The Pearland Kids didn't wreck the car. They just ran out of gas.
By now, most of you know that Pearland, Texas bowed to Hawaii Saturday afternoon in the American LLWS Division Finals – and that Hawaii will square off today against Japan, the winner of the LLWS International Division title, also yesterday, by a 3-2 score in seven innings over Taiwan. There was nothing close about the Pearland @ Hawaii game. The Hawaiians took it 10-0, ending the game in five innings by the ten-run mercy rule, as out-of-gas Pearland walked away with only two hits. It wasn’t pretty, but it’s one of those things that happens every now and then, even among evenly matched clubs, when you play enough games over pretty much of an everyday business. If they played that same game again today, who knows, the results might turn out to be exactly the opposite.
Pearland wasn’t involved in a car wreck on Saturday. The other fine little club just caught our boys on a day they had run completely out of gas. It happens. Look a Taiwan, They went into their game with Japan hitting in the high .400s as a team, and with a record in the tourney that included victories of 23-0 and 18-0, but not Saturday, not against Japan. Saturday, Taiwan wobbled away with only 2 runs and 4 hits.
Does Taiwan still have the ability to crush Japan, if they played again today? No question. It simply wasn’t meant to be and isn’t going to happen. Instead, Pearland (Texas) and Taiwan will play at 10:00 AM Central Sunday in the Preliminary Consolation Game for 3rd Place prior to the 2:00 PM Central Sunday Championship Game between Hawaii and Japan. And both games unfold again at Lamabe Field in Williamsport, Pennsylvania.
In this LLWS, Pearland’s Mike Orlando really stood out as everything a Little League coach needs to be as a teacher and role model to the kids. He never abandoned them when they needed his encouragement, and he put their final departure from the championship run in the perspective it needed to be all along – and was – with the Pearland kids.
“I’m proud of you guys,” Orlando told his team in defeat. “I kept telling them that I didn’t care about the the results. I tried to keep the spirits up, and I just kept reminding them that thousands of Little Leaguers would trade places with them in a second.”
Message delivered, heard, and there for the players as a whole piece of very grown up thought for that moment in time of losing that otherwise feels like a sudden free fall into a giant hole in the ground.
Life is full of moments that may feel like the end of the world if we haven’t had some kind of emotional experience with sane survival – and the formula for sane survival laces its way through the simple words of Mike Orlando to his kids.
What we don’t win from, we try to learn from. If it doesn’t kill us, like the old saw goes, it will make us stronger the next time we are facing a similar kind of situation. People who get that connection, learn and move on with their lives on the wings of wisdom. People who don’t get it, well, they just stay stuck on blaming circumstances and other people for their disappointments and bad feelings – and they gear up for becoming dedicated losers. The only real losers in life are those people who refuse to learn their own lessons from the pain of a bad outcome and who always need to blame others and circumstances for their setbacks.
Fortunately for the kids from Pearland, they had Mike Orlando as a coach. His lessons were all about having gratitude for the experience, learning from what happened, and moving on in the joy of knowing they just had a rare and beautiful experience that others would have loved having for themselves.
Good Luck to Mike Orlando, the kids of Pearland, and the people who make up that community. You’ve made the whole Houston area proud of you.
Tags: Baseball, History, Little League
The Pecan Park Eagle 
August 30, 2010 at 7:16 pm |
Little League World Series epitomizes everything that’s wrong in youth sports. I identified this evil the year my son made his league’s all star team. All Star teams should be banned, flat out banned. Go ahead and name an All Star team, give them a stupid trophy, but never let them play together on a field. Instead, the ENTIRE team that wins a league should advance into the tournament – stars, studs, and duds- just like real baseball. If a coach suddenly finds himself with the bases loaded, two out, and trailing in a game and his weakest hitter in the on deck circle, he might start to do some really coaching for a change. Under the current system all the coaches do is worry about their sons and the 2-3 best players on a team. They do not coach the scrawney kids that aren’t any good to get them primed for their big moments. Most kids see this hypocrisy and give up on baseball as the playground of fathers reliving their lost or failed youth. Ask the kid who was ignored while the coaches worked with the all stars to see if he (or she) bothered to watch the LLWS. Coach the duds, coach, not just the studs. Let these kids at Williamsport cry. The forgotten kid back in Pearland cried too. Who cared about him?
September 23, 2010 at 9:38 am |
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