CHANGING THE MEANING OF THINGS

Little League International Cleans House in Chicago

By Greg ‘Gadfly’ Doyle | PACOVILLA Corrections blog | February 16, 2015

This past week Chicago-style politics changed the meaning of things to a particular segment of our society: the little league baseball community. When I was a kid, playing little league gave boys from all walks of life a chance to play a team sport. Coaches, parent-volunteers who loved the game of baseball, were our role-models and mentors. Boys in little league learned the valuable life lessons of teamwork, fair play, sportsmanship, and following rules, while developing and practicing athletic skills needed to compete against our peers.

Cheating was never a part of the game. You could get benched for rules violations and poor sportsmanship, but cheating got you thrown out of the game and kicked off the team, if you were caught.

According to an article posted on February 11, 2015, playing by the rules was apparently not as important as winning for the Jackie Robinson West little league team of Chicago, Illinois. This team of boys (ranging in age from 11 to 13) was the darling of the media for several weeks in 2014, as they battled their way to the championship game against South Korea before losing in the Little League World Series.

Little League International was forced to strip the Jackie Robinson West team of all its titles won during the 2014 season. Why?

The League says the Jackie Robinson West organization cheated. The all-Black Chicago team was illegally stacked with ineligible players.

Little League International has stripped Jackie Robinson West of the national title that the Chicago team won last summer after an investigation revealed it had falsified boundaries to field ineligible players. (read the full story at http://tinyurl.com/oylfbjr.)

This scandal is disgraceful on so many levels. And though the article does not fathom the impact beyond the actions of Little League International’s decision to strip the team of its titles and clean house with Jackie Robinson West, it would appear that doing things the Chicago-way (a political reference) has corrupted an entire organization and a particular segment of a Chicago community.

Could it be anymore embarrassing and hurtful for a time-honored youth sports program to be corrupted by win-at-all-costs politics?

And what could be more of a poke-in-the-eye to the Black community? Really? Based on the implications of this scandal, it might suggest that an all-Black team in Chicago cannot succeed at baseball without an enhanced advantage (i.e., a stacked team.) Who in the Jackie Robinson West organization forgot the rules?

Who among the organizers, coaches, parents, and players did not remember the history of the man who their organization was named after? Did anyone bother to remind those little league players what a “color barrier” was back when Jackie broke it for them? (Here is a link to the official Jackie Robinson website to remind them (http://www.jackierobinson.com/.)

Where is the outcry from the Black community over this disgraceful debacle? This is not about skin color—it is about the content of their character.

Perhaps it is more fashionable for the press to give scant coverage to this story because it is President Obama’s hometown. Where are the talking heads bemoaning the tragic outcome for Black children, for the sport of baseball, for the impact cheating has on young people in general? There is no vilification of the folks responsible for perpetrating this deception. Instead, they have a lawyer now and are not speaking to the press.

Ah! They live in Chicago—forget about it!

Riders, think about every team that was beaten by the illegally-stacked Jackie Robinson West team in 2014. Teams that played by the rules, followed guidelines, invested lots of money to play and travel (in order to compete), and lost to the team that was cheating from the outset. There were local, regional, national, and international teams who were unfairly eliminated by this Chicago team and its organization. Thousands of kids and families were affected during the 2014 season by the unscrupulous deception of this Jackie Robinson West team.

And how does this scandal reflect upon American sportsmanship internationally? Heck, it’s just a game. Well, I ask you, is it? Is it really? We expect this kind of scandal from a third-world country that stacks a team with short, hairy thirty-five-year old pitchers and falsified birth certificates. But not America!

Baseball is America’s game. Now our national past time has been marred by a scandal involving middle-schoolers and Chicago-style politics. Can’t we even get the game of baseball right?

To make matters worse, the players and their parents had to know they were cheating. Boundaries are boundaries. Everyone knows where they live and what schools they can or cannot attend based on boundaries. This is not rocket-science.

According to the Fox News article, others in the community assisted them in carrying out this deception. When corruption spreads, it taints everything around it. But hey! It’s Chicago, right? That’s how they play in Chicago politics. Why not little league baseball?

I cannot help but think that poor role-modeling had something to do with this on a grander scale. Who in politics might have indirectly influenced the Jackie Robinson West organization to double-down and cheat?

Nah….Enjoy your President’s Day.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The team the Chicago Crooks beat for the U.S. championship was a team from the Pearland suburb of Houston which played by the rules. Unfortunately, those Pearland boys never got the chance to face South Korea because of all the ringers they had to face.

And what’s worse is that the ‘community’, the White House and the media are standing solidly behind the Chicago Crooks, claiming the boys were victimized by their coaches and parents. Sorry, but I don’t buy that. Those boys were old enough to know that a bunch of ringers had been thrown into their midst. Much was made of the fact that all these players came from the poorest black section of Chicago and how wonderful it was how these disadvantaged boys managed to to scratch and claw their way to the U.S. championship. I guarantee you that had Pearland been caught cheating, the White House and the media would have dropped those middle class boys in the grease.

Greg is right about Jackie Robinson. He endured some of the sorriest abuse imaginable and he took it with dignity as he beat the socks off his white tormentors among the ballplayers, while ignoring the racist taunts of the fans. In the history of American sports, Jackie Robinson ranks right up there wit MLK.

The cheating by the Chicago Crooks shows that the ‘community’ really never learned anything from either Martin Luther King, Jr. or Jackie Robinson. Neither of these two honorable leaders ever advocated that the end justifies the means. It would appear that the ‘community’ prefers to tiptoe in the muddy footprints of Al Sharpton, rather than adhere to what MLK preached.