August 19, 2003
From the desk of Jane Galt:Foul discrimination
And on the pages of a major Internet daily. Why, in this day and age, do we nod and look the other day when these hatemongers advocate shoving innocent children into a separate and most unequal ghetto, simply because of the way they were born?
A tour of the Little League record books shows that, for an American team, success is found by riding on the coattails of a hypertrophic hulk-child. Cody Webster, the hero of the Kirkland, Wash., team that ended Taiwan's 31-game Williamsport winning streak in 1982, is a dead ringer for Alvey: He also stood 5-foot-7 and 175 pounds at the age of 12 and hit a home run and threw a shutout in the championship game. The next year, 6-foot-2 Marc Pisciotta—yes, he was 6-foot-2 at 12—who pitched for the Cubs and Royals during a brief major league career, used his overpowering fastball to lead East Marietta, Ga., to the title. San Diego Padre third-baseman Sean Burroughs, who as a 5-foot-5, 170-pound 11-year-old looked eerily similar to the inflated baby from that year's Honey, I Blew Up the Kid, took his Long Beach, Calif., team to back-to-back titles in 1992 (when a team from the Philippines was disqualified) and 1993, when he hit .600 and threw two no-hitters.[. . . ]
When the next hulk-child comes along, a Little League official needs to stand up, on a chair if necessary, look him in the eye, and tell him to go play somewhere else. By knuckling under to a few dominant players, Little League implants a lasting lesson in the heads of the millions of youngsters that play in its leagues worldwide: The big kids always get their way. It's only fair that, for a year or two, normal-sized kids should get a chance to feel big. That is, before they get cut from the high-school team.
Speaking as someone who was six-foot-two at the tender age of eleven, I ask: have you no shame, sir? Ain't I a woman? If you prick me, do I not bleed? And if you kick me out of little league, do I not suffer as greatly as the littlest among us?
Incidentally, as a former. . what did he call it . . . hypertrophic hulk-child, I'd like to thank those among my readers who have taken to emailing me links, such as this one, of special interest to tall people. Keep 'em coming. Asymmetrical Information: Your Home for Tall Issues on the Web.
Posted by Jane Galt at August 19, 2003 2:58 PM | TrackBack | Technorati inbound linksThis guy sounds like one of the idiots who was whining about how unfair it was that the US sent the Dream Team to the 1992 Olympics to beat up on all of the other basketball teams. My response, then as now: if you don't want to compete, stay home and watch TV. As long as those kids meet the age and residency requirements, they should be welcomed and their performances watched and admired.
As for the dimwitted pimp for unwarranted egalitarianism who wrote this article, he should move on to his true calling--being director for one of those asinine youth soccer leagues that don't keep score.
Same. I was something of a prodigy in the height department.
Hey...I played against Marc Pisciotta's little brother when we were 12- Marc and his brother were about the same size at age 12 and I think both played pro ball for awhile. Small world, ain't it.
Hey...I played against Marc Pisciotta's little brother when we were 12- Marc and his brother were about the same size at age 12 and I think both played pro ball for awhile. Small world, ain't it.
Apparently desire, heart, and tenacity counts for nothing with this loser. I wonder if he teaches this important Simpsonesque lesson to his kids:
"Kids, you tried your best, and you failed miserably. The important lesson here: never try."
--H. Simpson, Philosopher
Little League teaches kids an important lesson: for any given activity, there will be some people who are just naturally better at it than you are.
The important thing is to do as well as you can and have a good time doing it.
I agree with Dan, with one addition: If you have to win, don't play it so that the other guy has the advantage. Use your head.
Jane -
Your loyal fans on the web will always look up to you.
With love -
5'6" Male
It's not an outrage against human competence to have weight classes in boxing and wrestling, and perhaps something of the sort is also appropriate for Little League.
He left out the Trumbull CT team that won behind Chris Drury. A junkballing everyman (boy, whatever.)
"It's not an outrage against human competence to have weight classes in boxing and wrestling, and perhaps something of the sort is also appropriate for Little League."
