The Incredibles and Youth Baseball

http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/news/story?id=3553475

In many ways, the life of a columnist is fairly simple: find an issue that you think will interest readers, and complain about it. Conflict and disagreement is interesting, so columnists are often looking for things they find controversial or annoying. I enjoy the column format, but I find a more free-flowing analytical format more interesting.

This is less political, but there are clear political dimensions to it. The AP summarizes as follows:

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.

As far as I can tell, a youth baseball league, in the name of "fairness," is not allowing the best pitcher to pitch. The social dimensions of this are pretty stark, I think.

1. The 9-year old African American has a data point to support a belief in a white-run, deliberately oppressive society.

First off, I don't believe that racism is a force here. I think that human idiocy, a far more powerful force, is the driving factor.

But fast forward five to seven years into the future, when the nine-year old pitcher is an adolescent, opinionated young man (I was there once). He will remember this incident, I'm sure; I remember my own Little League stories from when I was even younger than this. (My first at bat in the Fall League as a cleanup hitter was a fielder's choice, 4-6.) He looks back and notices that he was singled out. As a black kid. By a white power structure.

In essence, a talented black child was restricted from using his talents, simply because he was too talented. If I were an African-American in his shoes, racism would certainly occur to me. And you certainly can't blame him if it does.

2. This is the worst of modern liberalism.

For good and important reasons, modern liberalism is all about fairness. This example is a negative application of a positive goal. In "Harrison Bergeron," Kurt Vonnegut paints a picture of a dystopian future where everyone is brought down to a level of base equality in the name of fairness. He starts out by writing, "The year was 2081, and everybody was finally equal." I get the feeling that there's a little bit of that ethic going on here. "Harrison" is a short story about egalitarianism gone awry, and this is much the same.

3. What is the lesson to the other kids?

When the coaches say that they're not going to let their kids play, the message is quite obvious: if something is hard, and the odds seem stacked against you, don't bother. Just complain. Rather than learning that hard work is the righteous way to confront these situations, they learn about litigation, and politicking, and, more colloquially, "bitching."

4. There are other, more sane approaches to address the child's exceptional talent!

The main one, of course, is to limit the amount of pitching that EVERY kid can do in the league, simply in the name of arm health. Little Leagues across the world have been instituting pitch count limits and innings limits; if every pitcher is subjected to a 3 innings/week cap, it's certainly not unreasonable for the kids to try to hit him for those 3 innings. That, of course, would be a much more reasonable approach to creating some manner of "fairness."

The best popular statement of opposition to this gross application of egalitarianism was in the Pixar film The Incredibles, directed by the inimitable Brad Bird. Jericho is exceptional, and I hope that enough people see that to give him every chance to develop.