The Politics of Recreational Baseball
As anyone who has read my bio on the website knows, I have spent a considerable amount of time and work with Dixie Youth Baseball as a player, coach, and official. I have seen the game of recreational baseball from all angles, and the behind-the-scenes machinations involved in running a league and running tournaments would make the heads of the uninformed spin in mere seconds. There are many factors to take into account, not the least of which being the team that hoists the trophy after the final game.
I have a couple of friends in the Valley, Alabama area, and have been following the Alabama Babe Ruth state tourney being hosted in their city. The local Valley team participated in the tourney, along with Andalusia, Smiths Station, Huntsville, and Mobile.
The Valley team lost to Mobile 8-1 early on in the double-elimination tournament, then advanced back through the losers' bracket. They capped that off with a 4-0 victory over Smiths Station... or so they thought.
The Mobile coaching staff, from accounts, attempted to persuade Smiths Station to protest the use of a player that did not appear at the tourney's opening ceremonies. When they refused, Mobile filed a protest over what was apparently, at best, a nebulous rule. The protest was upheld by the state tournament director, and Mobile was awarded the state tournament championship without having to play Smiths Station or Valley and win it on the field... or so THEY thought.
An appeal to the protest has been filed by the Valley organization, and is now with the Babe Ruth national offices in New Jersey.
The only thing we know for sure from all this is that these circumstances should have never transpired.
For all of the conjecture back and forth about recreational baseball being for the kids, it is more and more the norm that the kids are the last group taken into consideration. From the proliferation of excessive rules and questionable judgment calls to World Series play where opening ceremonies take place well into the night when teams have to play the following morning (and, to Dixie's credit, they are improving — if not slightly — in this area), the notion that recreational baseball is strictly for the kids is laughable. Leagues are holding tournaments in what are often hard-to-reach locales that sometimes stretch into the early part of the school year, and the Little League World Series has turned into little more than a cash grab for ESPN and ABC, and not the tourney of sportsmanship and fellowship that they try so hard to portray.
No tourney that's "for the kids" would disqualify a team over a player that was not at an opening ceremony, or even for not submitting a team photo (as Mobile reportedly did not). No tourney that's "for the kids" would go into the school year with kids up to 3,000 miles from home. No tourney that's "for the kids" would put said kids on a bus for 24-plus hours to Texas, as my Dixie Pre-Majors team did in 1999.
To quote the movie The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training, "let them play."
File last modified August 08, 2004
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