Can’t help but tell what went on at our last game. The team has been really doing well so far this season, and it seems as though the more success the team has, the more a few of the more “aggressive” parents are beginning to go.
This is the 1st year of V ball for both teams, but its pretty obvious our guys have been prepared much better. Neither team has any Srs, but they have 2 Frs starting. We’re at home, it’s the bottom of the 3rd, and we’re winning the game 16-0. Our P’s are throwing a no hitter, and haven’t allowed even 1 ball out of the IF.
Our leadoff hitter in the 3rd gets his 3rd hit of the game, and the next batter hits a grounder to 2nd. The kid on 1st takes off for 2nd, the 2B fields the ball cleanly and flips to the SS. It was obvious there wasn’t gonna be a DP because it wasn’t a sharply hit ball at all, and the SS just caught the flip, touched the base for the force, then stepped back and stood there.
It ended up being a close play, but never that close, and never any doubt that the runner had no chance to beat the throw. All of a sudden one of our parents jumps up and starts shouting at our base runner, that he should have taken out the SS! I couldn’t believe it! Here’s this guy screaming for blood in a game like that!
I told him it was a good thing he didn’t do that because he’d very likely been popped for malicious conduct, been tossed, and then suspended. The guy actually got angry! He went on about how players can’t allow themselves to be soft, no matter what, and have to play the game the right way!
Standing right behind him was an ex-ML player of 13 years. I just looked at him, and we both shook our heads and shrugged our shoulders. Then he tried to tell the guy that it was wrong to just grind another team in the dirt for no good reason, let alone take a chance on purposely injuring another player. The guy told him that if the other team couldn’t field a better team, they deserved to be ground into the dirt!
Granted this was only one guy, but that kind of thing has a way of spreading like wildfire. Pretty soon we’re hearing parents on the other side hollering at their P to back guys off the plate and hit them if necessary. That causes a couple more of our parents to get involved and yell similarly stupid things. Thankfully the HPU came back and got everyone settled down, but for about 15 minutes things were really getting ugly.
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