Mark my words: they will win the championship. The big one. The whole enchilada. That trophy is coming home to Vegas, baby!
On a side note, Mo’ne Davis is a very talented, very smart young lady. Her talents combined with her looks makes me sure that marketers everywhere are trying to figure out how to use her to promote something.
On another side note, Marquis Johnson is a very talented pitcher himself and showed great poise both on and off the field today.
I look forward to seeing both of them in their future endeavors.
But mostly I’m looking forward to Las Vegas beating Chicago again on Saturday before they go whoop some international ass.
A lot of them are 13. You only have to be 12 on April 30 to be eligible. (The “Little League birthday” - the date on which all ages are determined for eligibility - used to be July 31, but it was moved back three months a few years ago. Meanwhile, the league I played in looked the other way, and let kids born in August start playing when their school classmates born in July could play even though they were too young.)
Meanwhile, those kids also have to (a) come to grips with the fact that, for all intents and purposes, they just wasted their summer vacations for nothing (Little League is definitely one of those things where nobody cares who the “U.S. runner-up” is), and (b) now have to put up with parents who can’t figure out how they lost a game to a team they handled easily a few days earlier, especially as, technically, the second game is the only one that really mattered.
(And yes, there’s a problem with how the tournament works, in that it’s not a true double elimination since they want to advertise a “U.S. Championship Game” and not have an “If Necessary” game.)
Oh, I don’t suppose that a few months one way or the other invalidates my point
Also, I suspect these kids will quickly figure out that the world little notes nor long remembers who wins the little league World Series. I certainly couldn’t tell you who won last year or the year before, or the year before that… I suspect very few people can.
There will be some reflected glory for a number of years, I would guess, within Las Vegas, just for having participated.
And really, a waste of a summer? A summer in which they got to play baseball from start to finish, when they got to spend time with their friends instead of having to go see Aunt Gertrude with Mom and Dad (this being a time when kids are separating rather rapidly from “family”), when they got to live in a dorm for two weeks? Don’t know about Nevada and its school schedules, but a lot of districts got under way last week or even before, so they may even have missed a bunch of school…
The world in general doesn’t remember who won these things for long, but I think the locals do…the Chicago kids still aren’t going to have to pay for drinks by the time they’re old enough to drink!
I just wonder how the team with Mo’ne Davis feels about the decision that the Las Vegas team gets to be the U.S. Champions just because they lost to the Jackie Robinson team in the U.S. Final while her team lost to them in the Semi-Finals - in other words, almost by sheer luck of the draw in determining the four-team pools in the Little League World Series. I also wonder how all of the other teams that got eliminated by the Jackie Robinson team and ended up with nothing, while other teams in the same tournament were declared the winners, feel.
Little League should do what the NCAA does in a situation like this - say, “We can’t possibly determine which team is the (national, Great Lakes, Illinois, etc.) champion now, so we are vacating the titles and saying that no team won that title in 2014.”
It does sound like an idea for a movie - 25 years after the fact, a little league championship-wininng manager admits that his league cheated, so the now upper-30s-year-old players from a team in its area that was eliminated by that team challenges all of the other teams to return to determine the “true champion”…and the team that lost the World Series title (e.g. from Japan) takes them up on it.
