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(Yahoo!) The mouth-breathing moralists won Wednesday. They punished children for the behavior of adults. The corporation that enriches itself on the backs of unpaid labor played to type: hypocritical authoritarian bully. The little man who started this all by cocooning himself in the notion of fair play got what he wanted. And the Jackie Robinson West Little League team, a group of Chicago-area kids whose physical addresses mattered so much less than what they represented, are no longer U.S. champions.

Here’s what happened: Kids from around Chicagoland joined JRW. A man named Chris Janes, who runs a league that lost a game 43-2 against JRW, complained to Little League International that the team used players from outside its boundaries. Little League investigated, found that JRW redrew the boundaries without consulting nearby leagues andstripped it of the 2014 U.S. title. In a statement, Little League president Stephen Keener said: “As painful as this is, we feel it a necessary decision to maintain the integrity of the Little League program.”

How this all unfolded was simultaneously farcical and typical, more or less summing up the existence of Little League International, which ought rebrand itself NCAA Jr. Its business practices fit the part, as does its concern over a rulebook whose existence single-handedly warrants the creation of the delete key.

Rules are rules, unless those rules run contrary to the entire mission of an organization. That is the case with Little League, born in 1939 to promote children playing baseball, designed in 2015 to pocket giant sums of cash and carry the water for personal grudges. Characterizing Janes’ complaints as anything else would be lipstick on a pig. Janes, who did not respond to an email seeking comment, raised hell about Little League boundaries, fully aware whatever consequences came would rain down on the very kids about whom he raved.

“Every time I saw that team play, whether it was on TV or in person, those kids were fantastic – high degree of sportsmanship, well-behaved and obviously well-coached,” Janes told DNAinfo.com, the website that broke the original story on the questionable boundaries. “I don’t have a single bad thing to say about any one of those kids.”

Just a lot of bad things to do to them. Anybody with a rational brain would understand the upshot of firing off a letter to Little League asking it to investigate. If the allegations were found to be true, the focus would stray from the league organizers – the real culprits – and hone in on the children, their families and why they would dare skirt the rules.

The answer is one that should edify Little League, not prompt scrutiny: because they wanted to play together. A group of African-American kids – a demographic that around the United States simply isn’t playing baseball – banded together and ran roughshod through talented teams from around the country. Some of the kids came from nearby suburbs. All of them were in the greater Chicago area. Inside the offices of Major League Baseball, executives relished it. This wasn’t forced, wasn’t instituted by some higher puppeteer. The kids banded organically, and they were great.

Little League worries that allowing kids from outside districts is a Pandora’s box, and that’s fine. If the rules are that important, it should enforce them pre-emptively to prevent such issues from taking place. Of course, that would take money, and we know what Little League does with its money: not spend it on the kids who draw the audience for the television contract that pays millions of dollars a year. No, Little League would rather pay its top executive nearly a half-million dollars a year than use some of its $80 million in reserves to administer a system that doesn’t have the appearance of picking on black city kids.

Because that’s what this looks like. Maybe it’s just a coincidence that the first all-black U.S. champion prompted a deep dive into the residency of the players’ parents. This is not to say JRW deserves some sort of special dispensation or immunity from investigation. Just that it sends a mighty bad message to a demographic baseball desperately wants to recapture after years of perceived mistreatment left it seeking better alternatives.

Look, there’s wrong on the JRW side, especially at the top, where the leadership tried to persuade nearby leagues to allow JRW’s gerrymandering post hoc. This was remarkably stupid and deserved discipline. The cover up, per usual, was worse than the crime. A conversation with local leaders on why this was important could have sent a better message than asking them to do something about which they already were aggrieved.

Then again, maybe it wouldn’t have. According to DNAinfo.com, Janes wrote in his letter to Little League International: “In the event we do not receive a detailed response explaining how these players were eligible to play for JRW we are strongly considering obtaining outside representation to see this matter through to the end.”

No wonder kids don’t trust adults. This is Little League baseball. Little League. And the guy whose team got thumped by more than 40 runs wants to get litigious, all in the name of fair play.

Little League could have squelched this easily. Remove the league’s top brass. That is understandable. If this is indeed an issue worth fighting for, commit to background checks that verify a child’s permanent address. And then say unequivocally that its champion is its champion, because the games were played, the scores are final and no amount of revisionism can remove them.

Instead, Little League did what it always does: take the cheap, easy route. One of the tenets of Little League’s motto is courage. Too bad Little League doesn’t practice what it preaches. If it had any, Jackie Robinson West still would be U.S. champion.

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