Hey, great points. I wonder why the article says this, then:
Either have a league with a draft and send the crappy kids home, play 9 innings with all positions and no ties and intentional walks and infield flies and …
Or set up a league for 9 and 10 year olds with rules in place designed to increase the participation and fun and minimize the competitive aspect of that, realizing that children will have a lifetime of opportunities to hit the homer or get their dicks knocked in the dirt.
I detest this bullshit. If you’re really interested in the kids learning life lessons, how about teaching the pitcher that you shouldn’t puss out in the face of adversity and match up against the weakest opposition. You should nut up and give your best shot. How about that for a life lesson?
Ah, c’mon. Your vision of Kumbaya anarchy is just that, yours.
Here’s how simple this is: rules aid the game by defining it. For what little importance such games have, and it ain’t much, that meaning is diminished by cheating - that is, breaking the rules for some unfair advantage.
Breaking the rules in order to extend a kindness and earn a little chunk of shiny clean karma is whole different animal - a frisbee dog compared to a weasel.
I can see both sides to this, but to put all that added pressure on that one kid was unnecessary and cruel. The kid will probably be playig ball for another 1 to 3 years, because after that it gets kinda serious. The opposing coach used strategy to win. He should have just pitched to the slugger. If he then wins, good baseball all around. If the slugger hits a homer and wins the game, good baseball all around. As someone upthread said, the coach made it about him. He got the win as opposed to letting his pitcher and fielders carry the day.
We had a kid like this in junior high school and high school. Nobody loved the game more than him. He tried harder than anyone, but was beyond sucking. He had some type of developmental problem. We all encouraged him and supported him. After he tried out for the team every single year, the coach made him the manager. He would practice with the team a little, and nobody every tried to strike him out.
I don’t know, some of the coaches with these kids are trying to relive glory days they never had. I recall a thread not too long ago about a coach of a T-ball team that paid one of his own players to punch the retarded kid on his team in the head so he couldn’t play. It’s a sad state of affairs.
I guess that answers my questions. Teach your kids to puss out. You must be one of those guys who plays co-ed softball games and hits it to right field because a girl is playing there. “Huh? Wha? It ain’t against the rules!!”
I’m surprised but I am completely with **Garfield26 ** on this one. If the kid’s ego was too fragile for a situation like this, then he should not have been playing competition sports. But the kid is not too fragile. He had a healthy attitude.
The parents are jerks for making a fuss. How embarrassing for the child. The Yankee coach made the right baseball move and he would have been a bigger jerk to violate the spirit of the game and let his team suffer.
These two scenarios are so incongruous as to be irrelevant. In the situation you recall, the coach not only did something outside the rules of the game, what he did was most likely against the law. In the situation we are discussing, the coach used a perfectly within-the-rules and legal strategy that is used in innumerable baseball games from the major leagues on down to the little league level.
If you know a kid who makes bunts a lot but isn’t a power hitter, is it ok to move all your fielders in to better make a play?
If you know a kid who gets too excited on a hit and forgets to tag up on a pop out, is it ok to make the appeal play and get him called out?
If there’s a really fast runner at first, and a really slow runner at the plate, and there’s a grounder to third, is it ok to throw over to first, or are you somehow morally obligated to try and get out the “better” player?
Actually, truth be told when I played little league I sucked at hitting and I was lucky to get a hit ANYWHERE, much less where I wanted it to go. Anyhow, despite the personal attacks:
So to “puss out” in Hentor-land is to figure out the best way to accomplish your goal and to do that? Just trying to get some kind of clarification here.
If the kid was in that kind of condition, I am led to wonder what the hey he was doing out there, anyway. Ghod knows if my kid might need an emergency cortisone shot if he got hit upside the head with a bat or ball, I sure wouldn’t want him out there.
Sometimes, life teaches painful lessons. This is part of growing up. The lesson in this case is “Sometimes, adults will grind your face into the dirt because doing so means that they win. Be aware of this, and be prepared for it, for it is called Real Life.”
That being said, yeah, I think that “using strategy” in this instance was pretty reprehensible. Then again, it wasn’t against the rules, and there are plenty of people out there who seem to think if it’s legal, it’s morally justifiable.
Apparently so. Seems to me at least one of the goals should be to teach the players about the rules of the game and when to apply them. That situation seems like a perfect time to teach the effectiveness and proper use of the intentional walk rule, for example.
I don’t get it, by ages 9 or 10, you should be learning to play baseball the right way. I understand the mercy rules, but pitching around the best player, especially when he is only protected by the worst batter is good baseball. Why did the Red Sox coach put the kid in that spot in the line-up? Why is he getting a free pass on this?
If anything, I’m upset about the Red Sox coach who felt it was a good idea to bat his cancer paitent behind the “Star Hitter.” It’s a championship game. Either the kid is good enough to bat behind the star batter, high in the order, or he’s not.
Sorry. If your kids the weakest chick, then he should be batting last in the order, not behind the star hitter.
If that is true, don’t have a a league championship at all, in fact don’t keep score. At this age, you are also teaching kids about a desire to compete and win. Should the Yankee kids suffer because the Sox put a kid who could “barely swing” high up in the batting order?
FTR, I think Reilly exaggerates many of these points to tell his stupid, feel good ‘aw shucks’ kind of story. I don’t trust his facts.
My guess would be that he didn’t make the lineup thinking about things like that. I would wager that it was a matter of alphabetical order. In a league where one of the rules is that everybody gets to bat, he probably didn’t think he would need to protect players from intentional walks.
Y’know, if cancer-boy had crushed the ball, there’d already be a made-for-TV movie about him. He had a slim chance to be a wild success and these whiny bastards want to deny it to him. Fuck 'em.
