When Everybody Wins, Nobody Wins

Jericho Scott

Yahoo news released a report on a 9-year-old baseball player who throws a 40 MPH fastball. This outstanding star, Jericho Scott, is among the greatest baseball players his age in the world. His reward? He was banned from the league.

From the article:

When Jericho took the mound anyway last week, the opposing team forfeited the game, packed its gear and left, his coach said.

Officials for the three-year-old league, which has eight teams and about 100 players, said they will disband Jericho’s team, redistributing its players among other squads, and offered to refund $50 sign-up fees to anyone who asks for it. They say Jericho’s coach, Wilfred Vidro, has resigned.

But Vidro says he didn’t quit and the team refuses to disband. Players and parents held a protest at the league’s field on Saturday urging the league to let Jericho pitch.

“He’s never hurt any one,” Vidro said. “He’s on target all the time. How can you punish a kid for being too good?”

Sports Illustrated picked up on the story, and since Sports Illustrated is a CNN company, it’s safe to say that in the following weeks this story will get some national coverage.

Reading this brought me back to my days of youth baseball. The first year we played, a devastating rumor made its way around Sage Creek Elementary School. After the trauma that was caused the previous year when a boy was thrown out at first base for the very first time, the city’s Parks and Recreation department had decided to eliminate “outs” in tee-ball this year. They couldn’t deal with any more tantrums or furious parents.

What irks me the most isn’t that competition was eliminated from tee-ball, but that the idea of somebody failing was so daunting that it changed the way the game worked. I understand the whole-hearted “just have fun” approach, and maybe I’m just too competitive, but baseball where every hit turns into a point defeats the entire purpose of the game. Are we going to destroy a game just so that people can’t lose?

I see this happening more and more: our society is adapting in order to eliminate losers. This isn’t a good thing, it is terrible. When a loser is removed, by definition so is a winner. Eliminating punishments eliminates rewards, and eliminating rewards and punishments eliminates incentive. Eliminating incentive eliminates competition.

This is what happened in my tee-ball league. Nobody cared. You couldn’t get them out, so why try hard? But the most devastating part of this whole story is that eliminating competition eliminates fun. The New York Times reports Jericho said “I feel sad… I feel like it’s all my fault nobody could play.”

The fact of the matter is that there are (at least) two things that makes any successful person successful:

1. They love what they do.
2. They are willing to work hard to accomplish their goals.

Eliminating competition effectively eradicates both of these things.

Remember when only the winners got a trophy?