Oh, those 'Little' Boys of Summer ...

I can't pull myself away from ESPN and its coverage of the Little League World Series. I'm borderline obsessed with it. I thought I had gotten my fill of the Series last year when I covered these pint-sized ballplayers for MLB.com. 

But even as my career with the dot.com veered in another direction, I've remained deeply in love with the event. I left a piece of my baseball heart in Williamsport, Penn., home to what might be the truest form of America's pastime. 

Each summer, teams of Little Leaguers travel there from places as near as Kentucky and as far as Japan or Saudi Arabia. They come carrying hopes and dreams and passions for what has become a decidedly international game. While baseball planted its roots firmly in U.S. soil, its branches go in every direction.

So you sit in Lamade Stadium or Volunteer Stadium and see this United Nations of youngsters enjoying this game like Jeter and Howard and Braun and Granderson and Lee and Mauer and Ellsbury and ... well, like any big leaguer. The youngsters run and throw and swing and catch. They laugh, they hurt, they cry. They make new friends, they see new sites, they live a fantasy. 

I used to think that putting a spotlight on boys 11-, 12- and 13-years-old was misguided. I mistakenly believed adults had co-opted the game, molding the World Series into what it has become: a made-for-TV spectacle. 

But I discovered firsthand last summer that the Little League World Series is no more about adults than a secondary education is. The World Series is about little boys like Dieter Miller and Cheng-Chieh Lee and Yuan-Ting Ta and Santee Jackson, Carson Carrike and Cole Scieszinski and Luke Ramirez and Katie Reyes -- and, yes, a girl of summer, too; it's about what they love and enjoy.

Oh, the adults around them enjoy it all as well. They soak up this intoxicating atmosphere at Williamsport like a town drunk with no limit on his bar tab. They cheer wildly for their sons and grandsons and brothers and cousins and the neighbor's kids. They celebrate the successes; they mourn the disappointments.

And there are many of the latter in Williamsport. For only one team will leave this burg deep in the middle of nowhere with a championship. The rest of the teams will return to their homes in with disappointment in tow, though not as losers. 

For to make it to Williamsport is to be a winner. It's an experience of a lifetime, a lifetime that has only begun to take shape. 

As I watched these little boys of summer last year, I hoped they'd have successes beyond the playing field. The odds are that, of the scores of boys playing in Williamsport then, only two or three of them will reach the big leagues.  

That's OK, because what they will have learned from their experience is how to be a good teammate, how to accept things they cannot change and how to enjoy a moment that so few boys will ever experience.

And for the rest of their lives, they will have hours of ESPN video and their watercolored memories to remind them of the thrills they are having -- win or lose -- on a small stage that is every bit as grand as Fenway Park, Wrigley Field or Yankee Stadium.    

Reality of Shaq's TV show: It bites ...

They say reality bites, but I think they were actually talking about reality shows. 

No argument there if that's actually the point, because if people have watched Shaq O'Neal's reality show, they have no other choice but to say it bites.

Two minutes into his second show last night (I skipped his first), I  wondered why a proud network like ESPN would even bother with show that takes viewers deep inside an athlete's obsession for the spotlight. The network had to think it's doing about what paparazzi do daily as they trail Hollywood stars everywhere. 

ESPN should know better. The World Wide Leader has seen Paris Hilton, Terrell Owens, The Donald, Hulk Hogan and Ozzy Osbourne, among others, take viewers in places only the mindless want to go. None of these other celebrities, however, took us where Shaq did.

There was a time when I found Shaq an intriguing personality, but that was, oh, a decade ago when he was playing the king-sized clown for boys and girls everywhere. But his public feud with Kobe Bryant changed my image of him. No, I don't blame the 7-foot-1 Shaq alone for what happened between he and Kobe. Pro basketball is a game of egos, and L.A. wasn't large enough for two egos the size of theirs. 

Ego is a funny thing, because if displayed too often, it turns into arrogance. That's what Shaq's show is: brazen arrogance. Because it takes arrogance of the highest order for an athlete to go out of his element and expect to compete against top athletes in a different sport, even if it is for giggles.

I would no more expect Shaq to hit a CC Sabathia fastball than I would expect Sabathia to slam dunk in Shaq's face. I'd like to think Shaq was wise enough to see that, too.

Wisdom, however, doesn't always come with age. Often, we seem to lose a few IQ points as our 20s roll into our 30s, our 30s roll into our 40s and our 40s ... OK, OK, you get the message here, right?

But as much as I want to slap Shaq around for his stupidity here, the culprit for this reality show fiasco is ESPN itself. The network aided and abetted this mess, and it shouldn't compound this stupidity by keeping the show on the air.

