Wednesday, February 25, 2015

Hildebrandt: What is the role of television in the latest Little League scandal? | SABR

Image result for little league and television ratings

I'm going to go with proximate cause on this one. My knee-jerk reaction was prime suspect. The story of Little League baseball has been about TV ratings ( which translates to ad dollars - can you say ka-ching? ) and has been for decades. This has been going on ever since LL banned Chinese Taipei for having the gall to win so often that the sound of people changing the channel forced their hand.

In the law, a proximate cause is an event sufficiently related to a legally recognizable injury to be held to be the cause of that injury. There are two types of causation in the law: cause-in-fact, and proximate (or legal) cause. Cause-in-fact is determined by the "but for" test: But for the action, the result would not have happened. For example, but for running the red light, the collision would not have occurred. For an act to cause a harm, both tests must be met; proximate cause is a legal limitation on cause-in-fact.
The formal Latin term for "but for" (cause-in-fact) causation, is sine qua non causation.
The main reason would be under the heading of "forseeability".
AKA: The No Duh Test
aka: No Shit Sherlock

Foreseeability[edit]

The most common test of proximate cause under the American legal system is foreseeability. It determines if the harm resulting from an action could reasonably have been predicted. The test is used in most cases only in respect to the type of harm. It is foreseeable, for example, that throwing a baseball at someone could cause them a blunt-force injury. But proximate cause is still met if a thrown baseball misses the target and knocks a heavy object off a shelf behind them, which causes a blunt-force injury. Evident in Corrigan v HSE (2011 IEHC 305).
This is also known as the "extraordinary in hindsight" rule.[4]
Ain't the law fun!!! Extraordinary in hindsight indeed!!!

BINGO!! LLWS has $60 million reasons why this story developed and then crashed and burned in predictable fashion. So Little League Baseball drops a steak on the floor ( expanded media coverage and ratings ) and then throws the dog under the bus ( the kids and the parents ) when the dog snaps up the steak.

The kids get thrown under the bus and Little League Baseball just happily rings the register. Like Major League baseball owners during the PED era, do you think they'll give any of the money back or suffer any stain from the story? No, of course not.

I don;t blame the kids, the coaches or the parents as much as the organization in that they promote and position themselves as the guardians of the purity of the sport against those other youth organizations that would professionalize and prostitute the purity of the competition. And yet they are the biggest pimps and whores on the block.

Little League Baseball long ago sold their soul to ESPN and commoditized kids. Now they both want to act all holier than thou and indignant and perpetuate the meme that they are built on neighborhood kids and volunteers. It's all rather sickening to watch and listen too. Shame on both of them.

They truly are a junior-NCAA in how they take advantage of kids. At least with the NCAA, the kids get a scholarship.

from SABR.org:
Hildebrandt: What is the role of television in the latest Little League scandal? | SABR:

Hildebrandt: What is the role of television in the latest Little League scandal?
From SABR member Chuck Hildebrandt at SABRMedia.org, the website of SABR's Baseball and the Media Research Committee, on February 17, 2015:
A lot of ink and pixels have been spilled during the past week about the scandal involving Chicago’s Jackie Robinson West (JRW) Little League team. If you haven’t learned the specifics by now, JRW annexed parts of three adjacent districts, redrew the map for their own district based on this misapportionment and, most damning of all, backdated the map in an attempt to deceive the officials at Little League International.
Most of the criticism has centered on the adults involved, and that’s certainly appropriate. It’s practically certain that the kids neither initiated nor facilitated the fraud, although they are definitely being held accountable for the misdeed after having been stripped of their championship. As painful as it is for them to be punished for something they did not have a hand in or knowledge of, there is no other real choice. They won their championship with ineligible players because of a fraud carried out by the adults charged with stewarding and mentoring them, and if nothing else, they will hopefully learn that if it is found out that you won by cheating, even inadvertently or unknowingly, the spoils of your victory will be taken away. That’s a good life lesson to learn at that early age, and they will surely never forget it.
What about the adults in all this, though?

Read the full article here:
http://sabrmedia.org/2015/02/16/what-is-the-role-of-television-in-the-latest-little-league-scandal/

'via Blog this'

This is what JRWLL ran afoul of "Bona Fide Continuous Habitation". And no cheating, you cannot consult with an attorney. Because nothing screams "Let the Kids Play" like a five page legalese document that describes whether or not a kid can play in your league or not. And this would be your nightly reading before you registered, with some follow-up work come All-Star time. I don't even want to get into all the exceptions and league boundary maps and all that other bureaucratic red-tape that Little League revels in.

