Thursday, August 21, 2014

The Little (Interest) League


If I have to endure one more word, sentence, news story or celebrity comment on Mo’Ne Davis and Little League baseball I may take a bucket of ice water and dump it on my head.

Folks, isn’t enough enough?

Let’s keep things in perspective here.

We’re talking about 12- and 13-year-old kids attempting – and I emphasize attempting – to play baseball. When I turn on the tube to watch an athletic event, my expectations are to see incredible athletes who have put a lifetime’s worth of work into their sport and who are doing incredible things on fields, tracks, courts and sheets of ice. I don’t tune in to see snot-nosed kids pissing away their summer vacations by striking out, throwing pitches into the dirt and picking up grounders and throwing baseballs 15 feet over the heads of their teammates.

They’re only kids, you say? Then what the hell am I doing watching tiny human beings who have yet to

grow pubic hair play baseball? I can watch that by taking a walk around the block. I’m pushing 60 and I can field, hit and throw better than every last one of them. This is entertainment?

Worse yet, these kids are being treated as though they were all miniature Derek Jeters bearing down on winning another World Series crown. Only they have the luxury of being excused for each laughable blunder because, Golly Gee Whiz, they’re only little kids.

We all should go through life with such a free pass.

Believe me; I get the selling point of this summer madness.

Here’s Little League, forever the domain of young boys, and it’s being thrown a figurative curve ball by a young girl who has shown the ability to, gasp, play on even terms with the guys.

On the heels of last winter’s kids’ movie hit, “Frozen,” where the film’s hero was actually a young girl (Hey, who punched out the bad guy at the end?), this story is both timely, has just the right amount of feminist appeal and includes the all-important built-in Baby Picture Appeal – you know, they’re little kids and don’t they all look so cute in their uniforms? – to be a hit.

It’s a can’t miss.

But in my mind, any public activity done by children is only meaningful if your child, or at the very least, a relative’s or a friend’s child is involved.

Otherwise, it’s a bunch of kids trying to do something, whether it’s the science fair, the school play or playing bad baseball in front of tens of thousands of people. And who attends science fairs when their kids don’t have an entry?

Look, the Little League fans for two weeks a year point out, the contests got record ratings and across the country people enjoyed the games.

Yep, exactly the same people who regularly watch reality television and who get upset when they don’t agree with the name a celebrity chooses for their child.

When this nonsense finally concludes, and the Little Leaguers go back to being kids, then we can all go back to watching news footage of grown men dumping buckets of ice water on their heads.

And isn’t this a most intelligent society?