Baseball has always been a game where 5'6" shortstops play with 6'6" pitchers and first basemen (well, they all used to be shorter, but you know what I mean). For all of the author's whining about the big, bad bullies, they all had teammates who were good enough to hold off the other side long enough for the big guy to lead them to victory. Baseball is a team sport, and if you need proof of that, ask Barry Bonds (by far the greatest baseball player in the world over the last fifteen years) to show you his World Series rings. You'll get a surly look and won't see any rings.
My instinctive sympathies might go to kids overshadowed by these "hulks", from a childhood where I was overshadowed by damn near everyone my age, including the girls. I wasn't always the shortest in the class, but I was always the lightest by 20 pounds or so, with corresponding lack of strength. Not to mention clumsiness and bad eyesight. But when I engage my brain, this proposal is ridiculous.
Baseball is a sport that doesn't need weight classes because:
1) It's a team sport. One great player makes a good team better, that's all. Put Sammy Sosa (with a forged birth certificate) on Charlie Brown's Little League team, and instead of losing 50 to 0 every time, they would lose 50 to 4 or 5 - that being the number of times Sosa could come to bat.
2) Skill matters far more than size. Size does matter at the margins - if Sosa was a tiny little squirt, he'd be reliably hitting singles and doubles instead of setting records for home runs, but if he couldn't hit the ball he wouldn't be playing at all.
So these "hulk-children" are a problem only if they are so out of the norm for 12 year olds as to fundamentally change the game. If that is the case, it makes far more sense to modify the rules to reduce the advantage conferred by size than to exclude the best players. I presume the only overwhelming advantage a gigantic child would have is the strength to hit the ball further. (Longer reach and legs might make them better fielders and runners, but not enough to change the game - and that's asssuming that they aren't awkward, as all the unusually large kids I remember from my childhood were.) So if it's necessary, move the fence in so normal 12 year olds have a chance to hit homers, or allow only two or three bases on a single hit and no errors.
And of course, putting the biggest kids in a ghetto wouldn't get Charlie Brown or me any closer to a spot on the championship team. Maybe the system in a story by Kurt Vonnegut once, where real equality meant the strong or fast would be burdened with weights, the beautiful wear masks, etc. But even that liberal lunatic Vonnegut didn't seem to actually be in favor of this - and I damned well wouldn't want to win that way. Not to mention the buzzers they would hang on me to distract me and reduce my effective IQ...
"Put Sammy Sosa (with a forged birth certificate) on Charlie Brown's Little League team,"
Poor Sammy. One little corked bat incident, and he goes from "inspiring role model" to "convenient example for hypotheticals regarding birth certificate fraud." :-)
By the way one of the forgotten disturbing elements about the Danny Almonte (sp?) scandal a few years back was that some parents paid over 10,000 dollars for a private investigator to dig up the truth about the kid's age.
Even though they were proven right, that seems like quite a lump of cash to spend over this.
Borrowing heavily from Robert Tracinski, the editorial director of the Ayn Rand Institute, this sounds a lot like the old Australian saying "You have to cut down the tall poppies." (Not meant to be literal, but in this case I guess it is.) Or, as Tracinski puts it, "anyone who dares to poke his head above the crowd must be attacked, denigrated, and brought down to the common level."
How sad that Josh Levin wishes this upon children. He thinks a child who cracks 5 home runs is worse than an adult who keeps the child from playing a game? Why, because the kid could hurt others' feelings?
Oh, and the lesson Little Leaguers receive from the game, that "The big kids always get their way," is total bullsh*t. How about rewording that to "The good players always play better than you, if you're not a good player"? Now that would be a lesson worth learning.
Sammy Sosa (with a forged birth certificate) on Charlie Brown's Little League team, and instead of losing 50 to 0 every time, they would lose 50 to 4 or 5 - that being the number of times Sosa could come to bat.
Not if Sammy pitched. No way Linus could hit Sammy's heater.
All of you seem to be missing the point. The article doesn't say they can't play, only that they should play somewhere else, namely with kids of similiar levels of ability. This is exactly how my little league worked. We didn't have age leagues AT ALL, we only had skill based leagues. When the coaches thought you were good enough, they bumped you up to a higher class where the challenge would be appropriate, no matter what age you were. Beleive me, it engendered a hell of a lot more pride to play in a league with boys mostly two years older than you than it would have to run up the score on kids your own age, if you were that much better. I say this from experience.
