By Larry Brown
Little League International officials had to intervene after allegations arose that a team threw one of its games at the Little League Softball World Series in Portland, Ore. on Monday.
South Snohomish Little League of Sonohomish, Wash. is accused of throwing its game against Southeast representative Rowan Little League of Salisbury, N.C. A great case can be made against Snohomish, too. The West region representative was no-hit in an 8-0 loss. Reports say they played all their bench players and instructed them to bunt the entire game.
“It’s clear to everyone that they basically threw the game,” Central Iowa Little League president Chris Chadd told The Des Moines Register.
“It was very evident when they did the starting lineups that their four best players were on the bench and they were going to be the reserves,” Central head coach Charlie Husak told WHO. “It was very evident right away what was going on. They weren’t striving to win. We saw that and (our) girls — you could see — it took about a half an inning for them to catch on. We were trying to keep it from them, but you could see when they caught on that the tears started to pile up and it was pretty emotional.”
Snohomish argues that they gave their top players a chance to rest after a long summer of games and allowed some other players a chance to play.
Why might Snohomish have wanted to lose the game by a large margin?
The Washington-based team went 3-0 in pool play, making them a lock to advance to the semifinals of the tournament. Snohomish had won its first two games by a combined score of 21-0. However, they struggled to defeat Central Iowa Little League 4-3. Iowa, meanwhile, won earlier in the day on Monday to improve to 3-1. As long as Snohomish beat North Carolina in the game after Iowa won, then Snohomish and Iowa would have been the two out of the five teams to advance from their pool (Snohomish would have been 4-0; Iowa 3-1; and North Carolina 2-2). But Iowa felt like Snohomish wanted them knocked out of the tournament, which is why they think Washington came up with a plan to throw its game against North Carolina.
Because Snohomish, Iowa and North Carolina all went 3-1 in pool play with 1-1 records against each opponent, a runs allowed average would have been the tiebreaker to determine which two advance to the semifinals. An 8-0 win for N.C. would have helped the Southeast team win a tiebreaker with Iowa.
Iowa protested the game but the Little League Softball World Series did nothing, so the Des Moines Register says they appealed to the governing body — Little League International. Little League International determined there was some funny business, so they forced a game between Iowa and Washington to determine who would advance to the semifinals along with the North Carolina team.
How scared was Washington of a rematch with the Iowa team (if you agree with Iowa's assertion)? Considering teams from the same pool would face a team from the opposite pool in the semifinals, they must have been pretty confident they would have met them in the finals.
The Washington team is lucky that Little League International didn’t disqualify them for poor sportsmanship, while the coaches clearly would have been sending a horrible message by employing such an embarrassing strategy if that's what they were doing. The strategy to throw the game actually runs counter to Little League’s tenet of striving to win.
This is actually a lot worse than the cheating scandal at last year’s Little League World Series.
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