NEW HAVEN, Conn. — Nine-year-old Jericho Scott is a good baseball player — too good, it turns out.
The right-hander has a fastball that tops out at about 40 mph. He throws so hard that the Youth Baseball League of New Haven told his coach that the boy could not pitch any more. When Jericho took the mound anyway last week, the opposing team forfeited the game, packed its gear and left, his coach said. Officials for the three-year-old league, which has eight teams and about 100 players, said they will disband Jericho’s team, redistributing its players among other squads, and offered to refund $50 sign-up fees to anyone who asks for it. They say Jericho’s coach, Wilfred Vidro, has resigned.
But Vidro says he didn’t quit and the team refuses to disband. Players and parents held a protest at the league’s field on Saturday urging the league to let Jericho pitch. “He’s never hurt any one,” Vidro said. “He’s on target all the time. How can you punish a kid for being too good?” The controversy bothers Jericho, who says he misses pitching. “I feel sad,” he said. “I feel like it’s all my fault nobody could play.” “I think it’s discouraging when you’re telling a 9-year-old you’re too good at something,” said his mother, Nicole Scott. “The whole objective in life is to find something you’re good at and stick with it. I’d rather he spend all his time on the baseball field than idolizing someone standing on the street corner.”
League attorney Peter Noble says the only factor in banning Jericho from the mound is his pitches are just too fast.
I suspect that these over-sensitive parents didn’t want to see their little snowflake humiliated. In the age of idiocracy, mediocrity is becoming the standard. Well done.
I saw this earlier. It made me sick. Let’s crush talent and individual choice at an early age.
I remember playing sports at that age where some players were simply better than me by a long shot. I learned how to compete fairly in an unfair world.
This is terrible.
The attorney even made it clear that they were banning him for pitching to fast.
Just awful.
Children are too delicate and must be protected from the emotional damage caused by failure.
Idiots! Maybe the Youth Baseball League of New Haven is taking a cue from the Olympics, where softball is being eliminated because the American women’s team is just to good.
Perhaps we should give all the teams equal time with this kid. That would be the socially conscientious thing to do.
After all, we can’t have someone out performing someone else. They might get a better paying job.
And that just wouldn’t be fair!
You guys are all asswipes. You picture yourselves as young Mr. Scott and wouldn’t want your own success interfered with.
But what is the purpose of “LITTLE LEAGUE” baseball? To cull through the human population and recruit the special few for the big leagues?==or is it for the local boys and girls to get together and have——–wait for it—– fun?
I quit little league after getting a base hit and the coach sustituted a faster runner. He ran on an infield popup. Faster, but much dumber. Coach wanted to win.
In fact, little league should be organized and run for FUN!!!! Everyone on the team should play. Everyone should be rotated each inning to every position on the field.
No reason at all for no one to get hits because Scot is a superior pitcher. No reason for Scot to be banned. Rotate the positions, everyone has fun except the egotists who want their superiority to be fawned over.
#6, apparently you’ve missed the distinction between an organized league and having a bunch of neighborhood kids form up to play a game ad hoc.
#6. Bobbo- thats about the dumbest thing I have ever seen you post.
#6: It’s a nice dream though isn’t it?
I guess it would just be too easy to let him move up a league and pitch to older kids who aren’t intimidated so much by faster pitches.
By the way,
#6 You are an asswipe too. Get over it! It was a long time ago and coaches have always wanted to win first, last and always. Life isn’t fair especially to somebody who so freely calls his brothers asswipes.
#6 – You quit baseball because your coach put in a pinch runner? Seriously? Did you quit football after the coach decided to hand-off instead of throwing a pass to you?
As for rotating “each inning to every position”,well, that’s just idiotic. First, how will a player ever learn to play a position if they only get to play it one inning every game? Second, why would this only apply to baseball? The same logic puts the shortest kid at center (basketball) the fastest kid at tackle (football) and completely ignores that fact that positions are specialized and require different physical attributes, skill sets and mental preparation.
Stupid.
The only real question I have here is why aren’t the kid’s parents pushing for him to be in a better league where he will be challenged.
This is just more PC crap. The US succeeded in producing the most innovations of any country because we encouraged & rewarded individual excellence, we didn’t punish it.
