Even though it happened a while back, this seemed to hit the national spotlight just before I left on vacation. In a Little League in Utah, the coach (of a team fittingly named the Yankees) pitched around the best hitter on the Red Sox to get to their worst hitter in order to win the championship. Everybody's pontificating about how it was so wrong for the coach to do that. Never mind that in actual baseball, it's done all the time. These are children - they have no business being exposed to things like competition.
Bull. Unless you're in the Special Olympics, every sport has winners and losers. It's the way things are. Is it the way things should be? That's not a question I have an answer for, but I know that on an everyday basis children are exposed to this in every sport they play. You may get a medal for showing up for soccer, but at the end of the day it is a competition. You do have winners and losers. You even have winners and losers in videogames. If you die, you lose and the computer's artificial intelligence wins. Of course, for those who don't want their children to experience the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat, they can give their child a set of rubber balls and let them kick them around the yard by themselves. Then they won't have their spirits broken. Of course, they won't have any friends either, but that's beside the point. After all, friends often break into groups of winners and losers. The winners leave the losers out, and that happens to kids constantly throughout their school years. That's just the way life is. However, on the bright side, it's not as though someone is a perpetual loser. Things have a way of evening out, just ask Jerry Seinfeld.
The bottom line is that what the Yankees coach did was right. His team was in a position to win and advance to the Little League World Series (not the title game, mind you, but the playoffs that lead there). If he didn't do everything he could to help them win, he not only shouldn't be their coach, but he wouldn't have a competitive bone in his body. Pitching around the superstar was the right play, and you can argue all you want about how you shouldn't pick on the cancer survivor, but what if he was just an ordinary kid who wasn't that good at baseball? Would that make a difference? He wanted to play to be normal, and by whiffing him instead of pitching to the beefcake, they showed that they considered him normal.
1 comment:
I agree. Luckily I've always been the beefcake and have never had to deal with something like that.
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