It’s such a tragedy that Little League has come down to this challenge. The recent revelations that one of the top pitchers for the United States’ team from the Bronx is two years older than its counterparts. Why would a 14-year-old be encouraged to shave off two years off his age? Why would his parents continue to insist that Danny Almonte is truly 12 years old? Why would they falsify his own birth certificate to make him eligible? The answers to all these questions come down to greed and a sense of desperation. At the same time, it tends to tarnish of the Dominican baseball image in this country and the rest of the world. For sure, for a number of years, this small Caribbean country has produced some of the best baseball players. It is somewhat in a competition with its island counterpart, socialist Cuba. One only has to take a look at Sammy Sosa’s performance in the major league this year to realize how baseball permeates everybody’s life on the island. For many, it is a sure ticket out of poverty. Baseball, over the years, has become synonymous with the American pastime. The hope of making it big tends to corrupt the the unsuspicious.
For sure, Danny Almonte appears to be much older than his team mates and opponents from the other teams of the world. His managers and parents were hoping that by pitching so well he would catch the attention of the team owners who would be interested in him and offer him a contract. At this point, his father did not care much about enrolling him in a school during the whole year he has been in this country. All his father had to say when confronted by school officials was that he was concentrating on his game. How many times have we heard such statements from some players’ family members? A self-made 12-year-old is taking time off from his Junior High School to dedicate more time to his game of baseball. Greed is at the nature of this corruption. More importantly, our infatuation with heroes, stars, celebrities is also to blame in this whole mess. Until we found out that he was truly older by two years, we were gawking all his movements on the field. We wanted to mint him our new young hero. But baseball is not like Golf where a young Tiger Woods could truly astonish the world of golf and all golf amateurs.
Tainting the ethnic background
For the longest time, I thought the investigations requested by some parents were the results of pure ethnocentricism. I thought that the establishment could not live with the fact that a young kid from the Bronx and the Dominican Republic had dominated this year’s Little League World Series. These investigations and all these inquiries go deeper. They are proof that this country will worship anybody who has triumphed the right way. If you want to cheat your way to success, you will ultimately get caught right handedly. It makes sense that the parents of kids from the non-winning were getting frustrated with somebody who appeared much older than their own kids. The coaches of the other teams had their own observations. While they might have appreciated the talent of young Almonte, they wanted to make sure that their little guys got beaten by the right guy. In the end, Danny’s father may have destroyed his career in baseball before it even got started. It is such an unfortunate turn of events.
Cheating At Large, Falsification Of Legal Documents In the Dominican Republic
Even Sammy Sosa had to admit that it is relatively easy to falsify legal documents in the Dominican Republic. In other words, parents can always get their kids what piece of documents they need to qualify in sports such as baseball and basketball. Falsifying documents and getting caught in the act occurred before in this country. Just last year, a much older kid from the Dominican Republic got caught by some parents of the Clovis School Unified in the Central Valley of California. He was a 21-year-old who passed for a 17-year-old and ended up playing basketball for his Clovis, CA school. For sure, he won a championship for the school district that had to face a huge mess afterwards. Delegations were sent to the Dominican Republic to dig into his true birth records. I believe these inquiries were started by ESPN. Then, the local newspapers got on the story. When Rodriguez’s visa did not get renewed, he had to go back to his home country. The life that he was fighting for eluded him just because his parents, agents and school handlers lied and falsified his birth certificate. These days, he is hoping that things were different.
It is not uncommon for some parents to want their kids to succeed in sports. Most parents hope that some day their kids can sign these huge and multi-million dollar contracts. Some parents sometimes pay close to $100.00 per hour for individualized pitching, hitting in baseball, passing and other techniques in football. The pressure is great out there. But we must wonder how much we, parents, are willing to go to give some sort of advantage to our kids. Are we doing it just for the kids or for ourselves? When core values are not respected, it is time to take a look back at the whole picture.