9 year old told hes too good to pitch.

[AgainstAllOdds]

NEW HAVEN, Conn. (AP)—Nine-year-old Jericho Scott is a good baseball player— too good, it turns out.

The right-hander has a fastball that tops out at about 40 mph. He throws so hard that the Youth Baseball League of New Haven told his coach that the boy could not pitch any more. When Jericho took the mound last week, the opposing team forfeited the game, packed its gear and left, his coach said.

Officials for the three-year-old league, which has eight teams and about 100 players, said they will disband Jericho’s team, redistributing its players among other squads, and offered to refund $50 sign-up fees to anyone who asks for it. They say Jericho’s coach, Wilfred Vidro, has resigned.

But Vidro says he didn’t quit and the team refuses to disband. Players and parents held a protest at the league’s field on Saturday urging the league to let Jericho pitch.


“He’s never hurt any one,” Vidro said. “He’s on target all the time. How can you punish a kid for being too good?”

The controversy bothers Jericho, who says he misses pitching.

“I feel sad,” he said. “I feel like it’s all my fault nobody could play.”

Jericho’s coach and parents say the boy is being unfairly targeted because he turned down an invitation to join the defending league champion, which is sponsored by an employer of one of the league’s administrators.

Jericho instead joined a team sponsored by Will Power Fitness. The team was 8-0 and on its way to the playoffs when Jericho was banned from pitching.

“I think it’s discouraging when you’re telling a 9-year-old you’re too good at something,” said his mother, Nicole Scott.

Full story can be read here...http://sports.yahoo.com/top/news?slu...v=ap&type=lgns

[swede96]

Wow...how sad. Now the poor kid has to feel like he ruined it for his friends.

[gordon gekko]

That's BS the kid sounds like a prodigy.

[Willie Bee]

Total crap, absolute and utter BS Especially waiting until the team is 8-0 and playoff bound. Fvcking parents ruin kids sports leagues far too often.

[bmw530i]

Remember that kid Danny.....he pitched for little league baseball they found out later he was to old. If he is legal age, let him pitch the season out, I agree, this will haunt this kid forever.

[greek]

its the parents fault ---------putting so much into kids sports tryingto live their lives ,fantasies thru their kids , how sad for that kid

[coldhardfacts]

Disbanding the team seems a little drastic. Couldn't they just put the kid at short or something?

[lys3rg0]

I once read some great blogs on such matters on fredoneverything.net... hope i can google some of them out of the archives.

Here are some nice excerpts:

Tag

I read in The Capital of Annapolis, Maryland, home of the Naval Academy, that the principaless of West Annapolis Elementary has banned tag on the playground. Yep, tag: You're it. It's for safety. Tag is dangerous. She is going to Protect Our Children. The principaless in question, Joan Brisco, described the horror of tag.
"They would start up, and inevitably it got too rough. The reason we stopped tag was because we didn't want them getting hurt."
Well, I guess. I can imagine that the emergency rooms of Annapolis have done land-office trade in broken and bleeding children, victims of tag. Probably the halls rattle with the tippy-tap of peg legs. No doubt the children's studies suffer because of missing limbs. That's how tag usually is. When I played tag as a kid, we always had the shock-trauma unit on full alert.
If fact, tag is a leading cause of death in children, ranking just behind meteor strikes.
"Rough" means boys.
Now, why do these ladies have their innards in an uproar over tag? Because they are ladies. Usually when I see that some terrible danger has been ended, as for example dodgeball, or a kid of six has been expelled for drawing a picture of a soldier, a teacheress will be behind it. Occasionally it's a New Age man, apparently a transsexual who got stuck in mid passage.
We have feminized the schools. Worse, the teachers don't much like boys.
There is a totalitarian strain in the female psyche. It isn't evil, at least not in intention. Quite the oppposite -- in intention. Women as a sex want to impose security, stability, and conventionality, at all costs, on everything. They want a tyranny of the safe and comfortable.

Boy Crisis

One hears often now that boys flounder in school, drop out, generally perform less well academically than girls, and don’t go to college. [...] The cause is not that boys are stupid. Boys have higher average scores than do girls on standardized tests, for example, and at the high end are far ahead of the girls. [...] So what is the problem? Whatever it is, it is new. I graduated in 1964 from a mediocre high school in rural Virginia. There was no “boy crisis.” The girls made better grades, the boys better scores on standardized tests. There was no yawning gap. In short, girls haven’t come up. They have always done well in school. Boys have gone down. Why?

