Feb. 11--Little League International this morning put the bad news into the Bad News Bears story of a plucky, underdog kids' baseball team that almost made it by stripping the Jackie Robinson West Little League team of its U.S. championship for using geographically ineligible players.
Don't blame the organization. This violation was not a minor technicality. Little League has rules for who can play for which regional all-star teams that attempt to retain some semblance of the old our-kids-against-your-kids spirit of youth sports. And quirky or arbitrary as these rules may sometimes seem, they have to be enforced so that this seeming last bastion of pure competition doesn't turn into just another grubby recruiting battle among hyper-competitive adults.
Like in the game itself, there must be clear lines between in bounds and out of bounds. And when you cross those lines, a mighty, prodigious feat -- a grand slam achievement on the order of JRW making it all the way to the international championship game -- becomes an impressive oh-well -- just a long foul ball.
And don't blame the boys. The presumption is that they trusted the men who assembled their team to follow the rules and that they, far more than our wounded civic pride, are the main victims here.
Blame those who selected the team and knowingly -- according to Little League International -- included players who lived outside the boundaries. They lit the fuse on a bomb and then hoped that time or distraction would extinguish it.
All that said, let's not allow this disqualifying violation to erase everything this team accomplished -- the heart and class that the boys showed, their talent, the thrills that they gave us. All of that -- well, OK, most of that -- was real.
We can put an asterisk by what they did for Chicago, but we can never erase it.
