Joey Kamide: The Good, Bad in Youth Ball

The Good, Bad in Youth Ball

The German Baseball Academy won the U14 PONY Qualifier at Tempo.
Last weekend at Tempo, our club hosted the U14 SUMA Open PONY League Qualifier, with the winner advancing to represent the European Zone in the World Series back in Pennsylvania in August.

While helping out with the tournament and watching a half-dozen or so games, I was reminded about the good and the bad with youth baseball in an age where young ballplayers are influenced by what they watch on television and the Internet. These young players have their development placed in the hands of their coaches, who are usually great role models and well-intentioned, but unfortunately also sometimes under-qualified and overzealous, focused too much on winning over development or biased towards the interests of their own kid they have playing on the team.

I enjoyed hanging around the tournament, where I met some American players and parents from the Landstuhl and Remstein military bases in Germany (I was born at Landstuhl, so that was pretty cool), who were my MVPs for the weekend after handing me some peanut butter and beef jerky, both of which are tough to find here in Prague. In addition, it was interesting to listen to while having no idea what was being said as coaches barked instructions to their teams from Germany, Moldova, Serbia, Poland, Romania and the Czech Republic, and I really enjoyed the sportsmanship and energy that players at that age bring to the yard every day.

A team from the German Baseball Academy, which had about a half-dozen guys who looked capable of dunking a basketball, beat the American military kids in the championship game and were dominant throughout the weekend. I told one of the guys with our club who was also helping out that if that's an accurate sample of what the development of the game looks like over in Deutschland, then the world will be taking notice in future years at events such as the European Championships, World Baseball Championship and the Olympics, once the IOC wises up and brings baseball back to the Summer Games.

Not everything I witnessed during the tournament was as the game should be played, however.

Another team from Germany had a couple big boys who thought they were playing rugby, and thought it was acceptable to lower their shoulder and barrel over a much-smaller catcher from Poland, who, to his credit, held onto the ball both times. During one of the collisions, the catcher was actually on the first-base side of the plate - leaving an open path along the third base line for the runner to slide safely into home - when the base runner ran over him, resulting in perhaps the dirtiest play in youth baseball as I've ever seen. Amazingly, the base runner was not tossed from the game (protecting the players, apparently, is a major fault of umpires in the Czech Republic, as I've already witnessed and been been told through multiple accounts by coaches and players here).

In another game, the coach of a Romanian team that was losing 22-0 in the second inning had the game called in the second inning. This was prior to the last three guys in his lineup having the opportunity to come to the plate. If I'm a player, I've got major issues with my coach who didn't let me swing the bat in a game after we traveled over 10 hours to this tournament. (The same Romanian coach allowed his center fielder to play the field while kneeling, only getting up to chase after the ball when it was struck to the outfield).

The coach of a team from Serbia sent a 13-year-old kid out on the mound, and after watching his fastball get batted around the yard for the first inning, either instructed or allowed his young hurler to come out and throw the next two innings while throwing, by my rough estimate, about 75 percent breaking balls. As I sat behind the backstop as the game's scorekeeper, I wanted to bound into the dugout and explain to the Serbian coach, as anyone with common sense could, how quickly this poor kid's elbow would be damaged and pitching career would come to an end should he continue to allow him to toss breaking balls at any rate, no less that rate, at his age.

I saw a lot of good things over the course of the tournament that leads you to believe that the development of the game in Europe is heading in the right direction. But I also saw a lot of red flags that indicate there is a lot of growth  that still needs to take place on the diamond on this side of the pond.