Leave Little League to the kids

This has been a rough couple of weeks for honesty.  There was Deflategate, with the prospect that the winner of the Super Bowl got there by cheating.  Trusted NBC anchorman Brian Williams admitted to fabricating stories about the Iraq War (if he wants to, he is now qualified to run for President).  And now the team from Chicago that won the US Little League championship has been stripped of the title for cheating.

As someone who participated in Little League for three years, I’ve always felt that it was the adults that screwed it up.  Just supply the kids with bats and balls and get out of the way.  No need for hot, itchy uniforms, silly team names, or an organized league with a champion who goes on to regionals like they always talk about on Glee.  Leave it to adults to take a great thing like baseball and mess it up by making it organized.

And if organized Little League wasn’t bad enough, now it is broadcast worldwide on ESPN.  The network pays $7.5 million per year for the rights to televise the Little League World Series, but how much of that goes to the kids?  Where are the child labor laws when ESPN is making a fast buck exploiting a bunch of 11 and 12 year olds? 

What do the kids get out of it?  They get the chance to have their smallest failures broadcast globally.  They get the chance to preen and call attention to themselves like their favorite athletes.  They get put under the same pressure as professional athletes who make millions of dollars per year, except the kids are expected to do it for free.

The quality of play isn't that good; how could it be?  These are a bunch of 11 and 12 year old kids.  They have another ten or twelve years of development before they can play at a level approximating “good.”  Whenever I've seen one of these teams at the Little League World Series, it always seems like it is six or seven average 11 year olds being led by a pitcher with a 0.05 ERA who throws an 85 MPH slider, shaves, and is cheered on by his wife and kids.

How can we avoid scandals like the one that tainted last year’s Little League World Series? My solution would be to stop the nonsense entirely and not have any sort of championship beyond local ones.  But then I don’t understand why college football teams play teams from colleges two thousand miles away.  As long as people are willing to watch a bunch of kids trip over their own feet trying to play baseball, as long as ESPN can sell ad time on their broadcasts, then there will be a problem of adults cheating so their kids can be “special.”  If you ask me, it’s the parents who are “special” but in the old fashioned sense if that word.

It is the same insoluble problem faced by the relationship between the NCAA and college football.  If you have a professional situation with the spoils being shared, it is hard enough to prevent cheating (see MLB and steroids).  But when you have millions of dollars of revenue coming in and a workforce working for nothing, cutting corners is going to be even more pervasive.  I don’t know how to keep Little League innocent and pure when adults are trying to profit as much as possible off it.

Just hand the kids bats and balls and let them choose sides.  That’s my solution.  The kids will have more fun, but that’s not the point of Little League, is it?