I'm glad someone finally brought up pitchers. A single batter cannot dominate a game by himself, but a single pitcher most certainly can. Baseball is a lot less of a team sport when your pitcher throws a perfect game and strikes out half the batters he faces.
"Baseball has always been a game where 5'6" shortstops play with 6'6" pitchers and first basemen"
It has also been a game where players are sorted by skill level on through the minor league system. The same should be done in Little League, which should have levels based on skill and not age.
"Baseball is a sport that doesn't need weight classes because..."
Baseball already has "weight classes", they're called the minor leagues. People play aginst others of similiar skill level. When they get better, they get bumped up until they get to the highest level. For Little Leaguers, that would be the 18 year level (though it shouldn't be age based at all, but skill based.)
"Sammy Sosa (with a forged birth certificate) on Charlie Brown's Little League team, and instead of losing 50 to 0 every time, they would lose 50 to 4 or 5 - that being the number of times Sosa could come to bat."
Put Pedro Martinez on the mound and they win 0 to 3 - Since Pedro would hit a few homers against the 12 year olds.
"2) Skill matters far more than size. " No amount of skill is going to let a 5 ft tall pitcher throw as fast as a 6 ft tall pitcher.
Jane
At 12 I was 4'7" - 67lbs and lusted after you and your sisters from afar, wistfully
unnoticed
in the corner
for most of the rest of you - lighten up
it was a joke!!!
"We didn't have age leagues AT ALL, we only had skill based leagues. When the coaches thought you were good enough, they bumped you up to a higher class where the challenge would be appropriate, no matter what age you were."
Wondering how long ago this was. From what I've seen the biggest problem in children's sports is parents. They're bad enough badgering umpires about calls and harranguing coaches about position in the batting order. Seems like it would be a nightmare (for the coaches) to have to make subjective decisions about which class a kid plays.
Otherwise, you raise a really good point. Skill classes, rather than age classes, would help most everyone learn the sport better. Generally you make the most advancement when competing against people of about the same, or moderately better, skill level.
At some point it's a problem from a behavior/maturity standpoint though, and Jane can perhaps verify this. A kid who is quite a bit taller than average is expected to act older than he/she is. A tall two-year-old generally will behave like a normal two-year-old, but the public thinks she is a four-year-old hellion.
"At some point it's a problem from a behavior/maturity standpoint though, and Jane can perhaps verify this. A kid who is quite a bit taller than average is expected to act older than he/she is. A tall two-year-old generally will behave like a normal two-year-old, but the public thinks she is a four-year-old hellion."
As a 6'4" man who was done growing by the time I was a sophomore in high school, I can absolutely confirm this observation. My parents even commented on having to overcome the tendency to expect greater maturity than was warranted by my life experience a the time.
"I'm glad someone finally brought up pitchers. A single batter cannot dominate a game by himself, but a single pitcher most certainly can. Baseball is a lot less of a team sport when your pitcher throws a perfect game and strikes out half the batters he faces."
One dominant player--even a pitcher--won't carry a team to the Little League World Series unless the rest of the team is good, too. The rules don't let a pitcher throw every game, even if he could. Also, 12 year old catchers who can handle a 75 MPH fastball thrown from 46 feet away (equivalent to a 100 MPH fastball thrown from the MLB regulation 60' 6") don't grow on trees. Someone has to handle the balls that do get put into play.
"Put Pedro Martinez on the mound and they win 0 to 3 - Since Pedro would hit a few homers against the 12 year olds."
Put Pedro on the mound and you'd have a crippled catcher (and a lot of batters soiling themselves)--and Pedro would be walked intentionally a lot. It's the Barry Bonds Paradox--if you become *too* good, it's going to end up requiring your teammates to come through, because the other team is too terrified to let you do it.
Jane,
You know my feelings about tall people being locked away in a dungeon somewhere so that their freakish kind can bang their heads on the ceiling by accident in peace and not bother any of us *normal* sized people.
Oh, except for those tall people I marry. They get a dispensation.
I'm a 5'10" male and never played in a little league. Should I also insert a random comment, or just spectate?
Too late...
