Race Bating

Commenting this week on the scandal du jour known as "Deflategate", Father Michael Phleger posted the following on his Facebook page:

Today ESPN reported that New England Patriots most probably deliberately DEFLATED the balls in the AFC Championship Game......If this is true then shouldn't the New England Patriots lose their title as was done to the Jackie Robinson West Team???? but, oh that's right the JRW team was all Black....silly me!!!!!!!! 

He was referring to investigations that have concluded that the National Football League champion New England Patriots tampered with balls used in the game leading up to the Super Bowl. At this writing, the NFL is contemplating punishments to both the team, and their quarterback Tom Brady, the alleged instigator of the transgression. Suspensions and fines most likely will be the result, not the stripping of their championship title, as was done to the Jackie Robinson West Little League team on account of rules violations.

I admire Father Pfleger, his ministry and his commitment to the predominantly African American community in which his parish, St. Sabina resides. I agree that the punishment to the JRW team was unnecessarily severe and bemoan the likelihood that the punishment to the Brady Bunch will probably be little more than a slap on the wrist. But I strongly object to Father Pfleger's defining the comparison of the two teams and their punishments around the issue of race.

First and foremost, the NFL and Little League Baseball are two unrelated governing bodies, the rulings of one have absolutely no relevance with the rulings of the other. Had LLB a history of letting off white teams for comparable rule violations, then Pfleger would have a point. However LLB already has a precedent of revoking the championships of teams who broke their rules. Had they given a lighter penalty to JRW, they most certainly would have been accused of favoritism toward an all black team.

Likewise, had a black quarterback, say Seattle's Russell Wilson, been accused of a similar offense as Brady's, and his team's Super Bowl championship from last year been revoked, the good Father would have been spot on. But neither the NFL, nor any other major American professional sports league to the best of my knowledge, has a precedent of revoking a championship for any reason.

If you look at the details of each case separately, I think it's clear that Father Pfleger's implication that race played into either decision is absurd. Last summer, the entire nation tuned in as two little league teams captured the public's imagination. The Taney Dragons of Philadelphia, featured Mo'ne Davis, a 5'4" girl with a 70 mph fastball. The other team was Jackie Robinson West, from the south side of Chicago. What was unusual about both teams as far as the Little League tournament was concerned, was that both came from big cities and were made up predominantly of African American players. The last part is particularly significant as organized baseball has witnessed a steady decline in the numbers of black players in its ranks for the past few decades. Nobody knows the exact reason for this but the attention paid to the two little league teams from Philadelphia and Chicago was seen as a shot in the arm for baseball in the African American community.

I don't have the numbers but I can't ever remember as much attention paid to the annual Little League Tournament held in Willimasport, PA. When the JRW team returned home to Chicago after capturing the American championship, they were hailed as conquering heroes, the celebration for them downtown was not unlike celebrations of Chicago's championship professional teams. Their championship was seen as a happy story which contrasted sharply with tales of violence and misery in much of Chicago's African American community.

With all the attention to youth baseball, all the good will generated, not to mention all the revenue gained from advertising and contributions brought through the efforts of the Jackie Robinson West team to the game, it's inconceivable to me that Little League Baseball would single out JRW for punishment because of their race. In fact, I'm not entirely convinced that the opposite was not true, that JRW may have been given special treatment by receiving every benefit of the doubt, as the allegations of the team's fielding players from outside their district had been well known for a long time. It turned out that during the tournament, LLB simply chose to look the other way. It was not until long after the championship was awarded, when irrefutable evidence surfaced that the allegations of rules violations were true, that LLB was forced to act. Although I strongly disagree with the revoking of JRW's championship, LLB's decision was entirely consistent with their actions of the past.

There have been a number of instances where national championships have been revoked for rules violations in amateur sports organizations such as the NCAA. As a professional league, the National Football League has different commitments than amateur leagues, namely contracts, stock holders, team owners, and the most important source of revenue, the fans who pay for it all. A disqualification of a team's championship would go a long way to disrupt the ungodly revenue stream that comes into the NFL and other professional sports leagues. No one in the industry wants that. Unlike Major League Baseball, the majority of NFL players are black. A very large number of its fans are black. A different set of standards for blacks and whites would definitely not be in the best interest of an industry for whom the only color that matters, is green.

