A scandal has broken out at the Little League Softball World Series, where a team from the state of Washington has been accused of throwing its game on Monday so that a rival team wouldn’t advance in the tournament.
The squad from South Snohomish Little League in Washington was no-hit by a team from North Carolina in its final game of pool play and lost 8-0. That raised some eyebrows, since the Washington team had been undefeated in pool play and had won by a combined score of 21-0 in its first two games. In its third game, however, it edged a team from Central Iowa Little League 4-3.
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Washington was already set to advance in the tournament before Monday’s game, but if it beat North Carolina, the tough Iowa was going to advance too. So in Monday’s game, Washington rested its best players, dropped down a lot of bunts and lost 8-0. That meant North Carolina advanced and Iowa went home.
Was this a sly manipulation of the pool-play system? Or just the result of what happens when a game isn’t as important to a good team?
That’s the debate going on now. Iowa filed a protest and coach Iowa coach Charlie Husak told WHO-TV:
“It was very evident when they did the starting lineups, their four best players were on the bench,” Husak said in a phone interview. “Their top four hitters were their subs the previous night when we played them. It was very evident right away what was going on … It took about a half inning for the girls to catch on,” Husak said. “We were trying to keep it from them, but you could see when they caught on that the tears started to pile up. It was pretty emotional.”
Little League issued a statement Tuesday morning, saying it had “received credible reports” that a team had not played with “the effort and spirit appropriate.” Little League had previously announced that Washington and Iowa would be playing a tiebreaker game Tuesday with the winner advancing to the next round of the tournament. Under its rules, Little League could have booted Washington from the tournament if it believed the team had purposely lost to influence pool rankings, but it didn’t go that far.
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For its side of things, the Washington team swears it did nothing wrong. From the Everett Herald newspaper in Washington:
South Snohomish Little League president Jeff Taylor denied any wrongdoing, saying South Snohomish head coach Fred Miller opted to rest some starters who had been playing in tournaments for more than three months.
“The only thing I would say is that Fred fielded a lineup playing some girls that hadn’t gotten to have much playing time,” Taylor said. “It wasn’t a game that we absolutely had to win and the Central Iowa team took exception to that because the outcome was that they got knocked out. So they called foul, because they said we didn’t play our best players. Because of that, they protested to the tournament director and felt that that was unfair.
“It came down to they hit our pitcher,” Taylor said. “We made a lot of good plays. We didn’t go up there trying to strike out, like they’re trying to imply. We made a lineup that rested some of our players that had been playing for three months. To try to downplay the accomplishments of these girls is unfair.”
This isn’t the only scandal to hit Little League recently. As you might remember, the U.S. champs from last year’s Little League Baseball World Series, Jackie Robinson West from Chicago, were stripped off their title after Little League decided it had manipulated district boundaries and fielded a team with ineligible players.
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Mike Oz is the editor of Big League Stew on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter! Follow @MikeOz
