The Little League World Series STINKS Compared To Cooperstown Dreams Park
I got some beef I wanna get off my chest no pun intended to a popular term in Chicago. I just wanna let ya’ll know that the The Little League STINKS in comparison to a much lesser known Cooperstown Dreams Park tournament. I’ll get into the why later, but first let’s explain Cooperstown Dreams Park:
It’s held in… you guessed it, Cooperstown, NY, home of the Baseball Hall of Fame in upstate NY
They have about a billion fields and barracks/bunks for the players and coaches to sleep in. There’s a home run derby, an around the horn contest and an OF arm contest prior to the start of game play and 12 year old teams from all over the country sign up to play in it.
It’s different from the LLWS because there are leadoffs and teams aren’t segregated to one town. If that were the case, my team wouldn’t have been able to go because we had kids from both Wheaton and Warrenville on the team, in spite of our towns feeding into the same school district. Teams take the event so seriously that they legit fly 12 year old pitchers in from across the country to pitch against the better teams.
My team went when I was 12 and some of the other teams could legit have beaten HS teams. That’s how good they were. We went 8-1 before losing to the eventual champion, and we were fucking loaded. We ran a train on the entire midwest that summer. Here were the standings prior to the championship round:
A few things I want to point out here:
1. Seth Manness and Michael Knox were both future draft picks playing for the Carolina Blaze, and Manness has been a middle reliever in MLB for a long time now.
2. Casey Crosby, my teammate, was a 5th rounder by Detroit in 2007 out of Kaneland HS in IL
3. A guy by the name of Chris Sale was on the Auburndale Storm. Ever heard of him?
and that’s just the names I can remember. There could have very well been more kids drafted that played this week. I know I’ll get shit for this but I know there are a lot of you out there that are the same way, I can remember any good player I’ve ever played against at any level in any sport for the most part. Just how I am (a total weirdo)
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Point is, some of these teams are fucking staaacccckkkkeeeedddd. My team, the Wheaton Blazers, lost to the Carolina Blaze 11-0 in the championship round quarterfinals. Crosby and I pitched that game and got our tits blown off our chests. That Carolina Blaze team would have slaughtered every team in the LLWS by 100 runs. You just don’t see meatball pitches like this that late in the Dreams Park tournament:
you see kids slinging it 80MPH with regularity.
and because of that, I watch the LLWS teams and games today and am disgusted that there’s a false perception that they’re the best 12 year old teams in the world, because they’re not. Sure you get those random kids pumping upper 70s every year or two, but Cooperstown has 8 or 10 of those kids a lot of weeks. Like I said, teams fly ringers in just to win some stupid 12 year old tournament.
There have been 54 current or former players to play in the LLWS and that dates back to the 1950s. For Cooperstown, there have been WAY more since the tournament’s inception in 1999:
and… there might be more than listed even. Crosby had 3 career starts for Detroit before hurting his arm, and he’s not on this graphic.
Cooperstown also has a Tournament of Champions where the winner of each weekly tourney winner throughout the summer is invited back to play to play the other weekly tourney winners. THAT, my friends, is the real Little League World Series. 12 year olds who’s parents pay 1000s of dollars for their kids to get the best training, coaching and competition in the country. Not participation trophy sportsmanship bullshit.
And that was talking 12 year old baseball.