Friday, August 23, 2002
Lights, camera, action
By Steve Wieberg
USA TODAY
SOUTH WILLIAMSPORT, Pa. — Early in every game, the public address announcer reminds fans that the Little League World Series is “the world's greatest youth sporting event.”
The ballparks are intimate and immaculate. Admission is free. Hot dogs go for $1.25. And most appealingly, 11- and 12-year-olds are playing their hearts out on the field — as they did most notably in Louisville's 11-inning, 2-1 thriller against Fort Worth, Texas, on Wednesday.
It's a reasonable claim ... if you can shut out the memory of cheating and forfeits from a year ago; the protests lodged against Harlem, N.Y., all-stars this year; the encroachment of corporate sponsors and the sight of TV satellite dishes and production trucks screaming BIG EVENT.
As the 56th World Series enters Saturday's U.S. and international finals and Sunday night's championship game — brought to you by ABC — there are some who wonder:
What hath Little League wrought?
With the sponsorships and prime-time TV broadcasts have come prime-time pressures on often pint-sized kids. That, critics say, epitomizes the escalation of stakes in today's youth sports, where friendly and healthy competition often succumb to a win-it-
all mindset.
“Children ought to be able to play games because it's fun and good exercise and they learn about teamwork and sportsmanship,” says Wake Forest President Thomas Hearn, who has long derided the explosive growth of college athletics. “As soon as the adults take over, they want to have a big tournament and be on television.”
Or as The New York Times columnist George Vecsey groused as Harlem's World Series team was fending off charges of using ineligible players, “In our zeal to create a parallel universe of intense competition and rule manipulation, and to have one more spectator sport for our own jollies, we have reached down into the ranks of 12-year-olds.”
Those kinds of shots tend to come from afar, however.
In Williamsport, where the Susquehanna Valley setting is idyllic and teams are treated like royalty, there are few complaints from the Series' participants. Not about TV-dictated game times. Not about 12-year-olds facing press conferences. Not about the pressures of proving your team is the best in the country, then best in the world (eight are are U.S. entrants, eight are international).
Joe Vander Hamm, assistant coach of the Fort Worth team that fell so gallantly in the U.S. semifinals, noticed eyes widening and sensed a bit of apprehension among his players when they first pulled up into the Little League complex and spied banks of big-league-style lights and TV trucks. “But once they got on the field, they went out and played,” he says. “They're pretty nonplussed.”
Former Holy Cross football star Gordie Lockbaum monitored son Gordie Jr. as the star shortstop and his Worcester, Mass., team also played into the U.S. semis.
“He likes the food and the accommodations. He enjoys talking to the other kids. He says he's relaxed,” the elder Lockbaum says. “As a parent, you can't hope for any more than that.
“It comes down to this,” he says. “These kids want to be here.”
Does TV take advantage of kids?
But not only are they minors, they'll remain minors for another five or six years. It's adults who must decide what's best for them. And for better or worse, it's those grownups who've made the Little League World Series what it is.
Nothing, of course, raises the prominence and therefore the stakes of an event like television. Little League first sold ABC the rights to the Series championship game in 1963, and cable's ESPN entered the picture in 1982. Starting with the eight regional finals — ESPN doesn't wait for the World Series — 28 games are carried.
ABC's telecast of last year's Sunday night championship game drew a 5.9 rating, highest for the Series since '93, meaning it pulled in 5.9 percent of the U.S. households with TVs. That reflected a national frenzy over Danny Almonte, the Bronx, N.Y., pitcher who threw a perfect game and a one-hitter in three spectacular starts before he was found to be over age and ineligible.
Even without a sensational story like Almonte's, the reactions of expressive 11- and 12-year-olds to success and failure make for compelling viewing. There will be no better game, no greater drama at any level this season than the Louisville-Fort Worth masterpiece. Louisville pitcher Aaron Alvey and Fort Worth's Walker Kelly carried no-hitters into the seventh inning and shutouts through nine, striking out a combined 40. Two Louisville home runs in the top of the 11th, the second a towering shot by Alvey, capped the 3-hour, 10-minute victory.