Father Pfleger does have one point. I said I do not believe that the ultimate decisions of the NFL and LLB were racially motivated, but the public's opinion, at least judging by the comments to Pfleger's post, is certainly racially charged. Unfortunately, most of the hundreds of comments the post received, seem to follow along racial lines; most of the black commenters supported Father Pfleger's implications, while most of the whites attacked him, sometimes in the most vulgar of terms. It must be pointed out that Father Pfleger himself is white.

Again, I applaud much of the work Father Pfleger has done at St. Sabinas, but I strongly urge him to tone the race bating down. There are plenty of instances of bigotry and racism in our society that deserve to be attacked. Finding racism in places where it does not exist, and further dividing us along the color line, is in no one's best interest, except sad to say, Father Pfleger's and others who seem to thrive on the attention it generates.

Rules are rules

A couple years ago I wrote about the greatest act of sportsmanship I've ever encountered. It happened during a college softball playoff game when a batter hit the ball over the fence for a home run, the first (and what turned out to be the last) of her career. As she rounded first base, she tore an ACL and crumbled to the ground. Unable to stand up, let alone run the bases, her coaches conferred with the umpires who told them that in order for the home run to count, the batter without any assistance from her teammates or a pinch runner, would have to complete the circuit around the basepath. At that point, Mallory Holtman, the first baseman on the other team asked if there was any rule against the opposing players assisting the stricken batter. The umps said no, and Holtman joined by the shortstop Liz Wallace gingerly picked up their opponent and carried her around the bases, lowering her leg to touch each base and finally home plate. The run that the team in the field willingly gave up, ended up costing them the game and a chance for the championship.

Stories like this one should make everyone stand up and cheer because they define in the purest sense, what athletic competition is supposed to be all about. Baseball fans like to think of the game we call "our national pastime", as an institution that exemplifies all that this country is ideally supposed to represent: fairness, decency, and above all, in its rules that ensure every player gets his or her turn at bat, democracy itself.

In reality, when adults codified the rules of the game, thereby wrestling baseball from the domain of children in the mid 19th century, the overriding question on the minds of the majority of folks who have played the game since was this:  "How can I get around those rules?"

An early star of the game who later became an owner and big time promoter of baseball, Albert Spalding, described his game in typical nineteenth century bravado this way:

Baseball is the exponent of American Courage, Confidence, Combativeness, American Dash, Discipline, Determination, American Energy, Eagerness, Enthusiasm, American Pluck, Persistency, Performance, American Spirit, Sagacity, Success, American Vim, Vigor, Virility.

You may notice that nowhere does Spalding mention honesty and fair play.

Granted there were some magnificent players like Christy Mathewson of the New York Giants and "Gentleman" Dave Malarcher of the Chicago American Giants of the Negro National League, who were known for their scrupulous attention to good sportsmanship. Both players were documented overruling umpires' decisions in their favor when they thought they were the wrong calls. Needless to say, these two extraordinary individuals are in the minority in the annals of baseball history.

Commenting on the character of some of the most honored and cherished members of the baseball community, Bill Veeck once said:

Wake up the echoes at the Hall of Fame and you will find that baseball's immortals were a rowdy and raucous group of men who would climb down off their plaques and go rampaging through Cooperstown, taking spoils.

Veeck should know, he was probably as rowdy and raucous as the best of them. He made a career as an executive and owner of several clubs, by thumbing his nose at the baseball establishment, including their rules. One of the eminently quotable Veeck's most famous quotes is this:

I try not to break the rules but merely to test their elasticity.

