2013 Little League World Series

When my son played LL, his coach had an obsession with the catcher being able to make the throw to second base. Which meant, of course, that only the kids with the best arms would play catcher, and even they threw out maybe one out of 50 base-stealers. Worse, those kids also tended to be pitchers, and league rules required you to factor in whether or not a kid also played catcher when you figured his pitch count limits. So in exchange for maybe one or two outs on the basepaths the whole season, genius coach gave away multiple innings from his best pitchers.

My son, who loved to play catcher, did not have a great arm but was very good at actually receiving the pitches and not giving away bases on passed balls/wild pitches. The potential for a collision with a runner coming home didn't worry him either*. I wasn't one of those pushy LL dads, but one day toward the very end of the season the coach told me, "Man, I wish DQson had a better arm, we could sure have used him behind the plate more. But you've just gotta be able to make that throw to second." It was all I could do to bite my tongue.

*In this regard, he was definitely NOT a chip off the old block; avoiding collisions has been a priority of mine almost since birth.

 

Damn, when did the LLWS final turn into Yankees-Red Sox? Three hours for a six inning game?

 

And 'Murica fails again. The highlight of this tournament may have been the Grosse Pointe One-Percenters going 0-3 with a loss to the Czech team.

 

Grosse Pointe blanked?

 

Indeed. Didn't get a hit until the fifth or sixth inning of their second game.