Baseball is a team sport and when the team cheats, gets caught and loses its trophy, as happened to nominal Little League World Champion, Chicago’s Jackie Robinson West, it’s bound to be an extremely traumatic experience. However, it is also a lesson; there are consequences to cheating whether you do it or someone else does it on your behalf. The earlier you learn that the better off you’re going to be.
Now, determined to use the disappointed players as cover to advance their agendas, some politicians and “activists” are crying that we shouldn’t “punish” the kids because it was adults who did the cheating. Vacating the championship does not punish the innocent players on Jackie Robinson West; it provides justice to the team that did not cheat and no other action can do that.
I put it to you that this group of excuse-makers is doing far more damage to the psyches and lives of those players than the adults who did the original cheating. Every single kid on the team understands the concept of cheating – they should – they see it and read about it daily in America’s win-at-all-cost sports culture and have for decades. From current baseball players A-Rod to Ryan Braun, to former cyclist Greg LeMond and infamous “Little League” pitching sensation Danny Almonte who was playing, and dominating, on a falsified birth certificate, cheating in sports at all levels is rampant.
It’s certainly not, as some charge, restricted to minorities or even the nation’s most popular sports; July, 2013 was the 40th anniversary of Soapbox Derby cheating scandal.
Young minds are nimble and they rarely have trouble learning from what they see – the rewards for cheating in our society are large while the penalties are small. No matter what happens in the future, A-Rod will have made millions, much of it coming from statistics boosted by illegal doping. Making matters worse is this constant blame shifting as these little leaguers are being encouraged to do. LeMond’s excuse was everyone was doing it and Braun went to so far as to claim the guy collecting and shipping his urine was anti-Semitic and doctored the sample.
Now the adults are calming this scandal was about race. Well they are wrong, this was about cheating and one of life’s great lessons; real champions don’t need to cheat to win. Those adults who cheated showed they, not the kids, were the weak link; they had no confidence in the kids they could legally field. Hopefully, the kids will show them the way by saying, “We don’t want a trophy we did not win fairly.” That will make them champs again in my book.