Say it ain't so.

never thought I'd see anything as disgraceful on a Little League field as the all-too-frequent stories about fathers getting into fights with umpires or coaches or other parents at youth sporting events. But this one might top all those.

The Youth Baseball League of New Haven, Conn., has banned a 9-year-old from pitching.

His crime? Excessive velocity.

Jericho Scott throws almost 40 mph, a speed deemed too dangerous for other 8- to 10-year-olds to step in against. Though Jericho had yet to hit a batter as his team opened the season 8-0, his coach was told the boy must play some other position or the team would be disbanded.

When coach Wilfred Vidro defied the league directive and sent Jericho to the hill last week, the other team refused to play, packed its gear and left. Officials for the league say that Jericho's team has indeed been disbanded and that the players will be redistributed among other squads.

I hope Ken Burns got some footage for his documentary, The Death of Baseball in America.

According to those same league officials, Jericho's mother Nicole Scott went bananas after the other team forfeited rather than face her son.

"I have never seen behavior of a parent like the behavior Jericho's mother exhibited Wednesday night," said league attorney Brian Noble. (Quick, who was your youth baseball league's attorney?)

All I can say on behalf of Ms. Scott is hallelujah. I hope she went bonkers. I hope she went Lou Piniella on them and started tossing bases around. I hope she took a bat to the water cooler a la Carlos Perez.

When a decision is this wrongheaded, the only appropriate reaction is overreaction.

I don't know if these league officials have gotten the word, but we're trying to get kids in cities in America to start playing baseball, not stop playing baseball because an opposing pitcher has a little giddy-up on his fastball.

Meanwhile, while this was going down in New Haven, somewhere in the Dominican Republic a 6-year-old with no helmet and no shoes was digging in against an 8-year-old who throws 50 miles an hour. It begs the question, will the U.S. even qualify for the World Baseball Classic by 2018?

The league claims that parents were expressing safety concerns. But given that youth baseball helmets now have facemasks, what the hell could possibly happen to a kid who gets hit by a 40-mile-an-hour pitch? Yes, that's 27 miles an hour slower than Tim Wakefield's average knuckleball.

So much for The Blessing of a Skinned Knee. Or the blessing of getting knocked down, getting up and brushing yourself off. Of course, given that Jericho hadn't actually hit anybody, one has to conclude that some parents were more concerned with protecting their children from striking out.

It's as if these parents and league officials have banded together to teach these children an important lesson: if something is hard or scary, you don't have to do it. You can just walk off the field. We can skip the achievement-in-the-face-of-adversity-part and go straight to the ice cream.

Are parents that determined to create an entire generation of Timmy Lupuses? And wasn't there at least one Tanner Boyle on the team that forfeited who wanted to stand in against Jericho?

"Hey, where you booger-eating morons going? We can hit this guy!"

Seriously, are we actively trying to create the squeezably soft Cottonelle Generation? Because no kid whose old man wouldn't let him face a 40-mile-an-hour fastball is going to grow up to knock out the gun batteries atop Pointe du Hoc.

I've got a real quick solution to the problem. Let Jericho pitch and put the kids whose parents complained out of their misery by removing them from the other teams. If you have the genes of a parent who whined to the league about a 9-year-old pitcher who hadn't hit anybody all season, then sports will never bring you anything but misery anyway and you'd be better off quitting before they duct tape you to a goalpost in high school.

When I was playing Little League for the Strafford Roadrunners in the Central Vermont League, our team was terrified of a kid named Dennis McLaughlin. Before we had ever faced him, we heard he had no-hit South Royalton; that he was untouchable; that he was a giant (probably 5-foot-4 in retrospect); that he had a moustache.

He was a Central Vermont legend by age 11.

Dennis played for Washington, Vt., a 40-minute drive from Strafford, so our little stomachs had plenty of time to churn as our parents drove us to that game.

But we played. And we dug in. Some with more conviction than others. And you know what happened?

He completely dominated us. But nobody got hurt. And a couple of us even put the ball in play.

And the ice cream tasted a lot better for having some dirt on our uniforms and the pride of having stood tall against our fears.

Of all the things kids do on an athletic field, standing in against a hardball is probably the scariest. (It's also probably the safest.)

But as Alexis de Tocqueville said, "Life is to be entered upon with courage."

And baseball, for a group of adults in New Haven, is to be exited with cowardice.

http://msn.foxsports.com/other/story/8495030?MSNHPHMA

Amen

Somewhere on this site we've had the dicussion of the harm that we are doing to kids by teaching them the faux-values of "everyone is a winner" and "participation is enough".

I see it everyday with employees who whine about having to actually do their jobs and managers who freak out when told that the project that they just turned in [typos and all] sucks and needs to be re-done ... yep, they're gonna have to spend another hour of work [with the Family Guy in the background] to make sure that the numbers add up and the solution fixes the problem.

Isn't this the same part of the country that wanted to do away with dodgeball and any other sport where the strongest survived?

I hate to give them bad news if little johnny or little suzy sucks at sports they will be the last ones picked.
Looking back I doubt my dad or other males in the picture would have even let me leave the game even if I did get hit.

Are you bleeding? No. Then get back out there!

Is anything broken? No. Then get back out there!

You better not embarass this family whinning about that little scratch.

I guess that would be considered child abuse these days

I do have one concern about this youth, however. It is not so much a safety issue for the batters, but for him. There are kids blowing out their arms before high school. One of the reasons is that physiologically, their bodies can not handle the stress.

I say that he should be allowed to pitch, but he should be under supervision of someone familiar with sports medicine, and frequency of pitching, number of innings, etc. should be watched closely.

I agree, he should be limited to the number of innings he can pitch and the number of consecutive games also. Sounds like the kid has some talent.

quote:

Originally posted by jazzdog:
I agree, he should be limited to the number of innings he can pitch and the number of consecutive games also. Sounds like the kid has some talent.

Those rules are already in place. The problem with kids throwing out their arms isn't so much from them throwing hard; but because they're throwing curves, sliders and screwballs, which stresses even adult arms.

I hear you Catch ... "What?!? It hurts?!? Boy get your butt over there on 1st base. What?!? You're scared?!? Boy don't make me get my belt. That boy might'll hit you, if you don't get out there, I'm GONNA hit you. Oh Yeah, when you get to first base, I want you to steal on the first pitch, that catcher is scared too."