Why I Dislike the Little League World Series

I played baseball in my youth - not just at the rec level, but also on traveling teams that were competitive around the area. I also went to many camps and learned a lot about how the game should be played and such. Having thought about the Little League World Series (LLWS), and how it's now broadcast on TV nationally and worldwide, this is clearly a terrible idea for the kids involved. Here's why:

1) Most of the kids involved belong playing against 13-14 year olds (kids their size). This is perhaps the worst crime of the whole thing. If you look at the height-weight statistics of the players, many of them are a few standard deviations above the normal height and weight of a 12-year old kid. When I was 12 I was 5-foot-nothing (if that), and weighed 90 lbs (if that). I threw a baseball in the mid 50's and got people out when I pitched by being accurate and throwing good off-speed pitches. These kids, particularly the successful pitchers, are essentially full-grown adults from a muscular perspective. This year, there was a "kid" who was 6'2" weighed 200 lb. and could throw a baseball 75 MPH. The problem is that these kids have gotten to where they are by being bigger, stronger and/or faster than the kids around them, not because they've developed the skills they'll need to succeed later (although some of them have, to be sure). This is a terrible thing for the long-term development of these players - they aren't going to improve by striking out smaller kids who didn't freakisly finish puberty years ahead of the curve. They don't belong on the same field, in fact. They belong playing up against people of a similar level of physical development. This same thing happened to a guy in a league down the road from my team when I was 12. He was 5'10", 170 at 12 and he was by far the best player even though he didn't even throw a ball correctly. He could just power it faster by virtue of having fully developed muscles. When he got to high school, though, everyone caught up in strength and he went from being the best to being mediocre because he lacked fundamentals. The fact is that the way to get better is to play against people at your skill level or better - not by beating up on weaker players, particularly when they're literally just weaker.

2) 12-year old minds aren't ready for that kind of pressure . It's bad enough the say some normal little league coaches/parents build up local games for kids. But being on national television and having (potentially anyway) your failures broadcast on ESPN to everyone who wants to watch seems like it's pretty tough for anyone to take, much less a child. You don't really see any stories about what happens to the winners or the losers of those games, but I'm betting there are some screwed up kids afterwards on the losing team. Probably much of the competitive spirit is driven by the parents, and we know this is usually a bad idea. 12-year-olds just want to act 12.

3) It's not really about what little league team has the best kids this year . The LLWS was sort of a cute idea. A grass-roots program to let teams from everywhere compete across the country and eventually some team would win. The problem is that it doesn't really work that way. 99.9% of the little league teams have absolutely no chance of winning at all, regardless of how good the coaching is. To compete, you need kids who are huge. Children cannot compete with full-grown adults in almost any sport-like activity. It almost doesn't matter how skilled they are. If you look carefully at the LLWS teams over the last few decades, you'll notice that a few program nearly always make it to the top, and it's not because they've just continually been lucky enough to grow larger kids. They recruit from well beyond their small-town range, and parents move or drive long distances to get their children to play for a team that can compete. Sometimes this is good for the kids, since they get to play for what is probably a good coach (although I've seen some pretty boneheaded coaching moves in the LLWS), but these teams essentially have no competition until they reach the LLWS since, as a rule, they are just physically superior to normal little league teams. This is usually a bad thing since they will be just beating up on lesser players and thus not improving.