Save Shaq from showing us an absurd side of himself that nobody wants to waste an hour seeing.          

Santana down, out ... and so are the Mets

This is another misfortune in a lousy season in New York that gets lousier: millions of dollars more on the disabled list.

The latest millionaire to land there is Mets left-hander Johan Santana, once the most dependable starter in the game. Oh, and Santana’s got a couple of Cy Youngs to prove it.

Now, he finds himself looking not ahead to his next start but to an appointment with a surgeon. Santana’s balky elbow shortened his season. He fought the pain and the discomfort since Spring Training, but the pain and the discomfort won.

Nobody expected this in New York City, not with a sparkling new ballpark and expectations as large as Central Park. Of course, injury to a pitcher’s arm can never be predicted, but if you fancy yourself a baseball fan, you have to hope it never happens to the Johan Santanas of the game.

Without the 30-year-old Santana to anchor the rotation, the Mets have little to look forward to themselves as they wind down their inaugural season in Citi Field. No Miracle Mets this season.

They might as well be the Pirates or the Nationals, two deadbeat franchises in flashy ballparks that months ago baled on the ’09 season.

At least Mets GM Omar Minaya can be hopeful about next season, prospects that elude his counterparts in Pittsburgh and D.C.

Minaya can also take comfort in the fact that Santana is only having bone chips removed from his elbow; he’s not facing Tommy John surgery, an operation that might ruin what has been a brilliant career.

Yet such news offers little solace to Mets fans, men and women who see the high-priced Santana’s trek to the disabled list as the final chapter in what has been a Shakespearean tragedy.

   

Just color Josh Hamilton a hypocrite ...

Not sure how many people read Richie Whitt's piece in The Dallas Observer News. 

Take a minute to do so. 

I don't know Whitt, and I'm as unfamiliar with his journalist pedigree as I am with the publication he writes for. I do know this, however: Richie Whitt's unafraid to walk through minefields.

For that's where he surely has found himself today for having the testicular fortitude to say that Josh Hamilton, the Texas Rangers star, has gotten a free pass because he's "white."

What baseball fan doesn't know Josh Hamilton's story? The good-looking crackhead, the tattooed drunk and the fallen prospect who seemingly had squandered the athletic gifts God blessed him with. Hamilton found himself a deep hit on a stranger’s crack pipe from being the late Josh Hamilton.

But his story wouldn't end so horribly. Hamilton would find salvation in places we hope people in his circumstances will turn to. He cleansed his life with the harsh scrubbing needed when dirt and filth and drugs and dames conspire to rob a man of his money -- and his dignity.

Hamilton turned to God for His help -- for a hand to fight the demons that would be in places we don't dare talk about. As part of his recovery, Hamilton went around preaching about how he's a different man than he was in those dark days of living on the precipice. He's scared straight these days.

Or so he preached.

His would be an inspirational story; his was the ultimate success story, if only it were a true story.

Now, everybody else knows its fiction, and everybody knows that Hamilton isn't someone we should be applauding. He's just like too many others who ask us to believe in them and then betray that trust when we do. He's a hypocrite -- an unrepentant hypocrite, too.

But in injecting race into the story, Whitt put a different spin on the Hamilton tall tale, which has now become a YouTube classic of him loving and drinking and ... doing whatever else he was doing this offseason with women who aren’t his wife. Yet even as people who aren't overly polite about hypocrisy talk about Hamilton’s excesses, the public has been silent.  So has much of the media.

To them, Hamilton is a warmer -- and whiter -- story than Michael Beasley or Josh Howard or one of the handful of NBA or NFL stars in rehab who were caught with alcohol or marijuana.  

For whatever reason, you won't see Hamilton's craziness picked over like a zebra's carcass on the Kalahari Desert. He's earned people’s sympathy again, even though he has a past so checkered that he should have used up all the goodwill others might have for him.

Forgiveness is a virtue; foolishness is not. We are fools to believe Hamilton's coverboy looks should lessen the scrutiny of his public misconduct.

His relapse is like Doc Gooden’s or Daryl Strawberry’s or like any of the number of contemporary athletes of color who have found the road to forgiveness takes years to transverse. They carry those miles of hard living into old age, if they live to see old age.

Josh Hamilton is lucky, because he won’t have the burden of color to slow his journey to salvation. But he hasn’t earned this carefree trek -- not this time, and not in the face of all he says that contradicts all he has done.

He is a “hypocrite,” and as Richie Whitt wrote, fans should not shy away from applying the word to Hamilton. It is, after all, more accurate than calling him a "star."