Monday, August 27, 2007
Things I'll bet you didn't know about the south
Posted by Whet Moser on Mon, Aug 27, 2007 at 5:09 PM
I received this message today from someone in my fantasy baseball league, in which I've been running a close second to the sender for about two months straight:
"Whet must not be allowed to win the league. Anyone from south of the Mason-Dixon line should be oriented toward Little League. That's your World Series."
Sadly, this is untrue. People below the Mason-Dixon line, or at least the part I grew up in, don't participate in the famously all-American Little League, not with all the enmity we still hold about the War of Northern Aggression. We do Dixie Youth Baseball. I shit you not. People from, like, anywhere else are always kind of surprised to hear that. I think I still have a uniform from my time in the Dixie Youth with team sponsors Classy Cut 'n' Curl on the front and the, um, somewhat less classy logo below--the old Dixie Youth logo.
To my knowledge this was not officially known as the "Balls and Bars," but there you go.
The South: it's weird. At least, thank God, the Roanoke Valley Rebels became the less offensive and actually more appropriate Roanoke Express, seeing as it's a railroad town that wasn't much a part of the theater of war. The fact that it's hockey, though, is still pretty inexplicable no matter what you call it.
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I'm confused ... so how do Georgia teams win the LL World Series two years running, then? http://www.newsday.com/sports/baseball/ny-spllws275348352aug27,0,3934530.story
I'm a little unclear on the politics that get certain teams in certain areas in one league or another; it might be akin to college athletic conferences. There are certainly Little League teams in the south, but it's not an option for everyone; the rec league teams in my county, for example, were Dixie Youth, and to my knowledge I had no other choice but to play for one. I was pissed b/c DY seemed kind of cut-rate and LL got all the attention.
I happened to catch the walk-off finale this weekend. Poor Japanese kid looked like Ralph Branca out there--utterly crushed.
I believe I was watching PBS, but the story I gathered is that a LL team comprised of all black players was scheduled to play for the state championship (GA, AL, I don't recall)- the white team refused to play them and with some interesting politics, got the bid to move on the the LLWS without actually having to beat the all black team. The next year, they formed the Dixie Youth League in order to maintain an all white league. And so the irony now is that the rec leagues are Dixie Youth, with myriad black players, not knowing the league was origianlly formed as a means of segregation. This link talks about it if you search the article for Dixie: http://www.baseball1.com/carney/index.php?storyid=27
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