When Big People Ruin the Little Leaguers’ Fun

GARDEN GROVE —  You’ve seen it dozens of times. Two baseball coaches trade insults. Someone throws a punch. Before it’s over, five guys pile on in a no-holds-barred brawl.

A major league scuffle? No, this fight happened in Garden Grove on Tuesday night when a meeting of parents who coach 11- and 12-year-old Little League players turned violent in a dispute over whether a hotshot pitcher is too old to play in the league.

By the time bystanders broke up the fracas between parents who coach the Northeast Garden Grove Little League, one team manager was on his way to the hospital--gouged with a set of keys, according to police and a medical report. And mothers at the league meeting were clutching their children and screaming for their husbands to stop slugging it out.

“Little League brings out the worst in parents. I mean, people getting into physical brawls about Little League? I mean, this is just ridiculous,” said Suzy Clarke, whose husband, Dave Clarke, was one of the team managers involved in the fight. “It’s a little bit above and beyond the call of duty of being a Little League coach.”

The fistfight underscores what experts say is the biggest problem with the world’s largest youth sports organization--overzealous parents who treat the game like the big leagues.

In the highly competitive leagues, parents trade players and have drafts professional-style, observers say. Some parents lie to get their children on teams. Others scheme to get their children on winners. In 1993, a cheating scandal forced Little League Baseball Inc., which oversees all league play, to strip a team of its world title. And explosive arguments between parents during games are common throughout the U.S., where Little League is nevertheless viewed as the exemplar of team sports.

“Unfortunately, we’re seeing more and more of this kind of thing,” said Leonard Zaichkowsky, a sports psychologist at Boston University who studies the culture of Little League baseball. “These parents are living in a competitive world, in their business or whatever, and they see professional sports on television where it’s kind of win at all costs.”

“They talk a good line telling their kids that sports is for fun and camaraderie,” he said. “But when it gets down to it, they are teaching kids to behave like, well, kids, even when they grow up.”

Witnesses and participants in the Garden Grove scuffle here said no one involved acted particularly grown up.

As they recounted on Wednesday, the fight broke out as the league’s volunteer board was preparing to meet on a thorny issue: whether a team should be forced to forfeit the first six games of the season because its star pitcher is too old to play. The forfeit would cause the team, the Athletics, to lose its first-place standing.

The player’s age came to light before a game last Saturday, when league officials say they discovered the boy’s mother had falsified his birth certificate as part of a child-custody battle. The boy will turn 12 on Saturday, making him too old to play in the league, which bars players who turn 12 before July 31 of the current season.

Playing shortstop as well as pitcher, the boy was one of the team’s best players, according to Larry Gomez Sr., manager of the Athletics.

Tensions were high by Tuesday night, parents whose children play in the league said, with managers of other teams insisting the Athletics forfeit their games and give competing teams wins instead of losses. Gomez and parents of children on the team suggested the games be replayed.

But before the board of the 25-team league could vote on the matter, punches started flying, witnesses said, with the two managers, Gomez and Clarke, who coaches a team called the Angels, in the middle of a five-man scuffle.

When three Garden Grove police officers arrived minutes after bystanders pulled the fighting men apart, Gomez was bleeding from a deep cut on his forehead, police said. None of the men sought charges.

“We had two parents get in each other’s faces and a punch came over the top from nowhere and that’s what started it,” said league president Blair McCullogh, who had called the meeting. “It was very scary. . . . This whole thing is ridiculous. We were trying to solve a problem and it just escalated into something ugly. . . . The kids were actually the best-behaved people there.”

Bandaged and with stitches in his forehead Wednesday, Gomez said he was ashamed of getting into the fight at the meeting at Earl Warren Elementary School.

“I think it’s actually pretty ignorant,” he said. “We’re grown adults. If we can’t solve something verbally then why solve it at all? I’m 39 years old now. I’ve been playing or coaching baseball for 25 years and I’ve never been involved in anything like this.”

McCullogh said the league has yet to decide how to handle the incident, but will consider barring the parents involved from managing or coaching again. And McCullogh said the board likewise has not decided whether the Athletics will have to forfeit the six games.

A spokesman for Little League Baseball Inc. in Williamsport, Pa. said that over-excited parents are a sad fact of life in the sport played by 3 million players in 85 countries.

“The vast majority of parents are not going to get into fights, but are going to make this a fun experience for their kids,” said the spokesman, Lance Van Auken. “But in individual cases we do have people who become overzealous. . . . You often hear people say that Little League would be fine if it weren’t for the adults.”

League parents Wednesday were still angry, not just about the fight, but about the claims of cheating that brought it on. They say they take the game seriously because of what it means for their children.

“These are our loved ones, our babies. We want our babies to go out there and play and have a good time,” said Leticia Embree, 41, whose son plays in the league. Embree was at the league meeting where the fight broke out.

“Our kids work out with their teams six hours a week and then they have to come home and do homework. . . . And parents? We don’t have any life during the baseball season. A lot of people have put in a lot of good and honest time for it to come to this. Some people are so greedy, they haven’t learned that this is for the kids.”