Last year, the Little League team from the Rolando Paulino League in the Bronx, New York, disgraced the national organization after reaching the World Series in Williamsport, Pennsylvania. The team falsified the age of its star pitcher, Daniel Almonte, who was two years older than Little League's 12-year-old limit, using documentation from the less-than-stellar record-keepers in the Dominican Republic. The Bronx officials conveniently scrutinized the papers with attention similar to that paid by the Securities and Exchange Commission to George W. Bush's Harken dealings. That Almonte had a vicious curve and incredible fastball certainly didn't hurt the Bronx elders in making their decision.

The issue of perceived racism, possibly sparked by sour grapes, was raised after teams beaten by the Bronx squad on the way to the series began making accusations. One manager on Long Island hired a private investigator to look into the players' age eligibility, and he now claims that as many as four others were over-age. Discrimination was an easy conclusion to reach, given the heavy Latino and black makeup of Rolando Paulino. At least on the face of it, it proved incorrect, fortunately, given the final verdict.

So when this year's charges of player ineligibility on the dominant team from Harlem, another entirely Latino and black team, were bruited about as the squad progressed towards Williamsport, it was tough not to think the urban kids were again being victimized for their background. Yet one also had to raise an eyebrow over the recent track record of an inner-city New York team, defended at the outset by many to their eventual chagrin.

But this year the angle was different. The claims were that some of the players did not live in Harlem. This cry of geographic deception by Wonder Bread-fed suburban teams goes back to the 1970s, when primarily Taiwan and other Asian teams began to dominate the Littler World Series at the expense of our junior Jack Armstrongs.

In those days, due to both ignorance and an attempt to not look anti-Asian, little was done to follow up on the charges that Taipei's borders didn't include the entirety of the island country. The eventual solution was to separate the series into separate American and Rest of the World brackets, with the American kids having to face only the Taiwanese and friends in the ultimate game for global 12-year-old dominance after officially winning the big one against the pride of the U.S. of A.

In this case, Little League's investigation ruled that the accusations that three of the players didn't live in Harlem were false. As has been pointed out, notably by the excellent New York Times' sport columnist William Rhoden, who happens to live in Harlem and knows many of the players' families, life in the city ain't quite as cut-and-dried as in the 'burbs and rural areas of the country. And while many wanted these eligibility issues to be black and white (pun obviously intended), the urban world often offers a very different, and more difficult, kind of childhood.

Thankfully, Little League executives grew up enough to recognize this and quell the pint-sized persecution. Reporters at the Times, led by Rhoden, went on to detail the living situations of some of the players whose qualifications were contested. While it may have been much more exposure than many of the families would have liked, it revealed a lot about the new world that Little League must find a way of dealing with, especially when grownups involved with teams decide to prosecute the innocent.

Javier and Jorge Lopez, talented twins on the Harlem team, for example, no longer live at the residence they listed on their league forms last year. There's your cheating, no doubt about it. Except for the fact that they had stayed there with a family friend when their mother told the woman "they had no place to go." They have since had multiple residences in the city. Nice life, avoiding the shelter, isn't it? The twins' cousin, Jeremy, was also being devious and trying to circumvent the rules. "He sleeps on the couch and comes and goes," said the husband of one of Jeremy's mother's friends. Jeremy's mom is going through marital problems and has used Jeremy's Harlem address as a place to retreat to when things get bad. "It takes pressure off the family to come here. They are trying to hold the family together."

"He sleeps on the couch and comes and goes." He's 12 years old.

There are obviously family problems, poverty, and other life-disrupting situations in farm towns in the Midwest and suburban communities. But the turmoil in those areas is unlikely to spread very far beyond the town lines, or, conversely, to result in a move that will take a child far from where the problems occurred. In New York City and other urban areas, the shift in residence may be two subway stops or a walkable 30 blocks away, just far enough to get you outside the arbitrary boundaries set up by the Little League authorities.

It can also be an entire borough away, but for a 12-year-old armed with a few subway or bus tokens, this can mean going to school in another district with more people than live in Rhode Island and still be sleeping on a couch in the neighborhood whose name is on the front of your baseball shirt.

Perhaps the Harlem All-Star team deserves thanks, rather than sideways glances, for providing real-life examples of the issues that Little League now faces. That is certainly no idle promise, because as fate would have it, the newly elected chairman of Little League Baseball, W. Dwight Raiford, just happens to be the man who founded the Harlem Little League. What a bully pulpit from which to push the acceptance of a new view of the world, and to have the organization deal with this environment sensibly and ultimately fairly.

One thing to remember: They call it Little League for a good reason. These are children playing games.

Issue Date: August 23 - 29, 2002