Leading by (good) example

Picture a baseball game. The pitcher is on the mound; he gets his signal from the catcher and nods approval. He goes into his windup, makes his pitch and the home plate umpire makes the call.

Then all hell breaks loose.

At first there’s just some smack-talk, then some shoving and suddenly fists are flying. One man is knocked down from a punch while others push and shove. The police arrive.

A bit of grousing and catcalling is nothing unusual in baseball. What was unusual about this scenario is that the umpire was 13 years old, the players in the 7-year-old range, and the fighting wasn’t among the players, but coaches and parents who came down from the stands onto the field of play and, apparently after some words were exchanged, began fighting around home plate.

Adults fist fighting at a child’s baseball game. Classy.

Injuries were reported, according to the Lakewood, Colo. police department. Several people received citations.

In a statement, the police referred to the brawl as sad and disgusting.

Indeed. In the amateur video widely distributed on the Internet, the players — children — can be seen running away from the adults, some who are presumably their parents, as the melee breaks out.

I was speechless the first time I watched the video. Are adults and parents so self-involved and their ego so pathologically tied to their children’s success — meaning their own success — that they are willing to get into a fight over a call by a 13-year-old umpire? Is this what American sports has devolved into?

Sports for kids are supposed to be full of teachable moments. A loss is an opportunity to learn to dig deep and find resilience, while maintaining dignity in adversity. A win is a chance to show good sportsmanship and praise the losing team for their tenacity.

Maybe it’s the adults who need some lessons.

In a popular YouTube video, two best friends are facing each other — pitcher and batter — in a state championship baseball game. The win is on the line for the batter. There’s the pitch, the swing and … the batter is struck out looking.

Elated, the pitcher’s teammates erupt from the dugout onto the field in a mad, exuberant team embrace between home plate and the mound due to their championship win.

And the winning pitcher? He dodges his teammates and runs to home plate to hug his buddy, in what one newscaster called a “master class in how you play the game.”

“Don’t let this outcome affect our friendship,” the winning pitcher said he told his friend.

The win was great, no doubt, but he put humanity and his friendship above the victory.

Baseball, or any sport, is in the end just a game. A pastime. Something to take the average person’s mind off the tedium of everyday life. And when our kids play, it should be a chance to help them appropriately celebrate their successes and learn from their defeats. Isn’t that what parenting is all about?

One person must have come out of the stands during that ill-fated children’s baseball game. Others, for whatever reason, must have followed, and bad went to worse, which then fell into the category of pathetic.

Coming down off the stands during a game played by 7-year-olds due to a call by a 13-year-old is nothing but shameful. Not only is it poor sportsmanship, it’s pathological.

Lakewood police, in what has to be the understatement of the year, noted, “Something like this is not OK.”

There was a time when character meant something, and sports were, supposedly, part of building that character. What ever happened to those days?

Lee Hughes can be reached at [email protected].