In his autobiography, Veeck As In Wreck, Bill Veeck took pains to point out the lengths of his mischief. Probably the most famous and notorious of his stunts came when he was the owner of the woebegone St. Louis Browns. On August 19, 1951, as a gag, Veeck sent three foot seven inch Eddie Gaedel up to bat against the Detroit Tigers. Veeck's stunts indeed tested the limits of baseball rules, ethics and sometimes even decency.

There was one rule that Veeck actively sought to break, baseball's infamous color line. As owner of the Cleveland Indians in 1947, Veeck signed the first African American player in the American League, Larry Doby. The following year he signed the great Satchel Paige who at 43, became the oldest "rookie" in major league history. Aghast, baseball insiders claimed that had Paige not been black, he never would have been signed at that advanced age. Taking aim at injustice, Veeck replied, "Had Satchel Paige been white, he'd have been in the major leagues for twenty years."

For his efforts, Bill Veeck, "the game's enfant terrible",  became one of the most beloved, and at the same time, most vilified individuals to be enshrined in the Baseball Hall of Fame.

Another colorful Hall of Famer who didn't have too many qualms about stretching the rules, especially when they pertained to him, was John "Mugsy" McGraw, the longtime manager of the New York Giants. In his playing days, McGraw, a third baseman, had a penchant for grabbing the belts of base runners when the ump's eyes were fixed elsewhere. One runner got wise to McGraw, and while standing on second base between pitches, he unbuckled his belt. When his teammate at the plate singled, the runner zipped past third base and scored, while the embarrassed McGraw stood at third base holding a belt.

One of McGraw's most legendary escapades took place in 1901 when he signed a second baseman named Charlie Grant to his team at the time, the Baltimore Orioles, (today's Yankees). Grant was a seasoned professional ballplayer playing for the black team, the Chicago Columbia Giants. As the player was light skinned and had straight hair, McGraw planned to pass him off as a Native American named Tokohama, a name McGraw made up. Blacks of course were not allowed to play "organized baseball" in those days, while there was no such restriction on Native Americans. Before the season began and Grant was able to become the first black player to play in the major leagues in the 20th century, albeit not in the open, his cover was blown in Chicago, as he was well known here.

It was "The Old Roman", Charles Comiskey, the owner and founder of the White Sox who famously declared: "If McGraw keeps this 'Indian', I'll put a Chinaman on third base." Comiskey was not being blatantly racist; he played with and against many black players in exhibition games during his playing career and would have loved to have been able to sign blacks to his team. But rules are rules and Comiskey was only stating the obvious; if McGraw was going to play fast and easy with baseball's color line, so would he. In the end, the sanctity of the rule barring blacks prevailed, and Charlie "Tokohama" Grant was back with the Columbia Giants in a matter of days.

In a sense, Chris Janes might be the Charlie Comiskey of today. He's the guy who blew the whistle on the Jackie Robinson West little league team whose national championship was stripped away last week.  In his role as vice president of the suburban Evergreen Park Athletic Association, Janes saw it as his duty to report his suspicions that JRW was fielding some players who did not live within the bounds of that league's territory, in violation of Little League rules. Incidentally, Janes's team was handed a 43-2 defeat by JRW in the tournament, which I'm sure had nothing to do (wink wink) with his decision to turn them in.

Well it turns out that Chris "Without the boundaries, it's not Little League anymore" Janes himself is not above accepting players in his league who do not live within its boundaries. The night that the ruling on JRW was announced, a Chicago woman came forward and claimed that Evergreen Park officials forged documents so that her son could play in that league.

Janes denied any wrongdoing. There are actually no rules prohibiting kids from playing in leagues outside their home districts for the majority of little league activities, only tournaments officially sanctioned by Little League Inc.who runs the annual Little League World Series. Janes insists that while his league does accept outside players whose parents come to them, they do not actively recruit players, nor do they play those boundary-busting kids in tournaments that prohibit them from doing so.

Would he if he could, play kids who weren't from Evergreen Park in Little League Inc. sanctioned tournaments? Your guess is as good as mine but honestly I think it's clear he would.

