“The actions of the adults have led to this outcome.”
–Little League Baseball announcing decision to strip the Jackie Robinson West team of their national title.
It was a feel good, “Field of Dreams” story. The inner-city Jackie Robinson West team won the Little League national title over richer, more organized suburban teams from all over America. When they won, it was indeed a reiteration of the American Dream. You would have had to have a heart made of stone to not cheer for them.
Most of these kids are from humble means. Their victory took them all the way to the White House to meet the president. It doesn’t get any more special than that. However the victory was short-lived. Complaints were filed and “whistles were blown.”
The adults who ran the Jackie Robinson West team cheated. They took in kids from outside the boundaries of the team’s designated area. The team’s manager and other officers decided to play it loose with the rules. They knew what they were doing and they got caught. It is easy to see why the 75 year-old Little League organization instituted the rules.
If I were a wealthy team manager living in, let’s say Dallas, Texas, and I found the best of the best players in Houston, El Paso, Austin and San Antonio and flew them all in to create a mega-super-Little League team, it wouldn’t exactly be fair. A team from a small town in Vermont or Wyoming probably couldn’t compete.
The kids just played baseball, of course. They didn’t know the rules. They just did what kids have done since the game was invented 150 years ago or more.
Why do what you did?
Kids want to play and they want to win. They also want to have fun. Many adults have other motives. Adults can be driven by ego, greed and a lack of respect for the rules; just because they think they can. This is why parents fighting each other at kid’s baseball or football games, or embarrassing their kids in front of other parents and kids really makes me angry. Nothing is gained from such behavior. Ever.
The adults at Jackie Robinson West knew what they were doing. They placed themselves above the rules but much, much worse, they placed themselves above the kids. They took all of their busted athletic dreams, and all of their busted ambitions and anger at the system and barreled ahead “just because.”
The kids are heartbroken, of course. They don’t understand. It is up to the adults who engineered this ego-game to profusely apologize to the children. The adults needed to be honest and open and use it as a valuable teaching lesson. The adults needed to apologize to Little League baseball and talk about how they failed the children.
But that is not what is happening – and I, for one, am not surprised.
The “adults” who let the kids down are letting them down again. They are in the process of suing Little League baseball for stripping them of the title. They are demanding that all of the other teams they played show where their players have come from as well. Local politicians are also getting into the act, demanding that the national championship title be restored. In my opinion, the politicians are idiots.
The adults are playing a game that we see far too often in our society. It is called the blame game. The team managers are blaming everyone else for this disgrace except themselves. In their minds, they must justify their lack of ethics by believing that others had an equal set of bad ethics. What they are teaching the kids is a victim’s mentality. When they were caught doing something terribly unethical, it was everyone else’s fault that they were caught. It was everyone else’s fault that the kids were stripped of their title – but not theirs. They have failed the kids twice.
About the future
I am not a prophet, just a guy who teaches and talks on good ethics; making choices and the consequences of those choices. However, I do know this: the adults in this case, the guys who set this up, will fade into oblivion. They will take their greed and their ego’s and go through the rest of their lives looking for others to blame for their own failures. They will talk of the other teams they sued, and the terrible people in the Little League organization and how they were screwed.
The record books will have an asterisk next to Jackie Robinson West – or the team itself will be forever stricken from the books.
The kids though, the kids will go through life wondering what happened and what might have been or could have been. What I hope that doesn’t happen is that they too will be made into believing the world was out to get them.
Quite the contrary. Those of us who love sports feel terrible for them. Sometimes I long for the days when kids played sports and had fun, and the adults kept themselves away from the field.
