Columbus Stars Baseball Team Banned For Being Too Good

By Linda Orlando

Many American traditions are slowly becoming history thanks to the ever-growing surge of political correctness that is slowly eroding the values and beliefs our country was founded on. No prayer in schools because someone might be offended; no pledge of allegiance; generically-named holidays; gender-neutral language; even the elimination of scorekeeping during children’s games. All those kindly, well-intentioned adults so concerned about children having to suffer incalculable amounts of stress and tribulation because of having to endure someone else’s ideas and opinions, and if children actually had to suffer the indignity of losing in a game, it would be the end of life on earth as they know it.

New examples of political correctness gone awry surface in the news every day, and one particularly perplexing story emerged when the Columbus Dispatch newspaper reported that the Columbus Stars, a baseball team of 11- and 12-year olds, were being kicked out of a recreational youth baseball league in Canal Winchester. Did the players misbehave in some way? Did they abuse fans at the games? Did they break some kind of league rule? No, the reason they were refunded their $150 entry fee made perfect sense to the parents of the players on the other teams—the Columbus Stars players were just too good. On May 9, the Stars beat the Red Sox, 18-0. Two weeks later, the Stars beat World Harvest, 13-0. On May 27, the Stars defeated Sugar Grove II, 24-0, and the next day they trounced Sugar Grove I, 10-2. Watching their record of wins, coach Terry Morris called up the league office and told them that his team would refuse to play against the Stars. ‘No way are we going to play them," said Morris, who coaches one of three teams from Bloom-Carroll schools in Fairfield County. "I wasn’t going to subject my players to that." Other teams followed suit, complaining and canceling games, until finally the Stars were yanked from the league’s schedule.

The coach for the Stars, Jerry Glick, was dumbfounded. "I’ve been in amateur sports for 35 years," says Glick. "This isn’t something I’ve had to deal with before." Since April, Glick’s players have been practicing four days a week on a field outside the Zion Lutheran Church, practicing for over two hours at a stretch. Some have been playing together for more than four years. "I don’t think it’s fair," said Michael Allston, 12, a catcher and pitcher for the Stars. "We always played our best, and we were just winning games." Allston’s 12-year old teammate Matthew "Boomer" Hufferd, who plays second base, blames overprotective adults for his team being pulled. "If they learn at their age that they can forfeit on things they don’t want to do, it’s quitting," Hufferd said.

Parents of the players on opposing teams concocted a plethora of reasons for the Stars being asked to leave the league, from whining that they didn’t want their kids self-esteem to be battered by losing a game, to complaints that their players were too big for their ages. One of the Stars’ players, R. J. Perry, is 155 pounds, and his teammate Allston is 5’8" tall. R. J.’s mother finally had to start taking a copy of each boy’s birth certificate to the games to head off disqualification. Parents of the players on the Yankees team unanimously decided not to play against such a successful team, saying that the issue wasn’t just competitiveness, but also safety—they were afraid one of their kids might get hit in the face with a ball and not be able to defend himself. Then parents accused Coach Glick of hand-picking players from all around the Columbus area to form an all-star team. But Glick supplied a list of players’ addresses to the league, proving that all but one of his players live in the 43207 zip code.

In returning the team’s entry fee, Michael Mirones, board chairman for the Canal Winchester Joint Recreation District, agreed with parents that the Stars should leave the league. "They were just beating the rec kids up," Mirones said. "It’s no fun for the kids that are losing." Awww. Hopefully the players in the remaining teams in the league were able to scrape together what was left of their self-esteem and carry on to play another day, and hopefully their parents are relieved that their precious progeny won’t have to suffer the indignity of actually losing to better players. As for the Stars, when the Columbus Dispatch ran the story about them being asked to leave their league, they were inundated with offers from all over the country to play. They’ve already scheduled games against teams in central Ohio, and they’ll be playing in two tournaments next month. A parent in a youth league in Atlanta even offered to arrange for the team to play in Georgia, saying, "I’d never heard of anything like that, and it blew my mind. I wish we lived closer."

The Stars even lost a game last week, playing against Georgian Heights, another Columbus team that the Stars had defeated twice earlier this year. But like the great baseball players they are, the Stars didn’t let the loss break their stride. Stars pitcher Josh Dameron, 12, said that his team had learned from the loss. "The mood of our team is the same," he said. "We don't care about the loss. The next time we play them, we hope we win." Sounds like the teams in the Canal Winchester league could have learned a lot from the Stars—not just about playing baseball, but also about the way life works—if they hadn’t kicked them out of the league.