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Tuesday, August 16, 2011
Little League World Series excesses
Is there a reason to show more than the championship game? This writer says: no.
But one game? Sure. The LLWS Championship game has been televised since 1953, when a pre-“thrill of victory” Jim McKay called it for CBS. Ten years later, tape-delayed coverage of the Championship started airing during ABC’s Wide World of Sports and, starting in 1985, the game was broadcast live. That part I’m cool with. It’s the other 408 innings that seem unnecessary, and unintentionally turned last week’s regional qualifiers into the prime time version of a Participant trophy.
I liken it to other athletic amateur events, those that you follow only if it’s in the Olympics, but by and large ignore otherwise. I’m sympathetic to this point of view:
Little League games should be seen through the shaky-handed camerawork of the centerfielder’s dad, not on collection of national networks where it’s crammed into the spaces between Frosted Flakes commercials and College Gameday promos.
Basically, the innocence has been commercialized. And the author doesn’t go far enough: people are making money, and it’s not the child laborers. The entire thing is now about how the workers are supposed to maintain their innocence and simply play for the love of the game, while everyone else treats it as a commercial enterprise, selling ads, making money.
The only place to put LLWS is on C-Span. It’s as important as Congress making laws. But not as important as an actual MLB or NHL game.
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