“Everyone gets a trophy” infiltrates Little League baseball

I suppose I should have been clearer — at the all star level, which is very competitive, this rule will compromise things.

Kids who are 12 and 13 years old are way past tee-ball and coach pitch. They’re competitive and want to win. This is insulting to kids who are largely mature enough to recognize who the best kids on the team are and that those kids should be playing in order to win.

Plus, even with that, at the all star level there is still a requirement for every kid to play either three outs in the field or get an at bat. That’s enough in an 18 out game.

Kids are playing better baseball in travel now every weekend than at these Little League All-Star events

If someone's son/daughter is really good at baseball/softball and these all star teams bow out quickly (and lets face it, thousands of teams across the US do), "club baseball" is the way to go in the first place.   Unless the all star teams keep playing just not in the tournament, that would be a different story.   

I have coached many a Little League all-star tournament with my three boys so I have plenty of experience with subbing in these games under the old rules. There are pros and cons to the new rules but I’m generally in favor of the CBO rule, which is the way many leagues have always run their regular season.

Under the old rules, teams would always take 13 players because then 10-13 never had to play the field. If you took 12, 10-12 had to play six consecutive outs in the field and get one at-bat. With 13, 10-13 only had to get one at-bat. The notion that it’s bad to incentivize leagues to take 12 because that 13th kid isn’t making the team is laughable and could only be spoken by someone who has never known a 13th player who didn’t play the field the entire summer while his mediocre team didn’t win its district like the overwhelming majority of teams. That kid would be much better off not making the team, being sad for 24 hours and going to summer camp and having fun instead of going to nightly baseball practice with a sociopath coach knowing he’s never going to play in a game except for his one at-bat often with two outs and no one on base because the coach can “get it over with” in a low leverage situation.

The new rule forces coaches to actually coach 10-12 both during the regular season and during the all-star season because they’re now actually going to play. I think it’s good to incentivize leagues to develop more than 9 kids and to reward depth. Deeper programs will do better than shallow programs. In both baseball and basketball, the two sports I have coached the most, the players at the end of the bench on an all star or travel team at 10 or 11 often wind up being strong varsity players by the time they get to high school because the kids who develop early and are 5’8” in 6th grade are often 5’9” in high school and far from the biggest: fastest strongest kid who dominates on that basis. You don’t want to lose those players because they’re miserable and don’t get opportunities at 10 or 11 and walk away.

When I coached, I would always take 12 kids and ply them all at least 6 outs in the field. At the plate conference before each game, they’d ask how many players we had and, every time, I’d say 12 and the other guy would say 13. And him and the umps would look at me like I was an idiot because everyone had to play. And, stunningly, we had a good team who came in second every year to a team that was really good and we wouldn’t have beaten had we take 9 or 13. We beat all the other teams in our district even though they only played 9 kids and had 4 miserable kids at the end of their bench who all struck out every time they came up because they had zero confidence and we’re only in there because there was a rule that made their coach bat them once.

I would say that a different rule might make sense farther along in the tournament. If you tell me you’re going to play it like a professional baseball game starting in regionals, that probably makes sense because then you have some really good teams and, and that point, players 10-12 have played a lot of good baseball over the course of the summer. But there are thousands of mediocre district all star teams all around the country who aren’t great. The new rules aren’t going to cause bad teams to win their District. The better teams are still going to win, generally the team with the best three or four pitcher rotation as that’s where all the games are win or lost. Quality depth will help some teams and that should be rewarded.

One downside to the new rule not mentioned are that it does take some strategy out of the manager’s hand. Kind of like the old NL argument for pitchers hitting. Being a manager will be way less stressful now as you just set your lineup and let it ride without worrying about getting everyone an at-bat or into the field if you were crazy enough not to have 13 players. The other is that larger leagues will have a competitive advantage over smaller ones. They try to address this by allowing a District to make an exception to the 12 player roster rule for smaller leagues. That seems prone to abuse unless their are clear standards for how that will be applied.

One other thing I’m not clear about is the penalty if you show up with fewer than 12 players to a game after you put 12 on your roster because a kid is on vacation. Last year, the rule was that you’d lose your adult first base coach in that situation. I suspect a lot of teams will be willing to have a kid coach first and make number 12 on the roster someone who isn’t great at baseball but spends a lot of time at the family’s beach house during the summer.

The rule about not taking an out if someone is unable to hit will definitely be abused and put umps in a really bad situation. I’m guessing the rationale is to protect kids and not send them up there while compromised but that almost never happens. Maybe make exceptions for head injuries that occur during the game.

So, now, let's a get a pitch clock for Little League! 

It has been my experience that the opposing manager never makes the choice but rather allows the team that is now short to choose on its own because for all of the weaknesses of  traditional local youth sports, most of the people involved are decent.

I am currently running a 4 team pool play tournament with the top two finishers advancing to an elimination stage with the top finishers from three other pools. At the first game, two players on one team brought the wrong jersey.  Before it was even brought to my attention, the opposing manager came over and told me he didn't care.  One team asked to change the schedule for the last day because they had just gotten a bunch of Yankees tickets.  The other three managers agreed to flip the game times even though one manager was going to have to come back earlier from a trip to make it happen.  A team forgot to report a substitution in the batting order.  The other team knew but didn't pursue it as batting out of order.  

Most people are decent and in it for the right reasons.