I haven't a clue how JRW comes upon its players, but I strongly suspect that, just as most little league programs like Evergreen Park's, parents and kids come to them, not the other way around. The organization has been around for a long time, and is very well known. It seems very reasonable that folks from all over the Chicago area would be thrilled to get their kids into the program.

That does not excuse the JRW administrators of willfully violating the rules of the tournament. In fact, there are so many loopholes and waivers enabling kids who live outside the boundaries to play on any given team, even in the Little League tournaments, that it's truly surprising to me that the adults who run JRW didn't go the extra mile to make sure that all the players already on the team could legitimately play in the big tournament. Unfortunately they didn't, and that's why they find themselves in the mess they're in. Perhaps they felt they were just too busy trying to run a little league program made up of hundreds of kids, not just the thirteen kids we keep hearing about. Perhaps in their over-zealousness to gain attention for their program and the contributions that would help out an institution that does a great deal of good in a troubled part of the city, they overstepped their bounds and broke a few rules. Maybe they just felt the good they did for the community overrode the tournament rules.

BUT THEY CHEATED!!!

I hear those cries coming over and over again from dozens of indignant coaches and parents of the teams that were vanquished by JRW in last year's tournament. One of those voices is that of Kristi Black who's the president of the Mountain Ridge Little League, who fielded the Las Vegas team that was the runner up to JRW in the tournament. According to Ms. Black, the tournament "has an asterisk on it like the one on Barry Bonds home run record." The coach of the Vegas team, Ashton Cave, compared JRW's misdeeds to those of cyclist Lance Armstrong, who like Bonds, was found to have used performance enhancing drugs.

I'll give you three guesses, who do you think Ms. Black and Mr. Cave believe should be crowned the US champion? Bet you won't need all three guesses to come up with the correct answer.

The voices of "reason" in defending the move to strip the championship from the kids who themselves did not cause this problem, claim that it's important to teach young people the value of respecting rules, and that a championship won fraudulently is no championship at all. In time they say, the thirteen members of the team JRW sent to Williamsport, PA, will learn a valuable lesson and be all the better for it.

I'm not so sure. My guess is that the lesson those thirteen boys will learn is that the world is an unfair place. What they will take away from this experience is that it doesn't matter how hard you work for something, there's always a chance someone out there will be willing and able to take what you earned away from you, especially if you're black.

WHOA, FOUL!!!, cry those same indignant voices, THIS IS NOT ABOUT RACE, IT'S ABOUT FOLLOWING RULES. WE SHOULD NOT HAVE A DOUBLE STANDARD, THE RULES ARE THERE FOR EVERYONE TO FOLLOW!!!

With this I agree, up to a point. The Little League does indeed have a precedent for stripping away championships for rule violations. It would be unfair of them to treat JRW differently than other teams simply because they're black. What does seem strange to me is their one-size-fits-all system of punishment for transgressions. There is no redress, and there are no considerations of the severity of the transgression.

Most systems of jurisprudence I know of enact punishments that fit the crime. After all, we don't get our driver's licences revoked for a single parking ticket. Not so apparently with the Little League where it's one strike and you're out.

So where do JRW's transgressions fall in the greater scheme of things? I can sort of understand Little League Inc's philosophy of limiting players on a team to a confined community. But as I pointed out in my previous post, we've become a highly mobile society, and the definition of a community is much broader and more complicated than it once was. And as I mentioned above, there are petitions to be filled out and waivers that can be signed, that allow the de facto expansion of a league's boundaries. In my opinion, this legal end-run around the rule contradicts the spirit of the boundary regulation, if not the letter of it. Many teams take advantage of these loopholes.

Because of that, the question of whether JRW's transgressions created an unfair advantage for their tournament team is debatable. Remember these are twelve year old children we're talking about, not "ringers brought in to create a super team", as they've been depicted. To hear the folks who support the stripping of the championship talk, you'd think JRW enlisted Derek Jeter and Albert Pujols to play for them.

To me, far more serious infractions, perhaps worthy of stripping a title, would include fielding players above the stipulated age limit, paying families for the services of their children, players using illegally modified equipment such as corked bats, the use of performance enhancing drugs, or any other transgression for which no waiver or loophole would ever be considered.

