Sorry, but this is bullshit. The coach had a choice beween making the ~15 kids he signed on to support winners, or making them feel like losers so that the one one kid wo’s irresponible parents set him up for failure didn’t have to deal with his parents stupid CHOICE.
If you are a parent of a (Yes, this is non-PC) criripple, and you put your crippled child in a position where his self respect depends on successful performance against able-bodied competitors, then YOU, as a parent, are liable for the damage suffered to the self image or your little darling.
NOTE First: I am NOT a proponant of team sports for kids. The sort of damage done by situations typicla of the thread subject matter is ONE reason for that. Parents need to be aware that by allowing/encouraging thier little darling’s participation in such, it is more likely that egos will be bruised, and dreams will be crushed, than that dreams will be realized.
Note Second: Dispite love for, and a lot of effort I have never been able to play baseball/softball better than ass. I have twice been in the position of being the scape-goat on which losing the the last game of the season could be blamed. (not the championship, I was never on a team cllose to that good.)
Also, as a player in a co-ed softball league, I inadvertantly made a play that was ( I adimt) very ungentlemanly.
Loosing sucks. Being the cause of your team losing sucks BIG TIME. Sometimes you will be the fuckup and it at some age you will need to face this. Yes, it is easier at 20 than at 10 years old, but perhaps learning such at 10 gives you a leg-up.
You get to admit that, becauwe of your battle with cancer, the shunt in your lung, ets. tha MAYBE you should be on the debate team, or FBLA instead of going out for sports at which your medical history makes you a poor candidate for.
You seem to be under the illusion that anyone who disagrees with your position just doesn’t understand the issue. This is another sign that you’re spending too much time in online arguments and need a little break.
Uh, if he decided to pitch to the slugger that would not have meant they would have automatically lost. The slugger has to make them lose. and they have a defense to attempt to prevent it.
He’ll be relegated to the debate team and the chess club for plenty of time. The only time some kids can enjoy sports is before the kids start to really mature and it gets competitive. This is his only time. I saddens and p[isses me off that you would want to deprive him of the opportunity and experience.
If you understood the problem, you wouldn’t characterize it as having been that they pitched to him. It was that they avoided pitching to another, better hitter so that they could pitch to him. If you can defend their behavior, then please do so without trying to minimize it or mischaracterize it.
Nobody here has ever once suggested that another team was in error simply because it pitched to the child in question.
Do you understand that there were two outs, and the game was on the line, and that the coach pitched around the slugger (something he didn’t do all season), and if the kid strikes out, the team loses?
If you understand all that, I retract what I wrote above, but I did get the impression that you might not have fully digested the situation.
Who deprived him of the opportunity? He had the opportunity to play. He had the opportunity kids dream about… coming up in a critical at bat, with a chance to win the game. He failed, but many kids without cancer or shunts in their brains fail, and they suck it up and say “wait til next year,” and they can’t sleep that night because they keep replaying it in their brain and eventually they get over it, but they don’t blame the other team for actually treating them like an opponent instead of a pity case.
No sport at any level is played with the idea that a kid who participates shouldn’t have to participate. What they did to “get to” him is irrelevent. He wanted to play the game and he played the game. They didn’t throw the ball at his head or spike him or knock him down at the plate, they merely pitched the ball to him and let him take his swings. If he couldn’t handle striking out, he shouldn’t have played.
Don’t you know that pitying the kid and treating him special would show contempt? What they did treated him as a normal opponent, which his parents should realize is a sign of respect.
I’m with you here. As I stated, I think the parents did the kid a disservice by makeing it a bigger deal than it should have been. They put the spotlight on the kid’s problems, the same thiing they are upset with the coach for doing.
They simply took the pussy way out. And this kid was pushing his personal envelope just being there. For that coach to put such a spotlight on his ability was a shitty thing for any adult—coach or not—to do. And, I’m sorry, but I don’t think you understand the purpose of these participatory leagues. This league was supposed to be an opportunity for this kid to forget about his problems and have fun. Instead, the shithead coach made the entire game about his lack of ability. He chose to put this kid in a position that he couldn’t handle and would embarass him.
I’m sure the kid could handle striking out. Sounds like he’s done it plenty. And he still comes back. Good for him. But this is different. The opposing coach chose to put him in this situation. One where not only is he likely to be another kid to srtike out, but the one the other team chose for the last out, with everyone watching in the championship game. The coach is a dick who needs his ears boxed.
This goes way to far. This is complete and utter bullshit. If you believe this you’re an even bigger asshole than the coach. Feel free to separate yourself from this stupidity.
Why quit now, with profanity and name-calling and a call for physical assault on the coach? Why not just go straight for the inevitable “Nazi” anology and be done with it?
No, sound strategy would have been for the coach to walk the good batter every time. Then he wouldn’t have been in a position to lose the game in the last inning. Hopefully, he played the best players in the most crucial positions for the whole game as well. That would be sound. The ones that didn’t belong, he could rotate them into spots in the outfield. (Did you know in these wimpy leagues, they play four or five players in the outfield? How will that teach the kids the proper way to cover gaps with only three fielders? But the good thing is that you could cheat one of them up to essentially have five infielders - they probably didn’t think to write down that that was against the rules. That would be sound winning strategy!)
There probably was no rule about yelling “I got it” when a ball was in the air and the opposition was in the field, so hopefully he did that too. Similarly, he should have yelled “Throw it to third” when the play was at second, to confuse the other kids. That one was probably not written down, either. That would be sound strategy, because it would improve their chances of winning. And Barry Bonds has to deal with people yelling distractions at him, so it’s okay.
Sometimes, in these wimpy leagues, they write in rules about sliding so that the widdle punums don’t get hurt. But, if they didn’t, hopefully he told his players to try to collide with the other players to disrupt the plays. It’s good, because it teaches the kids to handle adversity and to be ready to play the way that they do in the big leagues.
I’ve kept up. I think it’s safely established that you are the kind of person who would do whatever he could to win, as long as it wasn’t expressly prohibited by the controlling legal authority. We all get what kind of man you are.
Perhaps it has something to do with talent. The thing is, the kids generally don’t have a problem in these leagues walking away without the sense that they didn’t get to knock someone else’s dick in the dirt. Oftentimes the best kids are really comfortable about encouraging the other kids on and not worrying about things like whether they should intentionally walk others.
I know that I never felt the need to hit at the weaker players, but that may have been because I believed I could hit it over the heads of the other outfielders if they were playing me in or drop it in front of them if they were playing me deep.
Perhaps this is all just a matter of those adults who always sucked ass needing to apply some dressing to an old wound.
I was expressing an opinion, genius. That’s all. And you’re assumiing that the point of the league, the reason for its existence is to produce baseball stars and championships. Which means that you miss the point completely.
Shit, play to win. If the cancer kid can’t play, why the hell is he in the game? Moreover, why was he put in the lineup after the slugger? There are plenty of other activities he could participate in to feel good about himself if he wasn’t healthy enough to contribute to a baseball team, particularly one playing for a title. Anywho, I guess you could say he learned a another life lesson, after beating cancer, that life still isn’t fair.