the politics of kids' baseball
a disclaimer...This is my side of an issue and will be well colored by my opinion. Read it with full knowledge that I'm not in any way objective.
I pulled myself away from my couch potato weekend of illness on Saturday long enough to go to a church picnic for a few hours. There I got to see some folks I haven't seen in a while, one of whom is the mom of a boy in the youngster's class. They are pretty good friends, and have been in cub scouts and on a few baseball teams together. Her son, when it comes to baseball, is head and shoulders above mine. Hers is a perennial all star and has grown to about twice the size of mine, literally. He might not be twice as tall, but he's a lot taller, and weighs at least twice as much. With the new birthday cutoff age, he's also officially a year older and would be in a higher age group. All well and good. They have decided though, that he's too good for the league in which my son plays. He's joined an AAU traveling team with two other boys who used to play in our league.
Now here comes the rub. The league they left, which my son plays in, is very active. They have a complex of fields and it's difficult for the teams to get much practice time between games, because the schedule of actual games is pretty full. This AAU team has no home field, and they want to use ours. They are having to travel about half an hour to get to a field to use to practice. They asked the organization that runs our fields if they could use them, offering to represent the organization as their all stars. The organization turned them down, but then offered them practice time at something like $500 an hour. This woman is going off about how she pays taxes too, and those fields are county fields and the AAU team should be able to use them. Well, no.
You chose to pull your kid out of the organization that plays on those fields. Nobody forced you to do that. You knew what their practice situation was and made the choice anyway. Live with it. You 'offered' to represent that organization as their all stars. Oh joy. What does that say to the kids who play in that league? Well, you can play as well as you like but there's no way you can be all stars, because we sold our soul to some team with kids from all over town and they're our all stars. True, they may be very good, but they aren't our kids. Oh wait, three of them are. I freely admit that I have my own bias. My son has been practicing all summer, after blowing his spring season with a broken wrist, and is getting a second chance at a 12 year old season. He's getting better and going out for advanced ball and feeling good about his chances, and yeah, there's some hope he could make all stars, if such a thing exists. After working at it like he has and having it (hopefully) pay off with a decent season, I'd hate to have him (or any other deserving kid in the league) hear, "sorry...we already have an all star team, made up mostly of kids from somewhere else."
As for her rant, I just nodded and smiled. I'd get more loudly opinionated about it if the league would have sold out to them.
I pulled myself away from my couch potato weekend of illness on Saturday long enough to go to a church picnic for a few hours. There I got to see some folks I haven't seen in a while, one of whom is the mom of a boy in the youngster's class. They are pretty good friends, and have been in cub scouts and on a few baseball teams together. Her son, when it comes to baseball, is head and shoulders above mine. Hers is a perennial all star and has grown to about twice the size of mine, literally. He might not be twice as tall, but he's a lot taller, and weighs at least twice as much. With the new birthday cutoff age, he's also officially a year older and would be in a higher age group. All well and good. They have decided though, that he's too good for the league in which my son plays. He's joined an AAU traveling team with two other boys who used to play in our league.
Now here comes the rub. The league they left, which my son plays in, is very active. They have a complex of fields and it's difficult for the teams to get much practice time between games, because the schedule of actual games is pretty full. This AAU team has no home field, and they want to use ours. They are having to travel about half an hour to get to a field to use to practice. They asked the organization that runs our fields if they could use them, offering to represent the organization as their all stars. The organization turned them down, but then offered them practice time at something like $500 an hour. This woman is going off about how she pays taxes too, and those fields are county fields and the AAU team should be able to use them. Well, no.
You chose to pull your kid out of the organization that plays on those fields. Nobody forced you to do that. You knew what their practice situation was and made the choice anyway. Live with it. You 'offered' to represent that organization as their all stars. Oh joy. What does that say to the kids who play in that league? Well, you can play as well as you like but there's no way you can be all stars, because we sold our soul to some team with kids from all over town and they're our all stars. True, they may be very good, but they aren't our kids. Oh wait, three of them are. I freely admit that I have my own bias. My son has been practicing all summer, after blowing his spring season with a broken wrist, and is getting a second chance at a 12 year old season. He's getting better and going out for advanced ball and feeling good about his chances, and yeah, there's some hope he could make all stars, if such a thing exists. After working at it like he has and having it (hopefully) pay off with a decent season, I'd hate to have him (or any other deserving kid in the league) hear, "sorry...we already have an all star team, made up mostly of kids from somewhere else."
As for her rant, I just nodded and smiled. I'd get more loudly opinionated about it if the league would have sold out to them.
John put this out here at 2:22 PM
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