Obviously you can't justify infractions by saying that everybody does it, but I find much of the rhetoric leveled at JRW to be vindictive, self-serving, and dare I say, hypocritical. If it were up to me (which of course it isn't), a much more reasonable punishment for boundary infractions would be limiting sanctions to the administrators, in the form of fines or suspensions. I regard revoking the championship from the children of Jackie Robinson West to be draconian, if not unjust.

All the talk going on in the week since the championship was stripped, seems to miss the point of children's athletic programs. Any reasonable person would say that the purpose of such programs is to not only teach kids how to play the game, but also to teach values such as teamwork and sportsmanship. Winning and losing are of course integral parts of any game but in no way should they be front and center in children's sports. Critics claim that by their actions, the folks at JRW placed winning above everything else, but it seems to me that the other teams' fixation on cheating and unfair advantages on the part of JRW, places a far greater emphasis on winning, than do the infractions themselves.

If the coaches of the teams who lost to JRW were truly concerned with the spirit of the game and not only about winning and losing, they would accept the outcome of the tournament, not try to make excuses for losing. It's their responsibility as teachers and role models to understand that it's just as important to teach kids how to be gracious losers (as the JRW kids were when they lost the world championship to a team from Taiwan), as it is to be respectful winners.

Of course there would be no game of baseball without rules. But not all rules are created equal; some are integral to the game, others are not. If everyone slavishly followed every rule enacted since the game's inception, runners would still be put out by being hit (or plugged, which is the correct term) with the ball, pitchers would still be throwing underhand, and blacks would still be banned from the game.

It's far easier to tear down that to build. The folks at Jackie Robinson West have done a magnificent job over the years, building an important institution in the city of Chicago. Tens of thousands of kids have walked through their doors since 1971 when the league was founded. It's true that their administrators may have run roughshod over some tournament rules, but put into the their proper perspective, these transgressions don't amount to much, little more than bureaucratic neglect.

Players like Christy Mathewson, Mallory Holtman, Dave Malarcher, and Liz Wallace, all understood that the game was bigger than they were. Despite having the rules in their favor, they all chose to do what they considered to be the right thing, rather than accept a ruling against their opponents that they felt was unjust.

By insisting that JRW's championship be revoked, then reaping the spoils by claiming the championship for themselves, the adults of the Las Vegas team are doing far more to undermine youth baseball than the adults at Jackie Robinson West. As of last Wednesday, the Las Vegas team is now the US Little League 12U Baseball Champion. Talk about an asterisk.

Most of us within the game or without, fall far short of the moral and ethical credibility of Mathewson, Holtman, Malarcher and Wallace. Like the proverbial warning about throwing stones if you live in glass houses, those of us without the integrity of those four, had better be careful before we start pointing fingers at anybody else.

JRW

On September 1st of last year I wrote this post expressing my appreciation for the Jackie Robinson West little league team from the South Side of Chicago for winning the United States 12 and under Little League Championship. Today the team was stripped of that championship on account of recruitment issues as some of the players on that team did not live within the boundaries of the league.

Well I'll go on the record and say here and now that I stand by my post and my appreciation.

It was Chris Janes, a little league coach and Vice President of the south suburban Evergreen Park Athletic Association who set the investigation in motion late last year. In a radio interview on a local sports-talk station, Janes said he e-mailed the offices of the Little League governing body, raising questions about the validity of some of the JRW players, after he saw TV reports showing the mayors of suburbs, definitely NOT within the JRW's boundaries, publicly congratulating specific players and claiming them as their own. Whether it makes a difference or not, Janes's Evergreen Park little league team was defeated by JRW by a score of 43-2 in the sectional tournament leading up to the Little League World Series in Williamsport, PA.

Well as Marcellus once said to Horatio:

Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.

I don't for one minute condone cheating by breaking rules in any sport. It's especially disgusting when it comes to cheating in athletics involving children. There is no question in my mind that if the adults who run JRW and the district they represent, willfully violated Little League rules, they should be punished with appropriate fines and/or suspensions.

