Little League Baseball

[Patrick Szalapski]

I agree that we somehow need to get pickup games back into kid's lives. The trouble is that times have changed. I'm 21 now; I remember back to when I was 10-14. I had these two friends and we always wanted to play baseball. A few times we tried to get together our other friends/schoolmates to play a game. What happened? Never any more that 8-10 of us showed up. Now it is possible to play baseball with 5 a side, but it's not the greatest thing in the world.

Even now I go with a few college buddies to the softball fields near campus. If there is a casual game going on, it's not casual enough to allow a few players to simply join in.

There are organized slowpitch leagues, of course; but there's a certain appeal to pickup games of baseball/slowpitch.

Ten years ago, we wanted nothing more than to play pickup sandlot baseball. But no one else did. Nintendo, school activities, and general apathy towards fun got in the way. It seems to be the same now as a young adult. Too bad.

P-Sz

[GarthB]

Rog,

It was still standing when I moved away. All of my early experimentation with smoking was done in the big city of Geneva. We'd ride our bikes over there to swim in Seneca Lake.

If I had tried smoking in Phelps I'd have been caught. Everyone knew everyone there. If you threw a snowball at a car on your walk home from school, your mother knew about it before you got home.

Murph, the town cop, had it easy. IF a crime was committed or kids were dragging on the marked quarter mile segment of Route 96, he'd have the names and addresses of everyone involved before he got there.

[bluezebra]

I'm 69. I was born and raised on Chicago's West Side. We went to the local park, playground, or school yard. Sometimes, we played in an empty lot, or played over-the-line in the street. You learned to hit straight-away, because broken windows were costly to replace. We used anything we could find for bases. Sometimes, if we were lucky, one of the fathers would let us use floor mats from his car.

But, as I said earlier, we had FUN!!!

Bob

[STEVED21]

I think they should change the tournament rules. When you get to this level, you ARE playing to win. ABC/ESPN wouldn't pay the fees they do if the championship didn't mean anything.

The MPR is important in the regular season. That is where all the kids have to play. In fact, it probably doesn't go far enough. The kids shoul be required to play more than one position in the game. To many coaches install kids at a position and play every inning of every game there. Some are good enough to do this, but even the best can benfit from a different position. By the way, my son was one of those kids. His coach had him catch about 70-75 consecutive innings. I wasn't real happy. There will never be a perfect system, but I wish more coaches put more emphasis on teaching the kids instead of winning every game.

[Jim Porter]

Originally posted by STEVED21
I think they should change the tournament rules. When you get to this level, you ARE playing to win. ABC/ESPN wouldn't pay the fees they do if the championship didn't mean anything.

The MPR is important in the regular season. That is where all the kids have to play. In fact, it probably doesn't go far enough. The kids shoul be required to play more than one position in the game. To many coaches install kids at a position and play every inning of every game there. Some are good enough to do this, but even the best can benfit from a different position. By the way, my son was one of those kids. His coach had him catch about 70-75 consecutive innings. I wasn't real happy. There will never be a perfect system, but I wish more coaches put more emphasis on teaching the kids instead of winning every game.

In 1996, we were lucky enough to see our Cranston Western RI team win the US Championship. It was a thrill for the kids, and they were treated like heroes when they arrived home.

That team had a roster of 14, and the manager played every one of those kids in every game from Districts to States to Regionals and finally the US Championship and World Series final.

If they could do it, why can't everyone else?

[Skahtboi]

Steve, I must agree with you. The publicity that the LLWS has garnered over the past decade or so from television is partly to blame for the demise of integrity in the sport at that level. As a result, there is pressure on a bunch of kids to win. That pressure has been placed there by the so called adults involved in coaching and, sadly, parenting. More and more, whether in local leagues or in district, state, and national tournaments, the emphasis has become win, and sometimes win at any cost, rather than teaching the kids to go out and give their best and have fun, we are teaching them a much more adverse approach to the game, and subsequently to life.