U.S. LLWS runner-up: Jackie Robinson West cheated, should lose title

Had this group of kids from the Far South Side been beaten by a team of white kids who benefited from a geographical advantage (redrew boundaries), many who are defending or consoling JRW now would have been outraged by that.

 

If!!!!!!

 

One thing I keep reading about is how the JRW kids were "great sports" who displayed "great sportsmanship" and were "polite" and "carried themselves well."

Were they also "articulate"?

 

Makes more sense now that we know they were nice suburban kids, and not from Chicago.

And, speaking of pandering, the politicians are in overdrive in their attempts to still praise the team's "achievement" while barely conceding wrong doing by "adults".

 

Yeah, the Tribune story was great, especially the no-prayer mayoral candidate who is going to present them with a "Black History Month trophy."

 

Someone could do a pretty damned good sports enterprise story - hell, maybe I'll start working on it - about how malleable the idea of residency has become in youth sports. Covering preps, it was often well-known which kids lived three towns over. And, frankly, the inner-city schools were the worst about it, none worst than the Indianapolis schools (Chicago's the same way) that would raid each other's neighborhoods for athletes.

If you had told me before yesterday that there was a kid who attended a Lansing school, a kid who attended a Lynwood school, and a kid who attended a South Holland school on the JRW roster, I wouldn't have batted an eye, and I usually have a pretty good corruption radar. That's how desensitized I am to parents manipulating residency rules.

 

@notgoingpro (shout out to Bob Cook) has been doing some really good work on the residency issue for Forbes. He's worth a follow on Twitter.

In an era of school choice, residency-based organizations like high school athletic associations or Little Leagues, are put in a really tough spot.

The parents don't give two shits that they don't live in the neighborhood or a randomly drawn area the teams are supposed to come from.

With urban sprawl and in cities both large and small, you don't really have clearly drawn boundaries anymore unless it is something geographic like a river.

It really is a mess, but most teams and schools don't throw stones because of the whole glass houses thing. So no one is out there trying to fix it.

My guess is that organizations are going to be forced to rethink how they do things.

 

Left Out | The Players' Tribune

Not the most well written piece, but the point is well made.

But the thing is, nobody outside of Fort Meade knew who I was, even when I was 12 years old, the same age as those kids playing in the Little League World Series. When you’re a kid from a low-income family who has talent, how do you get recognized? Now, you have to pay thousands of dollars for the chance to be noticed in showcase tournaments in big cities. My parents loved me, but they had to work hard to put food on the table, and there wasn’t much left over. They didn’t have the option of skipping a shift to take me to a tournament over the weekend. The hard choices started when I was very young. “Do you want that video game system for Christmas, or do you want a new baseball bat?”

A lot of talented kids my age probably picked the Playstation, and that was it. It was over for them. I always chose the new bat or glove. But all the scraping and saving in the world wasn’t going to be enough for my family to send me an hour north to Lakeland every weekend to play against the best competition. That’s the challenge for families today. It’s not about the $100 bat. It’s about the $100-a-night motel room and the $30 gas money and the $300 tournament fee. There’s a huge financing gap to get a child to that next level where they might be seen.

Thankfully, an AAU coach by the name of Jimmy Rutland noticed me during an All-Star game when I was 13-years-old and asked my father if I’d ever been on a travel team. At that point, I had barely left the county. My dad told him that it was just too expensive, and coach Rutland basically took me in as if I was another one of his sons. He helped pay for my jerseys and living expenses. My parents took care of what they could, which was basically just money for food.

 

The whole schools of choice movement has killed the idea of schools representing clearly defined geographical areas once and for all.

And why not, really? If it's considered fine and dandy and wonderful for parents to yank their kids out of the next-door high school which has a crappy math department and send them across the county to go to Isaac Newton High, why shouldn't parents be able to do the same thing on the grounds of basketball?

High schools are just going to have to forget the whole 'residency' thing altogether.

Of course that means that communities are going to forget about supporting the teams too, since instead of being composed of kids from the neighborhood who have been playing for Hometown Public Schools since third grade, your varsity hoops team now has 8 guys from the hip-hop blacktop of Urbantropolis 30 miles away, and all the kids from Hometown High got cut back in November and are home playing on the Wii.

 

A quaint notion.

I'm referring to kids playing Wii.

 

This is an outstanding column. Fairly well-written too, not sure what the beef is there.

It's by Andrew McCutchen BTW. (Ghostwritten, I'm sure.) It's very good.

Still doesn't undo the fact that JRW cheated its ass off, but it explains how so many of these kids cycle out of baseball.

 

I agree fully. Nice article, from a perspective not told very often, or at least not so well.

Curious: it lists Andrew as a Senior Editor. Anyone know details on how The Player's Tribune is constructed and how it assigns titles like that?