Where I grew up, in grades 1-3 ALL kids played in the same league, boy or girl. The kids pitched at that age, too, so that meant there were biggish 3rd graders throwing wildly at tiny but somehow unabashed 6-year-olds. Most of us grew up to be relatively well-adjusted adults.
Also, Little League World Series teams are local all-star teams. They're already divided by skill level.
Little League divides its divisions by ages 9-10, 11-12, 13-14, 15-16, with the 11-12 year olds the "high profile" division that gets all the face time on ESPN and ABC.
Pitching and size tend to go together, even up to the major league level -- a 5-foot-8 pitcher with a live arm won't draw as much interest from the pro scouts as someone who's 6-foot-8 but might actually throw slower as a teen, because of the alleged upside "potential" (i.e. we think he could be the next Randy Johnson).
But at most of the other positions, size really doesn't matter that much in baseball, and at the age of 11 or 12 physical ability and amr strength, along with the abiliy to throw strikes, usually matter more that pure size alone. We notice the taller players because they're an anonmaly, the same way 6-foot girls in sixth grade classes aren't that common (and yes, Jane, there was a 6-foot girl in my sixth grade class -- loved horses, hated standing in the back row, dwarfing all the other kids, in the class picture).
"Baseball is a team sport, and if you need proof of that, ask Barry Bonds (by far the greatest baseball player in the world over the last fifteen years) to show you his World Series rings. You'll get a surly look and won't see any rings."
Baloney. Post-season baseball is a luck-based sport. Short post-season series frequently are won by the lesser team. Over the long regular season, the superior teams almost always rise, however . . . unless they are extremely unlucky, ie winning dramatically fewer games than their run differential would indicate while a division rival or rivals are winning dramatically more than their run differential would indicate.
For an example, see this year's Royals as a team whose place in the standings exceeds all expectations.
"No amount of skill is going to let a 5 ft tall pitcher throw as fast as a 6 ft tall pitcher."
Dunno about that. Billy Wagner's 5'10" (if he's lucky) and throws as hard as Randy Johnson, who's 6'10".
And by extension, shouldn't seven-footers throw even harder by your theory of pitching mechanics? Yet there are no seven-foot pitchers in the bigs.
But big kids AREN'T that uncommon. The columnist writes about 5-7 12-year-olds as if they were behemoths. I was a 5-7 12-year-old, and there were a number of girls and boys in my small-town class as tall or taller. 6-foot kids in the 6th or 7th grade may stand out in their individual classes, but they come along fairly regularly out here among the cornfed masses.
Maybe what's uncommon is a big kid who is talented enough (let alone coordinated enough) to crack his local all-star team and make it to the LLWS. Maybe most big kids who play baseball aren't able to dominate all comers, just like most medium- and pint-sized kids can't.
hbchrist quotes Homer J. Simpson, philosopher: "Kids, you tried your best, and you failed miserably. The important lesson here: never try."
:-)
Homer J's philosophy doesn't square too well with the Little League pledge (now defunct, due to political incorrectness?):
"I trust in God.
I love my country
and will respect its laws.
I will play fair and strive to win.
But win or lose
I will always do my best."
Nancy Lebovitz writes, "It's not an outrage against human competence to have weight classes in boxing and wrestling, and perhaps something of the sort is also appropriate for Little League."
Grrrrrr! Rowr!!! ;-)
At 14, I was maybe 4'11". At 15, I was maybe 5'1".
As far as I know, I'm the only player in history to play in the Senior Little World Series for *two* different teams. :-)
The thing is, especially as I got older (but not much taller) I was extremely confident of my ability to get on base. I almost never swung at a bad pitch, and hardly ever struck out. A team of me and my clones would be a very good ball team. (But making it to a World Series is really tough--and even involves a fair amount of luck-- so I doubt my clone-team and I could do it.)
So I appreciate the thought, Nancy, but height and weight aren't so extraordinarily important in baseball.
P.S. Truth in posting comments:
1) When I was 14, I rode the bench (coached 3rd base).
2) My teams were from Augsburg and Wiesbaden, Germany. Those are teams composed of U.S. military base kids. So winning all of Europe is at most like winning a single state in the U.S. (because there are so many towns in the U.S., as compared to U.S. military bases).
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