday morning, allowing them to post team photos on Facebook with medals and braces glistening in the sunlight.

Basking in reflected glory, the shrinks call it.

The second myth is that successful youth teams are the wholesome residue of coaching and hard work. Sometimes they are. But more integral to victory is filling your roster with kids who may or may not be from the neighborhood but were born in the months immediately after the age cut-off or grew early.

Little League’s majors division falls on the cusp of puberty, when kids are sprouting at wildly different rates. Grow muscles and mustaches early, and your 77 mph fastball from a mound 46 feet away arrives at the plate at the equivalent speed of 100 mph heater in the big leagues. And that 6-foot, 160-pounder with an aluminum bat is swinging for 200-foot outfield fences (slightly farther than the infield dirt at a Major League Baseball park).

The bigger issue, though, is between the ears, not the lines. What happens in five years when you’re still 5-10 and that scrawny 5-2 kid you used to overpower with your 77 mph fastball grows to 6-4 and starts ripping it over 400-foot fences?

What happens to your sense of self-worth when you face the public humiliation of being cut from your high school team, as some Little League heroes inevitably do?

What happens when the pinnacle of your sports career, maybe your life, comes before you’re a teenager?

You book an appointment with Dr. Richard Ginsburg.

“Sure, some kids say it’s a blast,” Ginsburg, a leading psychologist from the Boston area who specializes in youth sports, wrote in a 2009 commentary about the dangers of televising the Little League World Series. “But for others, they are simply not ready for prime time. Children at the ages of 11 and 12 are just beginning to really understand what it means to win and lose as their abstract thinking is just starting to develop.

“I don’t think the average 12-year-old is well-equipped to deal with success and failure while playing for a nationally-televised audience. These boys are only kids. Let them experience the highs and lows, the camaraderie, the joy of the game on a smaller scale that they can manage … Let’s find other ways to entertain ourselves as adults.”

But that’s just it. We can’t.

We watch because it’s our (supposed) national pastime, because it falls in a dead part of the sports calendar when networks and newspapers are starving for content, because we’re recapturing lost youth, because we cherish a simpler time free of life’s complications, full of its glorious possibilities.

It’s vicarious and voyeuristic. The innocence is intoxicating.

Park View doesn’t open the six-team West Regional in San Bernardino – the final hurdle to the LLWS in Williamsport, Pa. – until Sunday night, but the players spent Tuesday visiting four different San Diego radio stations. On Thursday there was a 2½-hour pep rally with speeches and TV camera crews and a merch tent. The team’s Facebook page is pumping an official watch party at Buffalo Wild Wings.

The Greek tragedy, of course, is that our fixation with innocence ultimately destroys it.

Crank up the stakes to preposterous levels in a championship-starved metropolis, and adults stop acting like them. Rosters get stacked. Birth certificates get doctored. Addresses get fudged. Rival leagues get mad and hire PIs. Attorneys get retained.

Eastlake Little League’s formal protest was emailed to the Union-Tribune last month. The parents who filed it initially said they’d speak on the record, then got cold feet after Park View’s president sent them a letter with veiled legal threats. The last Little League scandal, the disqualification of the 2014 U.S. champions from Chicago for using illegal players, resulted in a quagmire of civil suits. Lawyers are expensive.

Who knows if, as Eastlake claims, Park View’s “blatant violations of residency and school verifications are egregious,” or just a big misunderstanding. Or creative fiction from a neighboring league jealous of Park View’s 2009 LLWS title and continued success.

Or whether people will even care when they tune into one of ESPN’s 233 televised games this month, or are among the 40,000 jammed into Lamade Stadium for the final, or give Park View’s “Green Monsters” a standing ovation when they make the obligatory appearance at a Padres game, or line the parade route in Chula Vista if they reach Williamsport and win.

Two-hundred thirty-three.

They’re 12 … years … old.

What we need here, people, is some perspective. More park, less view.

The problem isn't the Little League World Series, it's that we watch it
 
nothing is sacred .

But it was the same way when I played little league.. who you knew or who your coach was all mattered ...And I’m 48 .

So nothing new . just depressing that we haven’t evolved any in 30 some odd years .
 
all this over a damn little league baseball game.

when i played...it was because i liked playing the game. my mom never pressured me into playing. she asked if i wanted to play, i said yes, i played.....simple as that. when it was no longer fun, i stopped.

i just can't imagine putting kids through all of this for a game of baseball. outside of the pros, it's not a job. you don't get paid to play...it's for fun; for the love of the game. and that's when it should matter most.
 
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