I can guess. Boys are churning wads of energy. They are physical and competitive. They want to climb things, test themselves, jump off of things, explore, drive fast, fight, behave like damn fools, and sack cities. In later years this energy may serve them well, but not yet. School is hellish for them, with its year after year of sitting, bored out of their skulls, while some drone babbles. It is worse for the bright, verging on child abuse. They hate it. I did.
[...]
Further, in the schools today we have feminization, feminization, feminization. Instead of treating girls like girls, and boys like boys, all are expected to be girls. It doesn’t work. Boys by their very nature like to roughhouse. They like contact sports. You don’t have to force them to play football. They are competitive. Women don’t understand this, and what they don’t understand, they outlaw. Today estrogenated school after estrogenated school bans dodge ball as too dangerous, outlaws tag (“They get too rough,” meaning too rough for Mrs. Teacher), and insists on “groups games led by a caring adult.”
It is hideous for boys. Everything they are, it isn’t. “Ohhhhh, let’s have a caring non-competitive game….” If he is really bright, with an IQ north of 150, he will decide that his teachers are idiots, which most of them are, and withdraw. There will be a price for this one day.

Maribel

Here, in the home of the free, the land of the brave, and suchlike prattle, I encounter this: “An 11-year-old girl who threw a stone at a group of boys pelting her with water balloons is being prosecuted on serious assault charges in California. Maribel Cuevas was arrested in April in a police operation which involved three police cars and a helicopter.”

These cockamamie stories are legion, like illiterate federal workers. I’ve followed any number of them. A little boy swats a little girl on the backside on the playground, and he is arrested by cops, charged with sexual harassment, and put into compulsory psychiatric counseling. Another kid draws a picture of a soldier with his rifle, and gets suspended. On and on.

What twisted circus of social decay is going on here? Have these people’s minds, if any, been taken over by extragalactic flatworms? That is my guess. We are seeing the first step toward cocooning us.

Now, I may not know what is really going on, but I sure as hell know what is really not going on. None of this is about security. At least, it is not about security in any sane way, having some minor three-generations-back relation to reality. We are a nation frightened of our daughters of eleven? Are girl kids that dangerous? Does any other country, anywhere, fear its daughters? Give me a break.

It is truly weird. America, the most aggressive nation on the planet, the grr, bowwow, woof superpower, is also the most timid. Sure, I know, aggressive because frightened, the bully terrified by sock-puppets that might wait in the closet.

That’s us. The country of Davy Crockett, John Singleton Mosby, Apollo Thirteen, now somehow scared of our own sprats, unable to teach them to read, absolutely absurd in the eyes of the world. Of course,the schools being what they are, lots of us have never heard of the world. It wasn't always this way. Anyway, I guess the Chinese will be merciful. Maybe they will put us in special homes, with soft walls.

Felony Swatting

"Espanola, NM -- (Reuters) "A 14-year-old boy could be charged with a felony for slapping a girl's buttocks, officials said." Yeah, the kid did it. Whereupon an assistant principal called the police.

When I was a kid, the obvious thing would have been to take Bobby aside and say, "Listen, kid, we don't do that. Quit it. Got that?" Whereupon, unless Bobby was a budding nutcase, the matter would have been closed.

But no. It's "criminal sexual contact." A felony.

The story did not say how the trauma affected the girl. Presumably she is an a psychiatric intensive-care unit, with an IV Thorazine drip, and teams of therapists working around the clock to save what shards remain of her former being. In fact, I'd guess she's in a coma. Maybe worse: She was thwacked on the butt. She'll probably need a respirator for life.

"We have a strict sexual-harassment policy," said Assistant Principal Ruben Lucero. "Any time a person's body is violated, we consider that major."

Savor the somber salacious absurdity. Her body. . . was . . . violated. Yes. It was the moral equivalent of being gang-raped by the Golden Horde. It was just like medical experiments in the dungeons of the Third Reich. Violated. On the playgrounds of America.

The horror.

Huh? What fourteen-year-old doesn't have a budding sexual interest in girls? And if not, why not? What's he supposed to have a sexual interest in? Goats? Endangered condors? Realistically, his options are limited. Girls are sort of what we have, unless we are girls, and then we have boys. And you don't suppose -- oh, the gnawing shame -- that adolescent girls might occasionally find their minds turning to thoughts of the carnal? Like, oh, about every ten seconds?

What is so wonderfully funny here is the irony. In the Sixties, feminists pushed the Pill, and hollered about how women should be able to cat around like guys. Now they could. Oddly, the sexual revolutionaries figured the Pill constituted a triumph over men. The notion that you can triumph over men by making sex more readily available is, uh, lacking in insight.

But now -- this is seriously strange -- the revolutionaries have reversed their field. Today's comic-opera feminism seems to consist largely of a squeaking horror of sex. They now push exactly the patriarchal attitudes of the 1890s: Women are helpless victims, pitiable, weak-minded, cringing, unable to handle a pass on the playground.

Funny, I've never met such a woman.

Ain't it grand? If a man says a bad word at the office, or glances at her legs, a woman should swoon, deftly dialing a lawyer before hitting the carpet, and maybe get the vapors. Is this not Victorian England all over?

[purecarnagge]

The funny part is the "league defending championship team" had asked him to join there team, now that teams parents "league adminstrators" are causing all the drama...

Start handing out the "Most improved player" trophies...