DEFENDING THOSE 'IDIOT' BASEBALL COACHES... GOOD HELP'S HARD TO FIND

(Originally appeared Sat., Aug. 12.)

Thanks to Rick Reilly's column in Sports Illustrated, everyone has had a chance to weigh in on the youth baseball coaches who intentionally walked the other team's best hitter -- in the championship game of a rec league for nine- and 10-year-olds -- and pitched to a scrawny cancer survivor, who predictably made the final out.

In Bountiful, Utah, it was the championship game -- Red Sox vs. Yankees in a rec league where every kid on the team gets to bat and there's a four-run mercy rule for each inning. You might have played in something similar.

There's a good discussion about this at Baseball Musings. One point which has failed to come up, as far I've seen, is that while you can't defend what these Yankees coaches did, you can certainly defend them.

Granted, it looks as if one them lied/tried to play dumb by claiming they didn't know the boy was a cancer survivor, but perhaps that was due to embarrassment. (Reilly clearly wasn't buying it.)

The coaches, Bob Farley and Shaun Farr, should be embarrassed, but if this league is about learning, then that applies to the adults too, not just the kids. Condemn what they did all you like, and you should, but so long as your knowledge of these guys is limited to that one mistake, you shouldn't infer anything else about them.

Simply put, they should be forgiven and given a chance to make amends.

Can't speak for Bountiful, Utah -- couldn't even find it on a map -- but in the small towns where I have lived and covered sports for smaller daily newspapers, the struggle to find enough adult volunteers to coach, officiate and organize youth and high school sports was and is a familiar refrain. Perhaps Bountiful is an exceptional case in this regard, but not many children's sports associations are so knee-deep in committed and dedicated volunteers that they can start telling people to take a hike over one mistake.

Grown men who single out a nine-year-old cancer survivor for the sake of a plastic trophy are clearly committed and dedicated. Farley and Farr just need to learn a better way to act on their commitment and dedication. For a few regrettable seconds, they clearly lost sight of the big picture, which is that everyone's there to learn and have fun.

STAY CLASSY

In February, yours truly had, albeit on a much smaller platform than Rick Reilly's, a gift-wrapped opportunity to use the bully pulpit. Long story short: In my next-to-last week at the Simcoe Reformer before moving to Ottawa, the county's largest public high school, Simcoe Composite School, opened its new gymnasium.

The first basketball game there was a junior boys game between Simcoe, which was in first place in the league, and Port Dover, the smallest school in the county, who was winless and only had only the minimum five players that day.

The final score was 100-33 (no need to guess who scored the 100). It got back to me that the SCS coach, a young man named James Warman, gave his team the goal of hitting the century mark as a way to keep his players motivated after they led by more than 40 points at halftime, since the playoffs were the following week.

Thus challenged, the Simcoe Sabres kept playing full-court pressure defence and taking three-point shots throughout the second half. The optics were fool's good: Big school with the shiny new gym hangs a hundred points on the weak team from the small school.

The bully pulpit was begging to be used, but as the facts and arguments were marshalled, it became clear that this was not simply about the kids, and big school vs. small school. The coach, Warman, was also in the story, just like these Yankees coaches in Utah.

Here was a guy volunteering his time out of the goodness of his heart and a willingness to pay back what his coaches had done for him. He thought he was doing the right thing, playing to win, and the frustration he felt at being questioned about it coursed through his voice as we talked on the phone.

"It was maybe not the right idea," he said. Like the coaches in Bountiful, pride might made him stop short of admitting straight out that he was wrong, but after we were through talking, it sunk in that it was unfair to do a hatchet job on a volunteer.

There was nothing to be gained by making a good person sour on ever coaching again. Perhaps that's the difference between writing for S.I. and those who can only dream of writing for it.

The column still appeared in the following Monday's Reformer -- "SCS stands for Stay Classy, Sabres." The stance that Simcoe acted like poor sports that day was still there, but the tone was a little more nuanced, I would like to think.

That's what the Reilly column perhaps should have reflected. It's one thing to end on the childhood cancer survivor vowing to become a better hitter so that next year, he'll be the one getting walked.

A better epilogue would see those coaches who humiliated him this year helping him achieve that goal next summer. That is restorative justice.

That's all for now. Send your thoughts to neatesager@yahoo.ca.