Mone Davis - SI cover

A quick googling shows her being called a "sensation" and a "legend."

She's 13. Even in today's era of overhyping everything, that's a bit much. And will anyone remember who she is in a week or two when football season starts.

 

Cody Webster, Chris Drury, Danny Almonte...yeah. She's in that group.

 

As others have noted, the LLWS teams are nowhere near the best teams in their age groups anyway -- those are the top-level travel teams, where the real studs play.
The LLWS teams would get ass-smoked off the field in the first day of any real top-flight travel ball tourney.

Bottom line: nobody outside of neighborhood friends and family should care.

 

He's the one that brought up this "fact" that a bunch of 12-13-year-olds can't beat a bunch of 16-17-18-year-olds. And continues to hammer us with this revelation. In other news, the sun is hotter than the moon.

 

Yeah, I'm wondering how, and why, this subject is being discussed. They're Little League All-Star teams. So what does the HS team have to do with the price of tea in China?

 

I was too, until I did a story a few years ago on ballplayers in Oregon. Harold Reynolds and Scott Brosius, both Oregon natives, said they thought growing up in a cold (and rainy) climate actually made them better players than if they'd grown up in the states you mentioned. Some of the pieces of the story that dealt with that:

Reynolds remembers in high school going to the high jump pits to pull out the sponges to soak up water from the field - anything to try to get in a game.

Indoor workouts, he said, had greater value than those games.

"What the workout in the gymnasium did," Reynolds said, "is it made me focus on specific things I needed to work on. It taught me skills that I needed later to be in the big leagues. Had I been playing games, 100 or so games, I would have never worked on those things.

"There was an advantage to being in Oregon, being indoors and being specific with your skills."

That's a message he'd like others to hear.

"If I had anything to say to any youngster in Oregon," Reynolds said, "I would say 'Look at that rain as a blessing, not a curse.'

"I learned a lot from having to be inside. I learned how to swing the bat in the mirror and see where my hands were, and if I was taking the right stride, and all those things."

and

"One of the things that I noticed," Brosius said, "is kids that are coming out of the Northwest, coming out of high school and especially out of college, are a lot more fundamentally sound at times.

"If you're outside and just playing games every day," Brosius said, "you're playing baseball, but sometimes you're not really developing some of the skills. In some ways, some of the finer points of the game are paid attention to a little bit more."

and

"Sometimes being indoors forces you to work on your game a little bit," Brosius said.

and

"I don't think I'm a Major League Baseball player if I don't grow up in Oregon," Reynolds said.

 

The point is ... that the LLWS teams which are sucking up hours of teevee time on national cable and the feont cover of Sports Illustrated ... aren't even as good as your local .500 varsity HS team at Hometown High, which draws crowds of 30 people.

Nobody cares, and what's more, nobody SHOULD care. Get this shit off our teevee screens.

 

Of course they're not as good as a high-school team, since they are a few years younger. I don't like the pressure it puts on the kids, but it's just programming. There was HS football on ESPN all day today.

 

One night of the LLWS recently outdrew all ESPN MLB broadcasts since Aug. 11.

 

Why do they show the BCS championship? The Raiders would beat the crap out of any of those teams.

 

And any of those teams would beat the crap out of Hoover or Miami Central!

 

There are eleventy million other channels. Find one.