Little League Baseball Politics

M

MarkNTennessee

New member
My youngest Son plays Baseball and has played for the last 5 years.

The league we are playing for now is very political.
With a total of six teams in the 9/10 league, 3 teams are stacked with all the last years all-stars while the other 3 teams has very few good players, to me thats not fair to the kids.

And no matter how good your kids is, if your not part of a special group your child will not play all-stars that year.

This year I have had enough of all this political BS, and contacted Dizzy Dean Baseball and informed them on how our league picks their teams. And they responded quickly. And today I got a call from the league president wanting to meet with me this week, with his famed followers.

Probably they are going to tell me that there is nothing I can do about the way they select their theams and I should just live with it and not rock the boat, but thats not my presonality. It's hard for me to sit and watch all these kids come to the games knowing that they are not going to win. It seems to lower thier Morale and they seem to not try as hard as they can.

I was wondering if any of you guys have run into this type of problem and did you do anything about it, and has it changed anything.
 
Hit 'em where it hurts: The wallet. Talk to their bigger sponsors and request they notify the organization that unless they revise their policy and begin assigning teams by random assignment they will pull their funding.
 
Is it Little League, Dizzy Dean or something else?

I am on the board of our baseball program (Dixie) and have coached for several years. I am coaching my son's 9&10 team this year.

How does your league pick teams?

Ours has a draft and a detailed drafting rules. When I first got involved in the league, I saw some "stacking" that basically involved either having too many coaches and "protected players" or after draft trading.

We have changed some of the rules and have had some pretty even teams the last 2 years. It can get political when people are in it for the wrong reasons, just like anything else. Some (a lot) of people thing winning at all cost is all there is.

The way we draft is:

1. You as a coach are allowed 2 "protected players" this is usually your son and an assistant coaches son. If you or your coach don't have a son playing then you only have one protected player.

2. At the draft, the coaches draw numbers to determine the order of the picks. In our case this year, there were 5 teams, so you either got a 1,2,3,4, or 5. You pick in order, and then back up, so #5 gets the 5 and 6th pick and when you get back to #1, he gets 2 picks and back down until all the players are gone. The older age group goes first and then numbers are drawn again to determine the pick for the lower age group. Say there are 3 10 year olds left after all the coaches have had the same number of picks in the 10 year old group, they are put into the 9 year old group and are picked with the nine year olds.

3. The coach has to pick one of his protected players with his first pick if they are in that age group. In other words, if I get #1, I have to pick my son (or my assistants son) if either of them are 10 year olds. If both are 10 I get an open pick with the second, and have pick the other "protected player" with the third.

In my case, I drew #4 for the draft of 10 year olds. With my first pick, I had to take my assistant coaches son who is 10 (mine is 9). I then picked from what was available until every one had an even number of 10 year olds. Three were left over, and put down with the 9 year olds. We drew numbers again, and I got #2. I had to take my son with my first pick of the 9 year old group, and then picked from the rest after that.

When everyone is doing that, it is very hard to "stack" a team. The most you can stack it is by having both you and your assistants son being super stars (which mine isn't although he did make pitching machine all stars last year). We have 10 players per team, so 2 won't stack a team.

What I do see happen, even with these rules, is coaches who know the kids, making better draft choices than coaches who don't know the kids.

In every draft I have been in, I end up having to pick kids I have no clue who they are, what they look like or anything else. I am basically just picking a name off of a list. Some times that works out better than others. Sometimes, you get lucky and pick someone nobody knows about who either never played before, or just moved in.

The other thing I see, is some coaches are better than others and consistantly have good teams, regardless of who they draft. They take so-so players and make them better.

When I got involved with the league, I was vocal about the draft being fair.

One of the things you have to fight is parents requesting that their kids get on certain coaches teams, that they get paired with certain kids (the most common excuse for this is "transportation"), or flat out refusing to play unless they are on so and so's team.

The only kids that we pair are brothers. Not cousins, neighbors or anything like that. If you draft a kid and he has a brother, you automatically have to take his brother with your next pick and no one else can pick him.

If I parent says there kid will not play for a certain coach, or will only play for a certain coach then we refuse to take their sign up.
 
The league is Dizzy Dean.

Your set=up is similar to what I had in mind for them to do the draw.

The major problem we have is like you mentioned, we have parents requesting certain coaches, and saying they will not play unless they have that certain coach. And the age group all-stars are not evenly seperated throughout the teams.

It looks like I'm facing a lose lose situation, but you never now till you make some waves. I know alot of other parents feel the same as I do, but I don't think they will back me on this matter in fear of thier child being singled out.

I'm not trying to cause any problems of any of the parents or coaches, I just want to league to have fair play for all the kids.
 
mark,
I experienced the same problem when my son was five in our t-ball league. Everything started out fine because we were a bunch of new players and our team did not even have a coach. Four of us fathers stepped up and agreed to coach and we ended up taking second in the league. However, the other teams and parents made a lot of the season less than fun.

Fall ball was pretty much the same, but with a little less on the win, win, win at all costs crowd.

I thought I was in with a group of pretty decent guys until the next season rolled around. My son is an average player at best and those guys did what every other team in the league was doing. Tried to stack up a team and just filled in with the average players that signed up.

Basically, it all left a really bad taste in my mouth for organized ball play in my area. When my son said he did not want to play anymore I didn't press the issue. Lots of kids really loose out because of area politics and money. Everybody seems to think there little Johnny is the next in line to the majors.
 
I'm a coach as well, Little League and T-ball. We do the re-draft thing set up similar to Yellowhammers.
We didnt have to do anything for major's this year because we just have enough kids to play.
Our over-all player number's are way down, no coach-pitch, and we had to move some young kids up to the next level of play.

I have seen in previous years some teams from out of town that were stacked. They try to keep the same kids together from t-ball all the way up through high school. I know this from speaking with the coaches, when my kids played that team we had no chance.
I agree with you, and you did the right thing by saying something. I'm not sure how far its gonna get ya, you may have to get together with some of the other parents and go to the meetings, voice your opinions, get on the board and run it the proper way.

Good Luck, I have 3 boys that love baseball, we're a ball playing family and I would hate to see a kid quit or dislike the sport because of this.
 
All the great players on one team huh? Why that sounds real familiar.

My first and only year in little league I was stuck on the left over team, we got schooled every game that year, except 1 and that was against the "top" team! we beat them by 2 runs....wow where those coaches [beeep] at those players, they made them run laps right there after the game. I loved to play but that ruined it for me.

I see your problem too in the league my son plays in, hes just getting started and I am going to watch thing close so he doesnt get discuraged as I did. What ever happended to playing to have fun, you know sandlot style!
 
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