EDITORIAL: For the love of the game
At the end of the day, they just wanted to play baseball.
With a little ingenuity and cooperation, some of the young athletes competing in the rain-bedeviled Pony League World Series in Washington eventually got their wish.
Torrential rainfall forced organizers to scale back last week’s competition while waging what proved to be a futile battle to restore a waterlogged Lew Hays Pony Field in time for Wednesday’s championship game between Washington County and Chinese Taipei.
To the league’s credit, the ground crew and countless dedicated volunteers – among them, a girl with a broken leg in a cast wrapped in plastic – worked tirelessly in an effort to dry out the field, which was no small feat, given the amount of water that had soaked into the all-natural surface. We applaud their moxie and resolve.
But when it became painfully apparent that no amount of trenching, drying agent or blow dryers would be enough to return the field to a suitable playing surface, organizers should have pivoted to a fallback plan.
Therein lies the rub.
“We didn’t have a plan B because we never needed a plan B before,” Nathan Voytek, president of World Series Tournaments Inc., told the newspaper. “How do you develop plans for something you’ve never experienced?”
That logic is somewhat shortsighted as well as incongruous, as event planners routinely plot contingencies for the unexpected, whether or not the unexpected has occurred before.
So, while tournament officials continued to bury their heads in the soggy soil of Lew Hays Pony Field, the coaches from Puerto Rico were cooking up their own plan B to find a suitable place for the kids to do what they came to Washington for.
And that was to play ball.
That those games played Wednesday at Canon-McMillan’s McDowell Lane Field weren’t sanctioned by the league was of little consequence to the players and their families.
Word spread quickly of the hastily called exhibition games involving Puerto Rico, Washington County, Mexico, and West Covina, Calif., and spectators mobilized to the North Strabane field to witness a display of sheer joy and sportsmanship from the athletes – some of whom traveled as long as 18 hours by air to compete in the world series.
Though the hometown team was sorely disappointed by being denied its opportunity to compete for the championship title, the players rallied and showed spectators their mettle.
The energy was positive on and off the field as the players and parents from Puerto Rico gave the Washington team friendship bracelets, and they all shared pizza and donuts.
One of the moms took to social media afterward to express appreciation for the impromptu scrimmage.
“The Puerto Rico team is so grateful for the efforts made by the Washington organization to make these games happen,” Viviam O’Farrell wrote on Facebook. “We leave with a bittersweet feeling, but so happy our kids could play yesterday and have fun.”
We understand the challenging – and unpopular – decisions the Pony organization faced in dealing with Mother Nature’s wallop on the region. We also understand their concerns with adhering to league regulations and ensuring the safety of the players.
But when it became apparent that it would be nigh near impossible to finish the tournament, the leadership should have done what the others managed to do: find a way to let the kids play, sanctioned or not.
We recognize the organizers had good intentions in their quest to restore the field, but it appears they might have lost sight of what really mattered: the kids and the love of the game.