[brandda]

There are a bunch of different questions here, so I will try to answer them one at a time:

1) How do other leagues handle this?
There are a couple of different ways. Really, really organized leagues have the playbooks or at least a copy of the relevant scoring pages for each game turned into a board official who tracks this at a league level. While this is a great way to do it, it requires a significant time commitment and is very unusual, but I have seen it done. Most of the time, this is monitored by individual managers who have agreed to uphold the rules for the safety of the kids and the good of the league.

2) Why doesn't the rule have teeth?
Sounds like you have a spineless board and a serious culture problem. In our league, if someone got caught purposefully doing what you describe here (and they would since we all know each other, know the kids pretty well and tend to watch each others games), they would be banned from managing, plain and simple as well as the standard penalties outlined in the rule book (see below). Besides being unsportsmanlike and against the basic principles on which LL baseball was founded, it is also dangerous to the kids to overpitch them at that age. Finally, in this day and age, you are open to a lawsuit from the kid's parents so it also qualifies as stupid.

3) There is nothing that can be done with respect to little league rules.
That's not true. The LL rulebook says that the team which used an ineligible pitcher automatically forfeits the games in which that pitcher threw. IMO, that should be the start of any punitive action, but that is up to your league.

It sounds to me like this is less of a rules issue for you and more of a cultural issue. The question really becomes, what kind of standards for behavior do you have in your league? If your board does not have a problem with this in a big way, then I would look for a different league for your son to play in. It sounds to me like you have bigger problems than this one incident.