“It's just great sports coverage, the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat,” says Tim Scanlan, ESPN's coordinating producer at Williamsport. “More than at most venues.”
The question is whether it's appropriate viewing. Given that it's children doing the celebrating and most notably the suffering, is it exploitative?
“It's a fair question to ask. There's a difference between 12-year-olds and major leaguers,” Scanlan says. “But 12-year-olds grow up awfully fast now, as you see.”
ESPN's cameras followed Harlem third baseman Andrew Diaz's controversial home run strut in a 5-2 win against Aptos, Calif., on Tuesday, leaving a national audience to decide if he was a showboating poor sport or simply a 12-year-old too caught in the moment to contain himself.
Kids tend to do that. Most aren't the target of TV cameras.
The cameras were there, too, two nights earlier, documenting the anguish of Harlem's Spencer White after the 117-pound catcher took a third strike with the bases loaded to seal a 2-0 loss to Louisville. And one captured the image of Fort Worth's Michael “Mikey” Valdez burying his head in his hands after striking out with the tying run at second base to end Wednesday's marathon against Louisville.
Scanlan insists, “These are not professional athletes, and we know that. We document the emotion; we show it. But we don't want the cameras to linger. ... If a camera lingers too long, I tell the cameraman to move on.”
The line between exposure and overexposure, between promotion and overemphasis, is a fine one to walk, Little League President and CEO Stephen Keener says.
“But I believe we walk it. All the time, we are advising and talking with members of the media here — both the print media and electronic media — that this is a Little League game, these are kids, they should be treated as such.
“We believe the exposure we receive from our television coverage is the best vehicle we have to essentially communicate the program.”
Ballplayers roll along
Put an event on TV, though, and the desire to be a part of it can mushroom into desperation. Competition intensifies. For some, the lines of fair play get blurred.
Rolando Paulino, founder of the league that sent Almonte and his Bronx team to the 2001 World Series, was banned from Little League for life when the deception over Almonte's age was uncovered. Almonte was 14, not the Little League maximum of 12.
This month, coaches of rival teams in the Mid-Atlantic Regional were quick to act on suggestions and then reports that several of Harlem's players lived outside its district and didn't meet Little League residency requirements. Little League denied two protests from the Bethlehem, Pa., team that finished second in the regional, clearing Diaz, White and their teammates to play in the Series a day before it began last Friday.
“The professionalization of athletics has had a detrimental effect on the whole sports enterprise,” says Wake Forest's Hearn, “but nowhere more than on the programs that are supposed to be for children. And Little League baseball is perhaps the most vivid example of that. The fact that there are all of these ethical questions suggests it has been taken over by the adult world and is no longer for the children.”
Dr. Vincent Fortanasce, a Los Angeles neurologist who wrote “Life Lessons From Little League: A Guide for Parents and Coaches”, tells of “a number of parents who've turned around to me and said, 'Look, I'm not going to let my kids play these organized sports because it's not for the kids, it's just for the moms and dads. It's just for the adults.' What they do is use the kids as pawns to get what they want. And so, they really look at sports as being a negative rather than a positive experience.”
And yet, again, that's not how it's being looked at on the World Series playing fields.
Gathered in a practice-field dugout this week, all 12 Fort Worth players were asked if they were bothered at all by TV's cameras, if they felt overpressured at the World Series. Every head shook no. “It's just fun,” says third baseman-pitcher Valdez.
Minutes after Fort Worth's loss to Louisville, players and coaches were proudly carrying out a post-game tradition, belting out the theme to TV's “Rawhide”:
“Rollin, rollin, rollin.”
“ Fortanasce, for all his reservations about the modern-day Series, still believes, “For the most part, what you see is something wholesome. And people need to see more wholesome things.
“Now, if you saw on TV the emptying of a dugout (for a fight), it would be something else,” he says. “But what you'll see is kids being very respectful, trying their best. You'll see a kid with a tear in his eye, and people can empathize with that. I'd much rather see that on TV than some of the sitcoms that kids see, that's for sure.”
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