BONA FIDE CONTINUOUS HABITATION
http://www.littleleague.org/assets/forms_pubs/tournaments/residence-eligibility-requirements.pdf

And for those who want to make it a black and white ( no pun intended ) issue, I ask you: Do you want to put any amount of money that the other leagues that were "awarded" victories would survive an audit of their roster versus their boundary map? Step right up, 'cause I'll take your money.

from dnainfo.com
http://www.dnainfo.com/chicago/20141216/morgan-park/jackie-robinson-west-broke-residency-rules-suburban-league-claims


Andrew McCutcheon offers eye opening perspective on LL scandal
www.theplayerstribune.com/left-out/




Unfortunately, this is where the path has taken us.

from Amazon.com: Why Johnny Hates Sports: Why Organized Sports are failing our Children
http://www.amazon.com/Why-Johnny-Hates-Sports-Organized/dp/075700041X
Sports is an important topic in many families and schools in the USA and abroad. Engh takes a courageous position and that is to say, we, as parents and amateur coaches have twisted the idea of organized sports competition and made it into a grueling exercise for its innocent victims: our children. Engh rightly points out that parents and ignorant coaches who use their amateur leadership position to wrongly influence our children as to what fair sportsmanship is all about. Engh points out that "winning" has unfortunately become the Holy Grail of youth competition. I'd rather prefer what I heard one Chinese table tennis champion say a few years back, "Winning is temporary, friendship is permanent." You only have to attend a local sports event or pick up a newspaper to hear about the tragic ways children are exposed to bickering parents, foul-mouthed opponents, loud mouth fans, unrewarded referees. Engh places himself in a vulnerable position to put the spotlighht on the very people he is asking to support his organization nationwide: the coaches, schools, youth organizations and parents. In youth sports, the child is supposed to come first, like it was in sandlot baseball and other sports in the past. But now "the organization" comes first, and corporate sponsors. children in youth sports have become a commodity. I wouldn't be surpised if some youth organizations try to ban his book because it exposes some of the politics, in-fighting and complete insensitivity that exists in youth sports today. There are many good, sensitive parents and single persons who are engaged in helping youth sports. I hope everyone of them buys a couple dozen of Engh's book and distributes them to their local libraries. Good luck, Mr. Engh ! We hope your book enlightens the next person who comes along planning to use an amateur coach position or parent-fan to fullfill his or her unrealized dreams of athletic greatness. H T White
http://norwell.wickedlocal.com/article/20140425/NEWS/304259927
According to data collected by Statistic Brain in 2013, 37 percent of youth sports participants wished they could play without parents watching. And an i9 Sports survey in 2012 found that same view among 31 percent of the kids it polled. "They said mostly because adults yell too much, are too distracting, make players nervous and put pressure on them to play better and win," i9 Sports reported. The same survey found 84 percent said they had at some point quit a team or wished to quit because it wasn't fun anymore, teammates were mean and the sport took away too much time from other activities.
As for the parents, according to an article in the Journal of Research in Character Education from 2005, 100 percent of moms and dads polled reported that they had at least once or twice acted like a bad sport after a game. Eighty-four percent admitted to feeling guilty at least once or twice for the way they had behaved at a youth sports event, according to the study.
Involvement in a child's sport requires balance, according to EducatedSportsParent.com - not too much and not too little. "However, what appears to be the most significant finding is that it may not actually be what you do that affects your child's experience. Rather what appears to be important is how your child perceives what you do," according to the article. Money can also influence parental behavior in youth sports. According to a recent article, a Utah State University study found that youths whose parents spend more money on their sporting events and equipment tend to not enjoy competing as much. "It wasn't necessarily about spending more, but it was those families where parents exhibited more forms of parental pressure ... seeing their kids' sport as a commodity," assistant professor Travis Dorsch said. "They put the money in and they expect something out of it, and that's where those pressure behaviors were coming in."
Jim Taylor, an adjunct psychology professor at the University of San Francisco, wrote in the Huffington Post about the importance of stressing process over results when talking to a child about sports and competition. "Parents, good or bad competition, give your children a hug, tell them you love them, and ask them if they're hungry," he wrote. "If you're too excited about a good performance or too disappointed in a bad one, stay the heck away from your children because they will sense your emotions no matter how hard you try to mask them." 
See more at:
 http://norwell.wickedlocal.com/article/20140425/NEWS/304259927#sthash.QO6SzVAo.dpuf





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