Curving the Wrong Way

All right. Confession time. I have not thought of an original idea for a blog for a week. I am completely stumped. I know there is all this about Tim Donaghy and Mike Vick, but you hear enough about it on SportsCenter or in the rare occasion, MSNBC or CNN. My job here is to get you away from the drudgings of scandals in sport. So I decided to look into what I thought what would be free of all scandal, the Little League World Series.

And boy, was I wrong.

There are no steroids or even age scandals. But to me, the biggest scandals are those pitch counts and the pitches they can throw. 85 pitches for a kid is entirely too much. Heck, if any pitcher throws more than that in the bigs, they are sent to the showers and made ice on their shoulders until they are frostbitten. Also, the kids can throw curves. The kids aren't even sprouting pimples, or much less 60 feet 6 inches away from home, and they can throw curves. In the long run, their arms are going to look like Anderson Varejao's hair. Dr. Frank Jobe may not want to help 15-year-olds. And the worst part is, the coaches let them. I mean, I can understand throwing a curve as your out pitch, but with some kids, the curves are their primary pitch.

Greg Maddux or Roger Clemens didn't throw curves when they were in little league. Some pitchers don't even use curves. But it is a travesty that these arms are being put to waste.