Who's On First??

I love baseball. This won't come as a surprise to any of you who know me, even if you only know me remotely well. Being from the hometown of the Pittsburgh (we invent new ways to lose games every week) Pirates, however, proves to be rather frustrating at times. At any rate, I love the game. First and foremost, I'm a baseball fan, regardless of who my home team happens to be.

Because I'm a baseball fan, I take the opportunity to peruse (public school students click here) several sports-related magazines on a regular basis, including Baseball Digest, Beckett Baseball Card Monthly, and Sports Illustrated. (and, for the benefit of my wife, I really do subscribe to Sports Illustrated for the baseball-related articles, and not any special issues that come out in February each year.) I normally don't read or look at too much non-baseball related stuff in Sports Illustrated, but I caught a commentary in this week's issue that I found intriguing. To save you the time of reading the whole article, here's a shorter version.....

Small town in Utah.....championship game in a local 9-10 year old Pony League.....it's the bottom of the last inning, and the batting team, the Red Sox, are trailing the Yankees by one run.....there's two outs, and they have a runner on third base. Sounds like an exciting game going right down to wire. The Red Sox have their best hitter coming to bat. The Yankees' coach decides to intentionally walk their best hitter to get to the next batter....who happens to be their worst hitter....who also happens to be a 9-year old cancer survivor who has to take human growth hormones and has a shunt in his brain. As you would expect, the cancer survivor, Romney, struck out to end the game, and the Yankees won the championship. And, as you would probably also expect, the packed stands went ballistic. People booed......names were called....fights even broke out. So, the question is......did the Yankees' coach do the right thing? If not, what WAS the right thing to do?

In my opinion, this decision came down to one factor....the Yankees' coach needed to make a decision based on what he thought was best for his team. If he had ANY other ulterior motives, or if it was about what was most important to HIM, then that's bad. Of course, no one knows this but him, and his claim is that he walked the good hitter to face the poor hitter purely out of "good baseball strategy". It seems that the opposing coach and many of the fans (and a great deal of the town, for that matter) feel that it was a bad move, and did an injustice to the game and to young Romney. (As a side note, intentional walks in 9-10 year old Little League are pretty much out of the norm. My son's coach did the same thing this past year in Little League after the opposition's slugger just DESTROYED a pitch earlier in the game. He took some heat for it as well.)

Those that think that the Yankee's coach did the wrong thing cry "foul" because "it's just a game" and "they're just kids". But, the reality is, that they aren't "just kids". They're kids that are on a team....playing ball.....keeping score.....and wanting to win. Any Little League coach worth anything is going to teach kids that, yes.....the goal is to have fun.....they aren't playing out multi-year million dollar contracts......BUT......they should also try to win. If you lose....learn from it, and go out and try harder next time. If you try harder and do your best, but still lose...so be it. Even when the two best teams are playing, one of them still has to lose. You lost, but you're not a loser. It is NOT wrong to teach young kids that succeeding (winning) is good. That's what's called a life lesson. You do it within the rules, and withing the realm of good sportsmanship, but you play to win, ESPECIALLY in a championship game. You can't tell me that giving that best hitter a chance to beat you when there's a way around it is the best thing to do for the kids he was coaching. Those kids worked hard, I would presume, to get to that championship, and they wanted, I presume, to win. To make a bad coaching decision would completely undermine the hard work that those kids put in all season.

I DO feel for young Romney, who cried after striking out with the game on the line. Although I didn't have medical situations, which apparently didn't factor in to anything in Romney's case, or else he wouldn't have been on the team, I was a pretty lousy ballplayer in Little League. It took almost 3/4 of the season to get on base, and that was only because I was too dumb to get out of the way of the ball that hit me. I can remember striking out to make the last out of multiple games, and I know how I felt when the team lost. The worst thing the coaches could have done is treat me differently because I wasn't very good. That wouldn't be teaching me anything other than "the world will stoop down to meet you where you are", which certainly isn't true. Instead, they had me take extra batting practice....gave me extra attention during fielding practice....tried to help me get better. (I still stunk, but it is what it is.)

What kind of message are we sending when we say that we expect special treatment to be given to the weak-hitting scrawny kid on the team, just because he survived cancer? A bad one, I believe.

The best part of this story came in the last two sentences of Reilly's commentary. Romney got up the next morning and said to his Dad, "I'm going to work on my batting, then maybe someday I'll be the one they walk." Way to go, Romney......you get it.

And the people have spoken......

Wow.....I can't believe it's been over a month since my last post. And this isn't even a real post....just a copy and paste of a commentary I saw in my email today. I'll give credit to The Patriot Post for this one......

McKinney Ousted in Primary Run-Off

The voters in Georgia's Fourth District finally had enough of wild and crazy Cynthia McKinney and booted her in this week's primary run-off by a landslide margin—59-41. McKinney did not bow out gracefully. Her concession was full of blame to go around. She blamed voting "irregularities," the common refrain of the so-called civil-rights movement, and went so far as to say that electronic voting machines are "a threat to our democracy." She added, "Let the word go out. We aren't going to tolerate any more stolen elections... We want our party back!" Meanwhile, staffers were doing their best impression of their boss all day, assaulting two Atlanta photojournalists, knocking one cameraman's equipment to the ground after a boom microphone accidentally struck members of McKinney's staff—an eye for an eye, we suppose. "One of my assistants needs stitches because of the press that are in this room tonight," McKinney cried. Cynthia just needs to give peace a chance.

Hopefully, the voters in Pennsylvania will be this smart in November and we'll have Governor Swann and not Senator Casey!