Bob Cook

Little Leaguers of all lands, unite!

I don’t mean unite as in the Little League World Series. I mean unite as in what your major league heroes have done to make themselves among the richest athletes in the world.

If you hadn’t noticed, kids, many people are making money off the fruits of your labor, trading on your supposed status as last bastions of wide-eyed innocence in sports for their gain. It’s time to stand up and demand your fair share!

That’s right, kids — it’s time to get paid!

As Karl Marx wrote, the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. So a struggle must come between the proletariat — those who play baseball for free — and those who profit from their servitude — the bourgeoisie.

Now this might seem like a radical concept, getting paid, especially for those of you who don’t get an allowance.

And your school might not have taught you about Marx, unless he’s on your state’s standardized test. Let’s just say Marx was a philosopher whose thoughts and writings on the nature of society and the economic relationships between owners and workers have had mixed success in their real-world applications. In fact, authority figures might tell you he’s been discredited at worst, wildly misinterpreted at best. But until the spiritual heirs of Marvin Miller come to organize you, Marx is a good guide to sense the problems inherent in youth sports. (Marvin Miller was the first head of the baseball players’ union, and will not be appearing on any state standardized test.)

Let’s look at the Little League World Series. Oh, I’m sorry, the Little League World Series presented by Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes, it’s official name. The Little League World Series presented by Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes that takes place on national television, and whose preliminary rounds take place on national television. The Little League World Series presented by Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes that has sponsorships out the wazoo (not a Marxist term, technically), including the likes of ReMax, the official real estate company of Little League Baseball.

Tell me, Little Leaguers — when was the last time YOU bought real estate? Exactly.

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I don’t mean to pick on just Little League, though its multimillion-TV contract has lent it a ubiquity that makes it the bourgeoisiest of the bourgeoisie. There are other national sanctioning bodies and travel teams that tell you, and your parents, that you should be paying THEM for the privilege of getting the practice and exposure that will get you to the big leagues, when instead you’ll be run into the ground with no forethought to your future. Your arms will be curveball-induced noodles by the time you’re 15. That is, if you haven’t already been burned out by six-days-a-week practices first.

Why would you feel alienated? They’ll tell you it’s because you’re entering your teen years. But Marx tells us that “the possibility that one may give up ownership of one’s own labo[u]r — one’s capacity to transform the world — is tantamount to being alienated from one’s own nature; it is a spiritual loss.” With every inning, your soul gets sucked away a little more.

With scores of Little League games now televised nationally, we can see that a specter is haunting youth baseball — the specter of professionalism. It’s the same specter that the NCAA has tried to fight off for the past, oh, 100 years. But it’s a specter any so-called amateur organization that profits off of free athletic labor cannot fight off forever.

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Young people, you have two choices. The fight for what is yours can end in, as Marx put it, “either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.”

“The common ruin of the contending classes” is what happens when your teachers gives the whole class a pop quiz because one guy threw a spitball. So that means you have only one choice. It’s time for a revolution! It’s time to strike!

That’s right, strike!

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