Here, there, everywhere.
Last week, with the Little League World Series underway, we heard from Bill Henel, a 20-year Brick, N.J., LL umpire — eventually its chief umpire — who’d had enough. The kids exhibited less and less sportsmanship, while increasingly mimicking the all-about-me behavior borrowed from TV’s aggrandizement of the excessively immodest.
And now we have learned that the bucolic seaside and forested inlands of Maine also suffer from borderline sports psychosis.
In the midst of ESPN’s pressure — producing coverage of 12- and 13-year-old Little Leaguers having their pitch selections, pitch speeds and swing planes analyzed, and their stats compared to MLB’s leaders — Paul O. Dillon of Corinth, Maine, sent along a piece from the Bangor Daily News that seems important to share.
It’s about youth sports in Maine, specifically a shortage of umpires, referees and other game officials driven out because they no longer can suffer the abuse from coaches and parents. Here, there, everywhere, and now, in Maine, here we are.
“We’ve had officials who have done one season then they’re out because of the way the crowd or the coach has handled them,” said Barbara Snapp, 28 years a girls’ lacrosse and soccer official.
Doug Ferguson, a Bangor-region sports official who teaches a course on game officiating, said: “We’ve had a tough time retaining officials, and the feedback I’ve gotten is that they all work youth games early and some have had some pretty poor experiences with parents and, unfortunately, some of the youth coaches haven’t been very civil.”
“It takes dozens of games for officials to become proficient; hundreds to become expert,” said Wayne Sanford, who assigns Maine’s high school lacrosse officials. “New officials learn to officiate on lower-level games, where players and coaches are also unskilled.
“Unfortunately, parents and coaches expect flawless officiating and too frequently become verbally abusive. This is a huge problem with respect to retention.”
Is it mere coincidence that most of these coaches and parents likely are in their late-30s to mid-40s, and thus grew up in the 1990s as TV already was in a sustained attack on sports, selling trash-talkers, mean-mugging camera stare-downs, images of rank immodesty and teams’ most conspicuous me-firsters as the preferred sights, sounds and stars of our games?
Another problem the Bangor Daily News cited with High School sports is the dubious win-at-all-costs “recruitment” of superior athletes to schools they otherwise wouldn’t attend. Yep, Maine, too.
But the most dubious recruiter in the state is the University of Maine, a taxes-funded college that recently had to cut $26 million in overhead by reducing faculty in both pay and population.
Ah, but even in Maine, there’s always a bundle to spend on sports.
Maine’s women’s basketball program annually looks like a foreign exchange school taught in a gym. Its full-scholarship roster since just last season has included players recruited from Italy, Croatia, Israel, Sweden, Germany, Spain and Austria. They must have been drawn by that winter climate in Central Maine.
At the same time, the men’s basketball roster has included full scholarship recruits from England, Serbia, Turkey, Latvia and Brazil.
Clearly, then, there’s a critical shortage of kids in Maine who played high school basketball and sure could use a scholarship to earn a college degree.
The psychosis that has left our sports gasping for clean, fresh air seems hopeless, untreatable unless we can transport people back to a place they never have been. And the sickness now starts with tee-ball, Pee Wee football, sixth-grade basketball and, last but foremost, turning on a TV.
Sanchez cheap shot costs plenty
Selective blindness strikes again! Odd, how Thursday on YES, Ryan Ruocco and Ken Singleton during the Yankees’ game, then Jack Curry on the postgame show, either ignored or missed what viewers couldn’t miss because of YES’ superb replays:
Gary Sanchez didn’t just “take a swing” at downed and engaged Nick Castellanos, he nailed him with a blindside cheap shot, a full uppercut from a standing position.
As cheap goes, that one wasn’t inexpensive; it cost him four games.
And just once — once — I’d like to read a statement from a players’ union condemning the indefensible act of one of its members, especially for one perpetrated against a fellow union member.
Mike Mayock remains a parody of himself. He arrived Thursday to analyze Dolphins-Eagles telecast on NFL Network loaded with self-impressed Mayockian language, including “RPO,” which he knows as the run-pass-option.
And he told us to note an offensive lineman’s “kick-slides out” blocking, and that Eagles rookie RB Donnel Pumphrey is suspect because, “They’re not sure yet if he’s a space player.”
But that’s the risk teams take, writes reader Steve Mackin, “when they draft earthlings.”
Put a cap on these long ball games
Wonderful, non-intrusive field-side storytelling Thursday by SNY during a Diamondbacks-Mets game: A muscular young man, in the company of a young woman, trying to remove the twist-off cap from a plastic bottle of water he had purchased. The cap wouldn’t budge. Smiling, he finally surrendered, handing it back to a vendor.
It was the highlight from a 3-2 game that ran a ridiculous 3:45.
A 2-0 Rays win Thursday over the Blue Jays in 8½ innings, nevertheless ran 3:21. Both starters, despite allowing a total of one run, were pulled before the start of the sixth.
The era of the six-inning starter will soon give way to the age of the five-inning starter!
Soon our TV attention will be diverted by graphics carrying teams’ secrets-to-success Red Zone stats from last season. But the chance of a network expert analyst identifying such stats as complied foolishness is not as certain.
Consider: the top three teams in Red Zone TD percentage success, last season — Tennessee, San Francisco and New Orleans — combined for an 18-30 record.
Readers Matter: Lou Dudka asks why managers and pitching coaches don’t hold their hands over their mouths when on the mound to speak with pitchers and catchers.
Steve Arendash reckons that the Yankees now will hike ticket prices to games next year against the Tigers, accompanied by the promotional whiff of boiling blood.
Anthony Fischetti: “I have in my car a ‘John Sterling Odometer.’ It shows how many miles I’ve driven before Sterling finally gives the inning and score. Amazing how far you can go!”
Peter Booth writes that he can never be hired by ESPN “because my last name is Booth, and, well, you know the rest.”
As they say in the restaurant business, “50,000 flies couldn’t be wrong!” Thus, countless readers must be right on this lookalike: Brett Gardner and NYC Police Commissioner James O’Neill.