Mike Celizic

I saw one of the best baseball games I’ve ever seen the other night. It had slugging, running, great fielding, errors, late-inning heroics, two mighty comebacks and a walk-off run scored on a wild pitch.

Final score: Chula Vista 11, Warner Robbins 10.

That’s right. I’m talking Little League World Series. You know, the event Sally Jenkins doesn’t think should be on television.

Jenkins, who happens to be one of my favorite columnists, got pretty hot and bothered about putting 12-year-olds on national television, where they scratch and spit and imitate their major-league heroes. It’s not natural to be making such a big deal over kids playing ball.

I know exactly where Jenkins was coming from, because a few years ago, I wrote a very similar column. Too much too soon, I probably wrote. Too many curve balls being thrown by arms that shouldn’t throw any. Too much attention being paid to kids playing a game.

But I’ve been watching a lot more of the tournament this year than I normally do. And besides being enormously entertained — at least when I wasn’t yelling at the ESPN announcing crew to just shut up — I realized that the Little League World Series is about as pure a dose of sports as you’re ever likely to get.

Watch the fans. They cheer for their kids and never cheer against the other kids. No one ever boos an umpire’s bad call because the umps are volunteers who pay their own way to the tournament.

Watch the players. And shut up about the spitting and scratching. In the first instance, spitting is fun and it’s in the dirt and it’s not hurting anyone. In the second, it’s not scratching. It’s adjusting. Baseball players wear cups, and they tend to move around in a rather delicate area and need to be adjusted. If it’s your anatomy, you’re not even aware you’re doing it. So get over it. Okay?

And quit complaining about how they imitate the big leaguers. That’s what humans do, especially young ones. We start by imitating our parents. We imitate other kids. We see somebody doing something new, we imitate it. We imitate speech, gestures, thoughts, even writing styles. The kids are supposed to imitate their heroes. Quit telling them not to.

Slideshow   Big moments for Little Leaguers Take a look at some of the action from the 2009 Little League World Series. NBCSports.com

And now that you’ve looked past those annoying things, notice that these kids aren’t your normal 12-year-olds, at least not in terms of athletic talent. They’re terrific athletes, and Thursday night the boys from California and Georgia were flashing some serious leather and making some awesome throws in the field. The last kid on the bench of either team was better than the best kid in any league I ever played in at the same age.

They weren’t intimidated by the stage they were on. Chula Vista saw a 5-1 lead turn into a 10-5 deficit when Warner Robbins had a 9-run inning. In a six-inning game, that normally rips the heart out of any team of 12-year-olds.

But the California manager didn’t panic, didn’t yell at his kids, never lost his cool. He acted exactly the way we keep saying Little League coaches should act. And the kids didn’t give up. They tied it by the fifth inning at 10-10, then won it in the bottom of the sixth with a walk-off wild pitch.

Yeah, it’s tough on the losers. But kids are way more resilient than adults. By today, they’ve buried their sorrows in horseplay, ice cream, hot dogs and video games. It’s a team sport, not an individual contest like the Spelling Bee, where you have no one to support you in victory and defeat. The losers will be just fine — and they’ll be better off for the experience of having done so much that was so wonderfully exciting.

Sure, the kids are kind of young to be on national television, but so are the kids in the National Spelling Bee, and I don’t hear anybody complaining about that. Anyway, no amount of bloviating is going to convince ESPN to take a popular and profitable program off the air. The LLWS is established on television. You can’t go back to those black-and-white days of yesteryear when the kids decided their championship in front of a few hundred fans in the remote Pennsylvania town of Williamsport. You may as well complain about the death of newspapers. It’s not going to change anything.

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