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Published: November 12th 2006
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After the ceremony we headed back to Gensac to have pizza and watch the rugby match Chateau Carbonneau (Wilfred and Jackie’s home and winery). France lost the match 47-3. Then after the game, we got into an interesting conversation about youth baseball in France, in particular the 13-15 Year old French championship that took place in Paris a few weeks ago while I was back in the US. The Pineuilh team (us) finished third place in France, but because of a disqualification of the first place team, Montigny, they ended up finishing second. And they only lost to the first place team because of a balk with the bases loaded in extra innings!!
The Montigny team was disqualified because they had a few players that were ineligible to play. If I understand the scenario correctly, there were three Montigny players who were too old to play in the 13-15 division, and they were not from the Montigny club. They had played the whole season with a different team.
What is silly about the whole situation is a) the Montigny team would have won the championship anyway, they were far and away better than the other teams in the finals,
and b) the tourney organizers knew about the ineligibility beforehand.
It was Jean-Marie, representative of the Pineuilh team (and also Vice-President of the French Baseball Federation) who protested the Montigny team on the grounds that they had ineligible players. To protest a team there is a slew of paperwork that you must fill out, signatures you must obtain (including the president of the club, the coach, cosigners, etc…) and so while the tournament was going on Jean-Marie was in the process of preparing this protest. Then, just before the Championship, the official protest was submitted. A week after the finals the Montigny team was officially disqualified.
It all seems very dramatic to me. Why didn’t Jean-Marie submit the protest at the beginning of the tournament, get the three ineligible players off the team, and let things continue as usual?? We know that the tournament officials knew about the protest and the ineligible players because one of the organizers approached Trish, mother of one of the Pineuilh players and the individual who was handling the protest paperwork for Jean-Marie, to ask her if she was going to follow through with the protest of the three ineligible players. If they
knew about it then why didn’t the organizers take care of the situation in the first place??
The reason is because it was Montigny was hosting the tournament. They were the ones organizing and facilitating the whole thing, and I imagine they were hoping that this would go unnoticed and the other teams would chalk it up as another Montigny championship.
There was also talk that the balk call with two outs and the bases loaded against the Pineuilh team in the semifinals was fixed; and as absurd as this sounds for a match between a bunch of kids to be fixed, I would not be surprised. At this age level, particularly in the French league, a balk is never called without a warning being given first. In this situation there was no warning given and it was the balk call that decided the game. The umpire who made the call was from the Montigny team. If Pineuilh had won the game they would have then played Montigny in the finals and would have submitted their protest immediately. Jean-Marie even brought this up at the organizers’ meeting in which he submitted the official protest, which did not win him many friends.
This all seems absurd, but then again people can get very serious when it comes to youth sports. I imagine anyone who has had kids in youth sports has experienced some type of bending the rules like this.
It makes me think of a tournament I played in with my AAU team when I was 14. The tournament was in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, and it included thirty or so teams from around the country and five countries. I remember we were joking about the fact that one of the tournament rules limited team rosters to fifty players. Fifty players!? We thought this was ridiculous. We were bringing sixteen players and many of those (including myself) did not play very much. We were surprised to find out that in fact a number of the teams did have rosters of fifty players. Two teams, California and Texas, would fly in a couple of new pitchers and position players for each game, depending upon what they needed for that game. I remember standing on first base holding a runner on and looking up at him and thinking ‘there is no way you are fifteen years old. You have a beard.’ I still can’t grow a beard, or even a mustache, and I am twenty-three years old……….
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