How did your paper play the Little League World Series championship game

This. A thousand times this. Not only are they 12 year olds playing rec ball on ESPN, but they're not the best 12 year olds playing rec ball. Look at Dylan Bundy and Archie Bradley (4th and 7th overrall picks in this years MLB draft and both Oklahoma highschool graduates). I can say with 100% certainty that niether of them played in the LLWS but also that they were probably the best player on their respective teams growing up. In fact, you can find Youtube videos of Bundy working out and it's clear that he's been a stud for a very long time, but never played in the LLWS.

 

The difference, though, is that with Little League (or Babe Ruth/Cal Ripken or Dixie Youth) the kids are representing their neighborhood, city, state, etc.

With the AAU teams, they don't represent anyone other than themselves and a lot of times the kids on one team are from different states.

So no one other than their parents cares how the AAU 12-year-old Rampaging Rhinos do, but people follow the leagues or played in them and get some sense of buy-in that way.

 

I think you have to see the community support around some of these Little League "community" teams to appreciate it.

I saw a district game this year with about 800 people. And the kids were loving it.

 

Guys, you are NOT going to wear down shotglass on the subject of Little League Baseball, Inc.

Its just not going to happen.

 

That would only solidify my position.

 

poindexter is right. And Dick, you're wrong.

 

I have to admit, I live 2,000 miles away now, but my hometown team went pretty far in the senior league division, and I was checking the scores pretty regularly. I did feel connected -- the star of that team, his mom grew up down the street from me (and was the hot 20-year-old college girl when I was 11 or 12). The anecdotes I was reading about this year's team, they were playing on the same field I played so I had some kind of scale, and it was just a nice trip down memory lane.

Little League does still have the magic.

 

I still love Little League 1,000 times more than this travel ball crap that has ransacked the glue that holds hometowns together in many ways.

My problem definitely isn't with Little League. It's with the media publicity.

 

There's our base agreement there. Travel ball has no soul.

 

Forgive me if this is a d_b but I haven't seen it linked here: Tim Keown at ESPN.com just killed travel ball in an essay last week. He is seeing it from California, same as me, and I know it's more pronounced out here. None of the dickbag parents who need to read this ever will, but it was compelling for anyone who is potentially faced with that decision.

http://espn.go.com/espn/commentary/story/_/page/keown-110823/elite-travel-baseball-basketball-teams-make-youth-sports-industrial-complex

 

Outstanding column.

I wonder if, at some point, youth travel baseball and softball will start getting as much negative publicity as AAU basketball has received. It probably should. Like Keown alludes to and I stated here, hometown Little Leagues are being destroyed. Maybe I'm being nostalgic, but that was a huge bonding experience growing up, for us kids and for the community of parents and relatives that attended. The concession stand was the place to be all summer long. The best of us went on to play in high school together, too. But, mostly, it just was a great way to get to know the people in your town other than at the elementary school you attended.

I guess you can't stop progress. But we're losing something, the same way high school basketball has suffered at the hands of AAU.

 

FWIW, I posted a link to the Kewon column in the same post as I did Wetzel's pay-the-players column.

Sometimes, though, I wonder if Little League might be losing communities to Ripken and similar leagues out of inflexibility on boundaries, rules and the like. A couple of years ago when the youth league here announced it was leaving Little League to affiliate with Ripken, one of the things they cited was LL's inflexibility when they wanted to adjust borders to reflect how the city's population had shifted. There was also a case where kids in some schools that were in the city's school district had to play in a league in an adjoining town, because of the way the lines were drawn many years ago. I sensed a bit of the "this is how we've always done it and will continue to do it" attitude I got when I covered a lot of American Legion ball.

Covered a couple of Ripken tournaments summer before last and liked how they didn't go cookie-cutter on dimensions, i.e. having longer basepaths for the older kids than the younger.