Cal Ripkin Chamionship game results

There certainly was a difference in the Cal Ripkin WS from what I've been seeing in the LLWS. I don't know that the players were any worse, but there was certainly a different "tone" about the game.

The pitchers we saw were certainly not up to the standards of what we've seen in the LLWS, but that was only one game, and there seemed to be a much different attitude out there. When I see kids who haven't thrown an inning in the tournament, pitching in the championship game, I get the distinct feeling that the "win at any cost" attitude is not as strong.

No matter though. It was still a good game, albeit without the glitz of the ESPN broadcasts.

I was taken by some of Cal Ripkin's comments while he was broadcasting the game. for one thing, it was obvious that he is not a "professional" broadcaster. He wasn't prone trying to "fill air time" by babbling on about nothing, and in fact commented a couple of times about how he was paying so much attention to the action that he forgot to describe it. Personally, I like that! it goes back to many of the old time broadcaster who let the action speak for itself.

But, one of the comments he made was that baseball, especially for the kids up to 8 or 9 should be kept as simple as possible. He made that comment several times in a variety of ways, but the main one I liked was about keeping signs to an absolute minimum.

He made another comment I really liked. He said that in his opinion, people today were expecting far too much out of kids this age and that made the game far too serious. He even made one brief comment about when the game gets taken too seriously, it causes kids to burn out on it more rapidly, causing the game to lose a lot of really good players.

This game was more like what I see during the regular LL season. I don't know how the teams for this tournament was chosen, but I got the feeling it was like an extension of the LL TOC than the LL All Stars.