While most of us here at the Leader-Call are counting down the days to college and high school football season, there is still a little summer fun left in the world of sports before the return of the boys of fall.
Guru Nichols
As I sit here typing this in the office on a blistering Thursday afternoon, the boys and I have the Mid-Atlantic Region elimination game (a regional to get to the Little League World Series) between Maryland and Delaware on our TV.
Why? Well, for starters, it’s sports, and it’s not deadline day, so we have it on. More for background noise than anything.
But I have stopped what I was doing a couple of times before I started typing this. And, while watching, I started thinking about how pure the game is at this level.
It is the way the game is meant to be played.
The players are typically well-mannered, and coaches are mostly respectful of each other and the umpires as well. After every game, the two teams line up and shake hands, just like it should always be done, at every level. The amount of true sportsmanship during and after a Little League game is something that a lot of people can learn from.
College baseball is fun to watch, especially being an LSU fan. But, there were many Friday nights this spring after I delivered papers that when I got home around midnight, sometimes later, that I was able to catch a Hawaii baseball game. What can I say, I’m a sports addict.
I’ve said it before, and will likely stay this way until the day I die, or, unless a local kid becomes a big league mainstay, that MLB just doesn’t do it for me anymore. I have very little desire to consume it.
Maybe it’s the outlandish amounts of money that the players get paid. I don’t know exactly what it is, I just know that turning on an MLB game these days is about the best way for me to take a nap.
Little League (the official one) does an outstanding job of making sure that the game remains as pure as possible with the way the league is run.
It began way back in 1939 (quick, guess who was president then?) and it’s the world’s largest organized youth sports program with millions of players from countries all over the globe (FDR was president), and watching it all unfold this time of year can be captivating.
By the time this is printed, all 10 regionals will have been decided, but that just means that the start of a fun and pure spectacle is just around the corner.
Williamsport, Pa., is the site of the LLWS, and it is set to get started with the first pitch on Wednesday, with the World Series finale set to take place on Aug. 24.
The 10 American regional champs will compete in one bracket with another 10-team bracket consisting of the international region champions competing against each other. The winners from each bracket will face off in the final game of the LLWS, looking to claim world supremacy, well, at least in their young minds.
It is worth taking some time to watch, especially next weekend, because there is always a Cinderella team that is easy to fall in love with, and keeping up with them gives us (well, at least me and my mama) something to keep up with until the return of football.