But guess what? It gets complicated. We live in a society where the nuclear family does not always consist of a mother, a father and their children all living under one roof. A lot of kids spend part of their time with one parent in neighborhood X, part of their time with another parent in neighborhood Y, and the rest of their time with an aunt, uncle or grandparent in neighborhood Z. Public school issues in this city encourage parents to list their kids' residences in whatever neighborhood affords their children with the best opportunity. Is that cheating? Well, perhaps, but frankly, given the circumstances, most parents who care about their children, are not beyond bending the rules (many of them arcane), in order to give their kids a bit of an advantage.

Getting back to Chris Janes's shocking discovery that some of the JRW players may not have come from within the boundaries of their league, if it was such public knowledge that the mayors of the towns some of these kids came from were able to make public pronouncements, how is it that the administers of the National Little League were unable to figure it out on their own? After all, JRW was not an unknown quantity when it entered the tournament this year, they've been around for a very long time. It was no secret to anyone that this was not a rag-tag group of kids from a small corner of Chicago, but an all star team comprised of kids who were selected from far and wide.

Personally I think this kind of recruitment is a bad idea. Why after all is it so important to build an all star team of 12 year olds? There's plenty of time for that in their young careers. 12 and 13 year old kids are still learning the game and in my opinion, winning should not the be all/end all of playing a sport at that age. As the parent of a little leaguer, I've had a lot of experience with 12 and 13 year old ballplayers and can personally say they're all great. The parents are another story.

"Without the boundaries, it's not Little League anymore. Little League stands behind its boundaries 100 percent", said Chris Janes, the coach who blew the whistle on JRW. Now I can't say what goes on in Evergreen Park, but if Mr. Janes really believes that, he's either blind or delusional.

My son's travel team has played in several tournaments in the region, including the 12 U divisional tournament that led up to the Williamsport Little League World Series. In that tournament, (governed by exactly the same rules that govern the LLWS), the team we played, and ultimately beat to win our division, was from another park in Chicago. It was a well established fact that this team recruited players from all over the Chicago area. I knew one of the players very well as he was once on our team in our park's house league. The boy lived within neither park's boundaries. We later encountered another player from that team, their best pitcher, in a Wisconsin tournament. He was representing a team from a suburb that was closer to Kenosha, Wisconsin than Chicago.

And truth be told, half of our park's traveling team is comprised of players from another park. My wife and I don't do it, but parents routinely choose and sign their kids up in little league programs that are miles from their homes. There are many reasons for doing this. Frankly I don't see it as a big deal.

But rules are rules.

That said, from what I understand of the situation, the officials at JRW broke Little League rules by not respecting the boundaries of other leagues within their division. The official Little League rules state that it's OK to do that so long as they get the approval from the officials from the other leagues affected. This apparently did not happen. For their part, the folks in the division seemed to look the other way.

It appears to me that the National Little League looked the other way as well. Let's face it, the story of Jackie Robinson West was a gold mine for them. It was only when their hand was forced that they took action.

Too bad for the kids some say, but they won the tournament unfairly. What about the other kids who didn't get to play because their rightful spots on the team were taken up from kids who didn't legitimately belong there? What about the other teams in the tournaments who got beat unfairly by JRW?

These are legitimate points to be sure.

But the kids who DID make the JRW team, didn't have anything given to them. They worked hard to get where they are, played the games and won enough of them to win the US Championship. They were all (as far as I know) 12 year olds, it's not as if they had a bunch of high school kids playing on the team. From my personal experience with the game, I find it highly unlikely that most of their opponents in the LLWS, including the highly regarded Taney Dragons from Philadelphia, held hard and fast to the boundary rules. Had JRW lost the US tournament, no one would have bothered with investigating them. If as I suspect other teams played fast and easy with the rules, then JRW had no unfair advantage.