Welcome to the new communism…
@ 6 Bobbo
When I was playing soccer in 1st grade the coach wanted us to win very very badly. He made us work harder than any coach after him. I was doing wind sprints in the cold. I took a ball to the nose and started bleeding, but I was still on the hook. No free rides.
That was a great year of soccer.
Kids should be allowed to be competitive. The little league association didn’t ban him from playing backyard baseball… those kids can still have fun.
How much less fun is a no hitter? The kids still get to field, they just don’t get to run the bases (as easily). Also, how cool would it be for the kid that scores a hit off that kid?
Yep, how stupid could I be? MORE kiddies having MORE fun. Everyone participates.
My challenge fairly raises the question of when childhood should end and the adult world of competition based on merit should begin.
I’m just saying, in most little league baseball, it starts too soon. Full contact football shouldn’t even be allowed until college and who cares about basketball.
Sports obsessed wish fulfilling parental projection is what most kiddie sports is about.
You all should be ashamed of yourselves, and you would be if you had any self-awareness. Go read a book which is what I did after I got pissed off===so, maybe, keep it just the way it is. Good military fodder.
@ 15 Bobbo
Talking about projecting…
You talk about parents trying to force kids to act out their dreams, trying to turn them into something. Then you tell us what to think and do.
Pretty sweet deal.
What we’re to feel:
We should be ashamed
What we’re to do:
Read a book
Honestly, sometimes I can’t tell if you’re trying to be Devil’s Advocate, muck stirrer (saying we aren’t self-aware while implying that you are) or if you’re trying to carve out a cult of people that will think/do as you ask…
>>I quit little league after getting a base hit
>>and the coach sustituted a faster runner.
Baseball (MLB) lost any credibility it ever had when they implemented the “designated hitter” rule. If the effing pitcher can’t hit, let him strike out. Jeez, we’re talking about grownup, EXTREMELY well-paid (overpaid?) men, not precious snowflakes.
That said, what’s the harm in letting the kid play? So his team sweeps the 9-year-old New Haven series, the other teams don’t (especially the pussies who default rather than go to bat against a good pitcher), and everybody moves on.
Bobbo is correct. These are nine y/o kids. They are there to have fun. Winning is all important to the adults, NOT the kids. But it ain’t no stinking fun if the teams aren’t relatively equal.
This is no different than organized Slow Pitch Softball where the participants are there to have fun and maybe imbibe a little while doing so. Or an industrial league.
To those that cry over mediocrity, get a life. Not every kid has the potential of to make the big leagues. There are about 100,000,000 kids in America. There are less than 10,000 playing top level professional sports.
Little League is organized so the kids will learn the game and have fun. It is to teach them how to play. Geeze, some of you are an Umpire’s nightmare. It is the adults that spoil the game for the kids.
#16–Steven===concentrate. Is it the simplest of weak paradoxes that has you unable to see the truth, or only the culpability revealed?
Go to the truth of the issue discussed. Stop attacking the messenger, and yes===look at yourself.
How many parents want the best for their kids, or more often actually want to relive their own values? So, yea==if you aren’t on guard about this, you aren’t a good parent.
The issue here should not be about competitiveness but about safety, both for the pitcher as well as the batters. With a nine year old who throws 40 mph pitches I am more concerned about protecting his arm than the batters getting hit (which will hurt but usually will leave a bruise). At 9 years old his body is not fully developed and throwing that hard could have serious long term repercussions on his development (ask any sports doctor).
This is why most leagues have a limit on the number of pitches a kid can throw a week. I believe in the league my son was in the limit was a max of 40 pitches a week for 10 and under and 70 pitches for 13 and under. With these limited amount of pitches most kids were only pitching a couple of innings a week. It also provided more kids with the opportunity to pitch.
Rather than disband the team over one kid the league should look to other options which address the same safety concerns and keeps all the kids playing. Since pitching is actually about controlling the ball (including the speed) and not just throwing it as hard as you can, why not put a “speed limit” on the pitches for each age group as well. The club is already willing to fork over $50 per player, with most teams having between 12 and 15 players thats between $600 and $750 which could instead be spent on a radar detector to enforce the “speed limit” (a corporate donor could be found if it was a lot more expensive). Then when the pitchers pitch have a parent from the opposing team holding the detector on the pitch (with a parent from the pitching watching – perhaps the two score keepers) and if the pitch is over the limit either call it a “no pitch” (but it should still count for his pitch count) or call it a “ball”. My personal thought would be to call the first 5 over the limit pitches as a “no pitch” and after that for the rest of the game they are called “balls”.
