However, Farley and Farr violated two major unwritten rules of youth baseball, particularly among kids this young still discovering the sport — rules that even the f-bomb dropping, umpire-gaming, smoking-in-the-park coaches I saw seemed to follow.

First, you never intentionally set up a situation for a kid on either team to fail.

You can have players run to second or third base when the ball gets by a catcher (which happens about every seven or eight pitches). You can wave a runner home if the left fielder is slow to pick up the ball. You can strike out anyone and everyone. You can even shift fielders depending on the batter.

But these are strategies that fit in the normal flow of the game, and are expected by players, coaches and parents alike. Plus, PONY league rules require you to accept kids with disabilities (my son had a teammate with one working hand, a kid who already had the Jim Abbott-style glove switch mastered), but it doesn’t require you to give them special treatment — either to help them or hurt them.

Had the top batter just walked unintentionally, and then Romney struck out, it would have been unfortunate for him and his team, but it also would have been accepted as just part of the game. But in ordering the walk, it’s clear Farley and Farr weren’t doing things in the normal course of the game. Especially with this free pass being the first issued by any team, in the whole league, during that whole season.

Perhaps if the intentional walk were in use, their move wouldn’t have been quite so shocking, though it still would have looked very, very bad.

That’s because the second rule is you don’t intentionally walk anyone, unless you enjoy being seen as less of a man.

I don’t know about other Mustang leagues — the 9- and 10-year-old division, in PONY parlance. But the coaches in my son’s league would choose death before the dishonor of a freebie. The strike zone is, by rule, absurdly huge, in part so pitchers might hit it once a while. But the stated reason for the huge strike zone is so, much to Billy Beane’s chagrin, players will swing at the ball, rather than work for a walk.

"Be a hitter!" was the general coaching advice shouted at my serial count-working son, aspiring to be his generation’s Kevin Youkilis.

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The unstated lesson being imparted is that, when the going gets tough, you don’t weasel your way out of it — you face it down. Or as Watson wrote in his blog, "In other words, pitch to the best hitter and challenge the hitter, a great sports lesson for little leaguers to learn."

Some might recall that the climax of the 1976 sports movie classic "The Bad News Bears" hinges on the coach of the Yankees telling his pitcher — to the chagrin of the pitcher, the opposing team and the fans — to intentionally walk the Bears’ best hitter to get the weaker hitter behind him. (Though even the writers of a script featuring much cruelty to children didn’t conceive of making that kid a cancer survivor.) Those Yankees, like the Mueller Park Yankees, did win the title, though that was because Kelly Leak decided to swing at ball four and got thrown out trying to stretch a gapper.

Some also might recall that when the Yankees coach came to congratulate the Bears on their finish, one player indelicately told the coach where he could stick his first-place trophy.

The Red Sox coaches did, shall we say, let the Yankees know their displeasure after the game, although there are no reports one of Romney’s teammates told Farley or Farr to put their trophy where the sun doesn’t shine. But given how Farley and Farr violated the true unwritten rules of youth baseball — and picked on the most vulnerable kid, to boot — I would suspect any coach, in any league, wouldn’t have blamed their players if they had.