In wintertime, daily life in the Open Air Museum of Ignorance, Superstition and Backwardness often revolves around sports. Last week, it was a debate about the politics of Little League.
… Little League Baseball confirmed the news on Wednesday, forcing Illinois’ All-Stars (Jackie Robinson West) to vacate its U.S. Championship over Nevada and Great Lakes Valley Regional victory over Indiana. The announcement also declared New Albany a Great Lakes Valley champion, the town’s first such honor.
Fulfilling my duty as resident civic contrarian, let’s pole-vault past the cacophonous blather about scandalous adult cheating, childhood heartache, overdue victory parades and selective exurban zoning. Rather, let’s look at a different side of the story.
Gentrification Is the Real Scandal Surrounding Jackie Robinson West, by Dave Zirin (The Nation)
… As for the decision itself, ironies abound. Jackie Robinson West was the first entirely black team to represent the United States in the Little League World Series. And yes, waiting until Black History Month to strip JRW of their title is at best tin-eared. But that insult shouldn’t blind us to the greater injury. Recall their damnable offense: Jackie Robinson West didn’t use 16-year-old ringers or cork their bats. They had players suit up who lived “beyond their geographical boundary.” The fact that the adults in charge of JRW felt the need to breach this rule perhaps has something to do with the fact that today’s urban landscape supports baseball about as well as concrete makes proper soil for orchids. A plurality of Major Leaguers is made up of people from either the US suburbs or the baseball factories of the Dominican Republic. Many of the few African-American players on Major League rosters actually come from the suburbs. This is because twenty-first-century neoliberal cities have gentrified urban black baseball to death. Boys and Girls Clubs have become bistros. Baseball fields are condos and in many cities, Little League is non-existent. The public funds for the infrastructure that baseball demands simply do not exist, but the land required for diamonds are the crown jewels of urban real estate. That’s what made JRW such a profound anomaly. In Chicago particularly, which under Mayor Rahm Emanuel has seen school closures and brutal cuts to physical education programs, their success made people believe that—with apologies to Tupac—flowers could in fact grow in concrete.
