I don’t think they’re exactly banning “we want a pitcher, not a belly itcher”
There’s a line where chatter goes from a standard annoying rhyme to an unsportsmanlike taunt directed at another player. If they’re crossing that line, and not being reigned in by parents or coaches, tough shit, nobody gets to say a fucking thing anymore.
Why not use the ballfield as a place to learn to behave like a human? Do people employ “chatter” at your work as a way to throw you off your game?
If the chatter is turning personal or inappropriate on the field, then I think the coaches have to step in and shut it down. Sportsmanship is part of what they should be teaching. I think banning all chatter is too much, though. It can be a good thing if it’s done right.
My limited exposure to little league games has been that the taunting of players isn’t so much a problem with the players (who seemed to be relatively oblivious to just about everything), but with the parents. I don’t recall my parents ever getting into fights when I was playing kiddie games, but just about every kid-sports game I’ve seen there was a parent fight going on in the stands because of something from the field. Even the article linked in the OP spends as much time commenting on adult bad behavior as it does on the taunting trauma.
Otherwise, though, if the kids are getting traumatized because someone’s shouting “we want a pitcher, not a belly-itcher”, then mommy and daddy have probably found the wrong sport for junior, and he or she should be allowed to do something else with his time that won’t scar him into his adult life. Sign him up for the biking league instead of Little League, or whatever.
Sounds like it is just too much trouble to teach kids boundaries. Much easier to just ban anything that might lead to conflict, and hope they learn it somewhere else before they are thrown into the real world as adults. We are doing children no favors by passing up teaching opportunities in relatively controlled environments when they are kids.
They’re kids. Of course they have learning and maturing to do!
It’s funny how people in this thread are advocating kids learning how to deal with life by accepting abuse, but not advocating that kids learn to grow the fuck up and not be assholes.
You think they don’t do that in the real world?
Baseball chatter is all about disruption and distraction (not “taunting,” as some seem to have a misperception about). IRL, people are going to disrupt you, distract you and mess with your concentration, sometimes intentionally, sometimes not.
Like BobLibDem said, most of the kids learn pretty quickly to block out the chatter when they’re at the plate. It’s an exercise in focus that really can carry over to RL.
Did you ever play LL baseball? I’ve been trying to explain that the chatter isn’t abusive. It’s not about trying to humiliate anybody or single them out. To be honest, I think a kid might feel more picked on or singled out if he was the only one who did NOT hear chatter when he stepped up to the plate.
That’s what’s sad about this. It was always the coaches’ job to keep the chatter from getting nasty. We don’t have to go back to the old days (when our second baseman got bitch-slapped by the coach for shouting “Pitcher’s got a rubber on”), but the coach ought to maintain a little authority.
Not little league, no. I explained about summer camp. And yes, it was abusive, humiliating, and it singled me out. And the people in authority did little to stop it. In fact they encouraged it.
Your summer camp experience was not representative of how things work in organized leagues. It sounds like the authorities at your summer camp didn’t know what they were doing. Little League chatter isn’t like that.
Of course the coaches should come in and shut it down. But what happens if they don’t? Surely you’re aware that there are lots of LL coaches out there who are concerned with nothing but winning at any cost, right? They don’t teach sportsmanship, they teach winning. And they’re not too concerned about taunting, etc on the field.
That same coach will be quick to call favoritism if you leave the subjective call to the ump, and all of the politicking and bullshit will bog down the game. So, it’s all banned.
Hopefully not. If it’s even-handed and harmless taunting, then I’m OK with it. But in the linked article, it was far from harmless. It ended in stitches.
First off, the teaching opportunity was already passed up when they let kids be unsportsmanlike without reprimanding them.
Second, who says this doesn’t teach kids boundaries? They had the right to chatter, didn’t take responsibility to keep it decent, now the right is taken away. That’s real world, where you don’t get chance after chance to be an asshole, you screw up, and you get shit taken away from you.
Taunting didn’t cause stitches, physical violence caused the stitches. Is it so difficult to ban physical violence and personal verbal abuse but allow traditional “hey batter batter” taunts?
Then the problem is the coaches, not the practice of chatter per se. The leagues need to put the hammer down on coaches if they allow the kids to cross the line. Banning all chatter punishes every kid and removes a distinctive part of the LL team bonding experience that’s been part of the game forever.
I don’t want the umps to have to monitor infield speech at all, and a rule like this does not remove ambiguity. Can encouraging words to a teammate (“Strike 'im out, Billy!”) be construed as “taunting” the other team?
Apparently in this case it was.
Do you think that the kind of people who resort to physical violence are going to obey some ban on taunting?
You’re right, and a lot of Australian cricket fans, me included, think less of them for it.
I know it’s professional sport, and that the opposition should be able to deal with it. But there’s taunting as a way to distract the opposition, and then there’s sledging that goes beyond the bounds of good sportsmanship. And the Australians cross that line too often for my liking.
As for the kids playing baseball, i tend to agree with Richard Parker. Rather than banning the taunting altogether, the coaches and umpires should police the boundary between comments that are just part of the game, and comments that go beyond the level of good sportsmanship.
And i’m talking about what is appropriate for a kids’ amateur game here. We can kid ourselves that, because it’s OK in the Major Leagues it should be OK in Little League, but the fact is that 99 percent of these kids will never play professional ball at any level. Why not teach them to play hard but fair?
If the alternative is to get physically ejected from the game, then yes.