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

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

Baseball, JRWLL and the soft bigotry of low expectations

http://wakingupnow.com/blog/error-bigotry-and-bigots

Generally speaking, in this country it is not identifying the problems we face that separates us as a country. We're pretty good at that part.  It is in finding the solutions where we begin to diverge.

Nothing illustrates this point more clearly to me than two recent stories from ESPN about the great success of the Jackie Robinson West Little League team and the related issue of the decades long decline of African-Americans playing baseball.

Nobody would disagree that when the numbers go from 27% to 19% to less than 8% in four decades that there is a current problem at play. Nobody would argue with the identification of that as a problem.

from ESPN:

Seattle Mariners manager -- MLB not reaching blacks - ESPN: 

"It's concerning," McClendon said. "Not just from a managerial standpoint but from a player standpoint, in what's happening with baseball in the inner cities. I think from all the conversations I've had, I know Major League Baseball is committed to bringing [it] back to the inner cities. I think from a philosophical standpoint we're missing some ideas that need to be in there."

The number of African-American players in the game is down to 7.8 percent. In 1995, African-Americans comprised of 19 percent of the big league rosters and in 1975 it was its highest at 27 percent.

'via Blog this'

After reading McClendon's comments as well as the following article about the Jackie Robinson Little League team my fear is that we will somehow once again run headlong into the morass of the soft bigotry of low expectations. When the facts on the ground seem to be telling such a different narrative. The facts are kind of funny like that. They tend to tell the truth. Others twist the facts to their liking, to suit an agenda or to fit with a narrative they've been clinging to. Follow the facts, the facts are your friends.

from ESPN:
http://espn.go.com/chicago/story/_/id/11418568/chicago-little-league-champs-return-heroes

While the words "South Side" are often shorthand beyond Chicago for gangs, shootings and poverty, the people who live here see a more nuanced picture.

 "These are middle-class families," said Jamieson Clay, a relative of Joshua Houston, the pitching and hitting hero of the U.S. championship game. "Ninety percent of the boys have both a mother and a father at home with them and the fathers are playing a pretty active role in their sons' lives."

 The team is built around a core of longtime baseball families, Clay said. Joshua Houston has older brothers who play high school and college baseball. His father is the team's pitching coach.

Of the Jackie Robinson West players who attend Chicago public schools, most attend magnet and charter schools, which indicates their parents made the effort to enroll them in special programs. One boy has two parents who are both Chicago police sergeants, while a second boy has a dad who is a Chicago police officer. Coach Darold Butler is a Union Pacific railroad engineer.

"The values of dignity, winning with grace, losing with grace, we can't take credit for that," Butler said. "Those come from their parents."

• 90% of the boys have an intact family environment 
• Most attend magnet and charter schools

Heaven forbid? Don't these kids and their families know that these are rather conservative, traditional values that the modern day narrative implies that  African-Americans should only embrace with the understanding that they will be referred to as an Uncle Tom / sell-out / or traitor to their race?

(or worse)
http://news.yahoo.com/high-school-girl-taunted-beaten-bus-stop-acting-035032786.html

After reading that article, if I didn't know any better. I would have thought these kids and their families fell right out of the The Cosby Show or Michael J. Fox's conservative Republican caricature Alex Keaton in Family Ties.   Not that there's anything wrong with that.



And if you are not quite sure what the phrase the soft bigotry of low expectations means, The Cosby Show provided the perfect illustration IMO. CLASSIC!!!

from mentalfloss.com:
http://mentalfloss.com/article/56559/20-things-you-might-not-know-about-cosby-show

4. COSBY WORRIED ABOUT THE STUDIO AUDIENCE'S REACTION TO THE PILOT

The Cosby Show's pilot was filmed in front of a live audience, and even though there were plenty of laughs where expected, Cosby was worried that the audience wasn’t embracing his overall vision of the series. In the scene where Theo is defending the “D” on his report card, he earnestly tells his dad, “If you weren't a doctor, I wouldn't love you less, because you're my dad. So rather than feeling disappointed because I'm not like you, maybe you should accept who I am and love me anyway, because I'm your son.”

What concerned Cosby about this scene was the spontaneous applause from the audience after Theo’s speech. Luckily the audience reacted even more enthusiastically when he replied with complete conviction, “That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard in my life!”

Perhaps the so-called Reverend Jesse Jackson will withhold his offer of a trip to Disney World and instead side-track the families to extensive re-programming and re-education. They obviously have not been understanding or embracing the indoctrination training that has been directed their way over the past few decades.

Perhaps there is a correlation between this and the decline in not only the numbers of baseball players from the African-American community, but in many more important socio-economic measures.

Back to the first article. Sorry Lloyd, as much as I love baseball, the community has some more important issues to address before they worry too much about the number of kids playing baseball. That pendulum will swing back a lot easier than some of the other more intractable societal problems that need to be addressed.

So whenever you get done sweating the details of declining numbers of A.A's in baseball, roll up your sleeves and help out with the other issues.

Just please, please, please don't forget to look at the facts. Just look at them. And understand the message they are sending. And don't fold, spindle and mutilate them. Otherwise, we miss a valuable opportunity to advance the ball down field and move forward. Instead of continuing to move backward. Unless the status quo and / or moving backwards is the goal. Then let's simply continue with the insanity of doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.

Another opportunity, let's see if we squander it.

Here are some of the more important socio-economic issues I was referring to earlier. Again, I think if you take care of these issues, the issue of the number of African-Americans playing baseball will melt away by itself, or at the very least, it simply doesn't matter nearly as much in the grand scheme of things.

Perspective people, perspective.

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The Slav's Blog about anything relating to the great game of baseball - and other less important issues from outside the diamond.

				Charts: The economic gap between blacks and whites hasn... If anything, the wealth disparities have grown even wider since the recession.
				View on www.washingtonpos...	Preview by Yahoo

#7 In the United States today, 12 percent of white children live in areas of concentrated poverty, but Charts: The economic gap between blacks and whites hasn't budged for 50 years of African-American children do.#8 According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 19.9 percent of white children live in single parent homes.  But for black children, the number is an astounding 52.1 percent.#9 Since 1960, the percentage of white American adults that are married has declined from 74 percent to 55 percent.  But for African-Americans the decline has been even more dramatic.  Since 1960, the percentage of black American adults that are married has declined from 61 percent to 31 percent.
#10 In the United States, the incarceration rate for black men is more than six times higher than it is for white men.

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 #1 For decades, the unemployment rate for black Americans has consistently been more than twice as high as the unemployment rate for white Americans.  In July 2014, the official unemployment rate for white Americans was 5.3 percent.  Meanwhile, the official unemployment rate for black Americans was 11.4 percent.#2 A report released earlier this year discovered that the "underemployment rate" for African-American workers was 20.5 percent.  But for white Americans it was only 11.8 percent.
#3 A study released back in 2012 found that the average white household has 22 times as much wealth as the average black household.
#4 African-American households make up only about 13 percent of the population, but they receive more than 26 percent of the food stamp benefits.
#5 One study discovered that 82 percent of white students graduate from high school but only 63.5 percent of black students do.
#6 Pew Research found that the income gap between white Americans and black Americans has continued to grow ever since the late 1960s...