Lo and behold, I return to the blog with an interesting story. It comes from the Salt Lake Tribune sports pages:

Pony League Baseball and the human condition collided at home plate during a recent championship game, leaving defeat and doubt in one dugout, maybe disgust, too, and imperfect victory, at some cost, in the other.
Standing in the vortex, in the batter’s box, was 9-year-old Romney Oaks, a survivor of brain cancer who played little league baseball, in part, because he wanted to be a regular kid who did regular things. What he became, after that single at-bat, though, was anything but regular.
He was transformed into the explosive centerpiece - “a powder keg,” as the league president put it - of a discussion about what junior sports should teach children who participate, what the value of that participation is, whether adults mess up the kids’ fun, and at what price winning should come. Clear-cut answers are about as easy as knocking a heavy split-fingered fastball out of the yard.
Romney struck out.
And ignited an uproar.
Here’s the setup: The two best teams in Bountiful’s 10-and-under Mueller Park Mustang League - the Yankees and Red Sox - met in a championship game, played the last Friday night in June. The undefeated Yanks were in the field, up by one run in the bottom of the last inning. With the tying run on third, two outs in the books, and the Red Sox’ best hitter, Jordan Bleak, coming to the plate, Yankees coaches huddled and decided to do something they hadn’t done all season: They told their pitcher to intentionally walk a hitter. An absolute anomaly in a low-key recreational league in which regular-season games were governed by competitive limitations, such as a maximum of four runs allowed in an inning. Those limits had been suspended for the championship game.
Bleak already had nailed a three-run homer and a triple.
“It was a baseball move,” says Shaun Farr, one of the Yankees’ coaches. “These kids wanted to win.”
Romney was the only thing that stood in their way.
The undersized youngster, who had been diagnosed with the brain tumor five years earlier, who had battled valiantly through a mighty survivor’s fight via traditional treatments, including surgery and chemotherapy, had been restricted, thereafter, in his baseball skills. When manning his position in center field, he wore a batter’s helmet as a precaution to guard the shunt in his head. When he swung the bat, it looked like a drag bunt.
Red Sox coach Keith Gulbransen, who was coaching first base, says he overheard the Yankees coaches discussing their strategy: “They said, ‘. . . This is the kid who hit it out. And look who’s up next.’ They knew who was on-deck. It was heartbreaking. It was sound baseball strategy. But, at this level, was it fair? Romney knew what was going on.”
After two strikes, Romney already had tears in his eyes. It was merely a matter of seconds before the kid who wanted to be regular became a special K. After the third whiff, the plumbing fully clogged and backed up, spilling down his face.
There may ordinarily be no crying in baseball, but, on this night, there was.
Anger, too.
Gulbransen heatedly demanded an apology from Yankees coaches Bob Farley and Farr: “Apologize,” he said. “Romney didn’t deserve that.”
“This wasn’t about Romney,” says Farr. “It wasn’t about picking on a cancer survivor. It was about taking the bat out of their best hitter’s hands in order to win. Our kids had worked hard. We played within the rules. We were trying to win.”

So I ask you gentlemen (and ladies, if you’d like to chime in as well)… what would you do in that situation?

My short answer (I’ll elaborate in a bit) is that I would do exactly what the winning team did. I would play fundamental baseball and walk the good player to get to Romney.

Marshall: Well, this is an easy one for me. I’d have walked the home run-hitting kid in a wink of gnat’s eye to get to the kid I knew was likely going to strike out. It’s an easy choice. The game is on the line. And the idea of the game is to win.

Obviously, the can of worms here is why this is even a question. The other team should have pitched to the good hitter so that the other kid could feel good about himself? That’s going out of your way to create a false impression. Where I come from, we call that a lie.

Jim: Fascinating story, guys. I’m still mulling it over.

But it reminded me of a similar example from a few years back. You’ll have to forgive me for not remembering the specific teams, but the story goes like this - a legendary high school girls basketball player is in the next-to-last game of her career, approaching the school or league career scoring record. She gets within two points of breaking the record… and gets injured. Blows out a knee, I think. Out for the year. With one game remaining, and two points away from rewriting the record book.

The team, and the coach, and everyone else lamented how sad this is, and came up with an idea that is either brilliant or just plain wrong, depending on your perspective. They decided that in the final game of the year, the injured girl would take the court (on crutches), and the other team would permit her to make a two-point shot. Then her team will let the opposition score two points, and with the game 2-2, the injured player will go to the bench and a substitute will come in, and the real game will begin.

I thought the proposed solution was just plain wrong. The reason we love sports is because it is unpredictable. Sometimes, even often, you fall short of your goal, whether it’s a championship or breaking the scoring record. If your knee gets injured, it gets injured. You don’t interrupt the game for some charity points because reality is so sad. If I recall correctly, there was a big gender gap in how people reacted to that story. Women thought it was perfectly appropriate for the opposing team to “give” the injured player two points so she could have the storybook ending she had been working for so long; Men thought it was rediculous, was a dishonest way of breaking the record, and went against the concept of competitive sport. (I wondered how it felt to be the non-injured player on the opposing team who got to score the two points unimpeded.)

Looking at the story of Romney Oaks, there’s a part of me that laments that he was in the game in the first place. Either the team as a whole is playing to win with its best players, or it isn’t. It’s very noble to want to give Oaks the chance to play with the team as a regular kid. But at the end of the day, he isn’t a regular kid. Get together and play an exhibition, a scrimmage, whatever. But if the game counts, and the rest of the team wants to win, then put your best players on the field. And walk the home run hitter.

Scarlett: I’m confused. I thought Romney wanted to be treated like a normal kid? Well, he was. He wasn’t given a pass because he was sick.

I love the parent who complained about teaching the kids there are short cuts to winning. Uh, yeah. Welcome to real life lady.

Sports at that age help teach kids life lessons, and this game seems full of them. 1) You don’t get a pass because something bad happened to you. You think Romney’s boss is going to go easy on him because he had cancer when he was younger? Not a chance. 2) There are winners and losers. Winners do what they can to win, and the best do what they can within the boundaries and rules. Last time I checked, intentional walks were in the rules of baseball. 3) There are sore losers. And in this case, it’s the parents. Sad to say the adults here are acting like crybabies. I venture to say that some parents are probably using Romney as an excuse to bitch about losing.

Hey, at least they kept score. We should be happy for that, right?

Jim, again: Ennuipundit has a comment or two, and reminds me that the basketball player I was trying to think of was Nykesha Sales from UConn.