I know that it is not in the tradition of this blog to try to provide solutions to a problem, but rather to show why a solution will not work. I am sure there are problems with this proposal that I have not thought about and which some of you will love to point out. I want to say in conclusion though that as much as I enjoy baseball, little league ball is about the kids, helping them to develop physically (safely), mentally and in social skills, which includes learning how to be competitive, and handling both winning and losing with good sportsmanship. I think this proposal meets most of those goals.
On a side note, I would like to commend the US Women’s Softball for the gesture of leaving their shoes at home plate after their final Olympic game. It was a great way to protest the eliminate of the sport from the Olympics. They are a team that is full of class and they showed it.
My kids all hate little league baseball here and don’t play. Basically there is no score or outs. Every player every inning gets an at bat until they hit the ball, if they can’t hit it off of a pitch they get to use a Tee.
It’s lame and extremely boring.
On the other hand, the soccer league is extremely competitive and is a lot of fun.
@ 18 Fusion
The dream of the founder:
“Stotz’s dream of establishing a baseball league for boys to teach fair play and teamwork had come true”
Fun isn’t in that dream, it’s baseball we’re talking about after all.
@ 19 Tenkey
Fine work.
In Grade 9 our rugby team went 0-11 in the B Division. I also got my nose broken twice – yeah the second time really hurt.
In Grade 10 we got a great coach, and by Grade 12 our team was competitive in the A Division. Two years later the seniors and juniors won BC.
Bobbo. I’m sorry you had a bad coach. Fusion, I wasn’t having much fun AND I wasn’t learning anything either. I am competitive and I learned how to compete well through losing, winning, and through a good example, my coach.
My son isn’t competitive so he hikes, bikes, and snow boards. I’ve never tried to push him into a competitive league – he wouldn’t enjoy it.
Competitive sports are ‘competitive’, that’s why you keep score and give out trophies. There are options, but it’s up to the parents to act like grownups and quit living through their kids.
Sorry guys, life ain’t fair. In my house ‘fair’ is the ‘f word’ – we don’t use it.
I had the same problem… I was really tall for my age. Something about being ‘premature’ and then making up for it in spades later on..
The parents would go ballistic when I came up to bat! then once I hit a ‘fastball’ right back at the pitcher… There was a riot. I had to flee home on my bicycle.
Now, I would sue everyone there ‘back into the stone age’.
@ 21 MADGeek
Sounds like a good solution to me.
I think it could even serve to make him a better pitcher. Operating under a constraint like that might lead to other, slower, pitches improving.
He probably could’ve relied on the speed with that age group, but while other pitchers try to throw near the limit, he’ll be mixing it up. Maybe his slider or his curve will be 35 mph.
Also, capping how many pitches they get per week seems easy/reasonable/feasible. Far more reasonable than the solution imposed.
Wide range of opinions here. Good to see. I wasn’t aware that little league had those different options short of standard adult playing, that also is good to see.
What should reasonable people conclude? Maybe that different approaches benefit different interests and there is no such thing as one size fits all?
Hopefully, every parent will encourage their own kiddie according to that kiddies real interest and abilities. They aren’t just pets.
Who the f^ck times pitches at 9-year-olds’ baseball games?
“Maybe… different approaches benefit different interests and there is no such thing as one size fits all?” (#27 Bobbo)
It looks like Bobbo is learning!
A good day for all of us!
This doesn’t make any sense. In our league the 7-8 year olds use pitching machines that are set for 40 mph. How is this kid dangerous if he’s pitching at the same speed they’ve been seeing for the 2 previous years? Most of the pitchers in my son’s league (9-10 year old) pitch in the high 30’s. Plus, with the limits on pitches thrown per week, one kid can’t carry a team. Sounds like the other parent’s were upset because this team was undefeated.
everybody who thinks this kid should not be allowed to pitch has to sit down and watch ‘The Incredibles’ again.
what kind of message does this send to not only the pitcher but everyone else in this league? if you are ‘too’ good, you shouldn’t be allowed to play? maybe we should take the smart kids out of class so they won’t make everyone else look stupid?
jesus. a society that celebrates mediocrity and punishes excellence is doomed.
#32–Pedro==how so. One thing comes to mind, but what are you thinking of?