It’s right about now that I miss having a newspaper column. I wrote every week for two years about whatever I wanted, but nobody ever disagreed strongly enough with me to write an email or a letter to the editor. This might have been that week.
A few weeks ago, a baseball league for 9 and 10 year olds in Utah held its championship game. With two outs, a runner on third and trailing by one run, the Red Sox had their best player up with one last chance to salvage the game.
As has been done thousands of times in baseball games all over the world in such situations, the Yankees coach elected to walk the good hitter in order to pitch to someone else. Why face the best player when you can increase your chances of getting outs (now at home, first and second base)?
Just one problem. The kid coming to bat for the Red Sox is not a strong hitter. Oh, and he’s a cancer survivor.
The kid strikes out, ending the game and giving the championship to the Yankees. And that’s when the complaints started. Red Sox parents said it was a jerk move that sends the wrong message to kids. They said it was picking on a weak kid, a cancer survivor!, in order to win a game. After all, the kids are just there to have fun, not win at all costs.
They have their opinion, and that’s fine. In a SI.com poll, 60 percent of respondents agree with the Red Sox parents. I’m in the 40 percent.
As the great Herman Edwards once said, “You play to win the game.” I understand that it’s a children’s league, but they’re not 5 year-olds. At some point you have to learn that life isn’t perfect, and in order to win somebody has to lose. Isn’t that part of what youth sports is all about? There’s getting out and getting exercise, having fun with your friends, but also lessons about succeeding and failing and how to deal with both of those situations.
In a few years those kids will be in high school, where they will play for championships…if they even make the team. Sometimes sports isn’t fair. Is the high school coach supposed to take a kid who can’t hit just because of his past? When do you teach the kid that lesson? The night before tryouts?
Why not lay the groundwork throughout the youth athletic experience. After all, there are lessons in kids sports at every practice and every game as it is, no matter how insignificant those things seem at times.
Cal Ripken Jr., author of several books on teaching youth sports, said kids need to be exposed to success and failure as part of the process. At some point, he said, the pressure of the whole sports system becomes too great, too emphasized by parents and coaches, and without those lessons, kids are being set up to fail.
“Before kids really learn how to play, they need to experience the good and the bad, sometimes the positive, sometimes the negative, a little adversity, and they need to learn the game, and they should be allowed to make mistakes,” Ripken said. “When you emphasize winning, those mistakes really aren’t allowed.”
Red Sox parents said it was an emphasis on winning, at the expense of a fragile kid, that did just the opposite of what Ripken is pushing. But it wasn’t about pitching to a kid with cancer. They weren’t punishing him for his condition. It was about playing the percentages, playing baseball in a championship game. If the Yankees give up a hit to the Red Sox best player, it’s their parents who want the coach’s head on a stake for his bonehead move.
It’s not like the Red Sox coach, and virtually every other coach in the history of youth baseball doesn’t do something that could make a kid feel bad about himself. What about the fat kid who gets stuck in right field? Or the slow kid who always strikes out who only gets his one at-bat a game?
Go to any baseball field during little league season and you’ll hear coaches say quite blatantly things like, “He’s not going to hit, just pitch it right in there,” “Infield in, this guy won’t hit it hard,” or “This pitcher’s got nothing, wait for him to walk you.” Or what about the catcher who doesn’t have a strong enough arm to throw out base-stealers? You think those coaches don’t put the steal sign on every pitch?
Before you go condemning one coach for making a call in a championship game, think about what you’re really against. If you want kids to be sheltered and not have to endure the “harsh” lessons of losing once in a while, take them to the candy store whenever they demand, and give them a trophy for successfully putting on their shoes today. There are no losers there…except when the real world catches up with them, and the first time someone tells them “no.”
Part of sports is losing. That’s the case in Major League Baseball just the same as it is in little league. Don’t want to expose your kids to losing? Better make them change their favorite team every year lest they not support the World Series Champion.
The kid who struck out to end the game apparently went home and cried himself to sleep. That’s certainly not something you want every night from a kid. But you know, when I played baseball there were many times where I went to sleep feeling like I could have done better. If only I had gotten another hit. If only I hadn’t dropped that fly ball. If only I hadn’t walked in that go-ahead run when I was pitching. And I was one of the better kids on my teams.
When I was 13, there was a kid on my team who always played right field. The entire season, I would bet he got no more than 5 hits. But every practice he went out there and swung his heart out and chased down fly balls. Every game he went up there hacking and made it his mission to beat me to every ball in the outfield when I was in center. When he picked up that ball, when he got those five hits, he was ecstatic. His parents cheered. My parents cheered. That smile was bigger every time because of all the other things in between.
When I got a single, I might have been disappointed I didn’t get a double. It was a matter of perspective. Having hit many doubles before, that letdown made me work harder to do better the next time. But for the right fielder, that single was the taste of success, a function of all those swings at all those practices, that was made sweeter by the 0-for-16 slump he was in before.
Kids are tough. They don’t like to feel bad, and the good ones will realize early on that sometimes it takes a little extra work to get what you want. That’s the case in this story, a bright spot that some adults could learn from. The kid who struck out said he’s going to practice his hitting, so that next time they’ll walk him to pitch to someone else.
That’s the kind of response that should come from a disappointing end to your season. I’ll work hard and do better next time. For all the time the boy’s father has spent complaining in the last few weeks, he could have been throwing him a lot of pitches. My arm is fresh if he needs to make a call to the bullpen.