The point everyone seems to miss in all the heated conversations about this issue, is that JRW and little league programs everywhere are not simply about the all star teams that represent them in tournaments. They're about the hundreds of kids in each league who with or without any baseball acumen, participate in the house leagues, learning the game, not to get the chance to play
high school, college, or professional baseball, but to learn about teamwork, sportsmanship, fair play, and mostly just to have fun. For some disadvantaged kids, their little league experience may be their one and only outlet to escape an otherwise troubled life.

I can't see much good coming out of stripping the championship from a group of kids who were just doing their best to play baseball, but I do see a great deal of potential harm to little league programs across the country. Yes the blatant violation of the rules is wrong and needs to be addressed. But from my own experience, for one reason or other, mostly out of convenience, the majority of adults involved in little league baseball at one time or other violate the spirit if not the letter of the boundary rules. As we have seen, ninety nine times out of a hundred, the officials are more than happy to look the other way, as indeed they should.

In this case if it were up to me, I would sanction the administrators of JRW and the district for their transgressions, and maybe even some of the administrators in the Little League for dropping the ball on this.

But I would leave the kids out of it.

That last part is not going to happen, it's a done deal as the players of JRW have been stripped of their hard earned championship and all the other championships that led up to it.

How typical, it's the adults who fuck up and the kids who get screwed.

The game still matters

In a time when folks are declaring gloom and doom for the sport of baseball, this year's Little League World Series produced no fewer than two powerful, feel good stories that prove the game we still refer to as "The National Pastime" matters.

"Throw like a girl" has been the mantra of baseball fans across this country as one of the highlights of this year's Series was a flame throwing 5'4" 13 year old from Pennsylvania named Mo'ne Davis. Young Ms. Davis, only the 18th girl to participate in the Little League World Series became the first member of the female persuasion to pitch a shutout in the competition held annually in Williamsport, PA. That performance against South Nashville on Friday August 15 turned Mo'ne into a national celebrity.

It was hard not to root for Ms. Davis and her team the Taney Dragons from Center City, Philadelphia. The Dragons team, much like my son's travel baseball team, and decidedly unlike most of their competition in the LLWS is integrated; its players and coaches reflect the multi-cutural population of the city they represent. Also like my son's team, one of its best players happens to be a girl.

But I couldn't root for the Taney Dragons on August 21st because that day the team from Philadelphia faced the team from my home town, Chicago: Jackie Robinson West.

The team that is known affectionately around these parts simply by its initials JRW, is an all-star team, its members chosen from a league of the same name located on the south side of Chicago. Much has been made about this all African American team representing a part of town that lately has gotten more publicity for bad things rather than good. People have expressed amazement at their success given that in our time fewer and fewer African American players play in the Major Leagues and interest in the game in the black community is at an all time low.

But there's nothing at all amazing about the success of JRW. The league was established back in 1971 by Joseph H. Haley, an educator by profession. His league has become one of this city's most cherished institutions, thousands of Chicagoans from all walks of life including a few major leaguers have had the honor of calling themselves members of Jackie Robinson West. In the words of the Illinois General Assembly's official proclamation marking Mr. Haley's passing in 2005:

From a league with just five teams, Jackie Robinson West Little League has grown to more than 1,000 players on 36 teams; the league has instilled the values of good citizenship, perseverance, team effort, sportsmanship,and self-discipline in generations of young people; Mr. Haley wanted the children in his league to get a good education and taught them that school was more important than baseball.

On the evening of August 21st, the alderman of the ward where my son plays baseball, arranged for a viewing party to watch the game between JRW and the Taney Dragons, which would determine who would go on to the US finals. It was one of dozens of such parties around Chicago to support the team that represents not just the south side, but our entire city.

In that game Chicago would never look back after scoring four runs in the bottom of the first. Despite a late rush from Philly who down by one run, loaded the bases in the top of the last inning, the game ended 6-5, JRW.

The mostly white crowd at our event went wild when Philly harmlessly lined out to the Chicago second baseman to end the game.

It took a spectacular double play to win the next game against a strong, highly favored Nevada team who smoked both JRW and the Dragons in their first meetings. But in the end, JRW won that game too and became the US Little League Champions.

Unfortunately, JRW lost the World Championship to South Korea the following day but it hardly mattered. The city of Chicago threw them a huge party that culminated Downtown at the Pritzker Pavillion in Millennium Park. It was the kind of celebration normally held all too infrequently when one of this city's professional sports teams wins a championship. Sadly I missed the event as I was out of town.

Public figures and executives from both of Chicago's major league baseball teams were there to speak words of encouragement to the young players and to all young people of the city, black, brown and white, at least those who cared to listen. The message was simple: their most important job was to get a good education first, and good things most likely will follow.

In both victory and defeat, JRW has represented Chicago honorably. As a result, the team and the league have rightfully been embraced by the entire city.


Coming as it did on the heels of a well publicized national tragedy, some writers could not resist the temptation to frame the story of a Little League baseball team winning the national championship within the subtext of race in America. In a blog for The Nation, directly under a picture of the young members of the JRW team aboard a float being cheered on by throngs of white people during a parade in Williamsport, Dave Zirin wrote this:

... the events of this summer show with bracing clarity that there are huge swaths of this country that love black culture and hate black people.

The whole point of Zirin's piece was to compare the public's reaction to this year's Little League World Series, to that of the shooting of an unarmed black teenager Michael Brown, by a Ferguson, Missouri police officer. Zirin expresses his astonishment over JRW "beating the odds" as an all black team from the inner city where: "the gutting of the social safety net, the explosion of economic inequality and the hollowing out of our cities" has decimated "Little League programs, Boys & Girls Clubs and community centers: the very infrastructure baseball demands." These are the very conditions Zirin argues, that paved the way for incidents like the one in Ferguson.

In other words, blacks don't play baseball anymore, so the story goes, because society has taken away the apparatus for them to do so.

If anything, the events of this summer have proved (to anyone who didn't know it already) that theory to be nothing but hooey.

The point Zirin seems to miss is that successful Little League programs, like so many other successful institutions involving children, are not the result of any social safety net, but are the result of the one most important factor in determining the course of a young person's life: parents.

From an article written by Bob Cook in Forbes Magazine, published just before the start of this year's tournament:

What makes Jackie Robinson West succeed as a league is the same as what makes any league succeed, no matter the players’ race, ethnicity or income status. 

“It’s a combination of factors,” said (Joseph Haley's son who took over the league upon his father's death, Bill) Haley, a dispatcher for the Chicago Transit Authority. “Our league has a strong tradition. The coaches were once players. It’s taken hold in the community. You pull kids from a limited area, so there’s a sense of community to start out with. Being state champions (the league has won two Illinois championships in a row) is incidental to what we’re trying to do.”

The key, Haley said, is not the children. “It’s the adults. Baseball is a family game. It starts with just a dad playing catch with his kids. You’ve got a dad who hits pop flies on a Sunday. That’s where the connection comes in. 

“That’s how it started for me.”

Those words ring true for anyone who has ever been involved with Little League baseball at any level.

In expressing his amazement over the success of the team from the Jackie Robinson West league, Dave Zirin (who happens to be white), seems to fall into the trap of mistakenly assuming that African American communities are places filled with nothing but hopelessness and despair, fueled by poverty and racism. Implicitly he's saying that it's hard for black folks to do anything on their own without help from above. As such, characterizing the success of JRW as "astonishing" and "against all odds" is parochial at best, patronizing at worst.

The success of the Dragons and JRW teams are tremendous accomplishments to be sure, but no different from those of any other Little League team who reaches those heights. What Zirin and other social commentators fail to take into account is that the stories of Mo'ne Davis, her Taney Dragons teammates, and the team from Jackie Robinson West are not simply triumphs of the human spirit, but like anything worthwhile in life, are the result of countless hours of dedication, hard work, and the pursuit of perfection from everybody involved: the players, the coaches, the community, and especially the parents.

That's a valuable lesson all of us need to learn.

Thank you Dragons and JRW for being such magnificent teachers.