’Pen Pal
A few of Hawaii's teams have recently done very well in national or world championships on the U.S. continent. Kids are the victims
in Almonte messWe have historically had quite a bit of success in these competitions.
Aiea's Junior Little League repeated as national champions and our Babe Ruth team won the title in New Jersey. I'm especially pleased about the latter, because the Babe Ruth League is an organization we were a part of for years.
The Babe Ruth world championship has actually been won by a Hawaii team two other times in the past 20 years. Hawaii won the first in 1972, the second in 1988 and the third last week.
I happened to manage the first team, my nephew David "Boy" Eldredge managed the second and another player of mine, Eric Kadooka, the third.
While we were a part of BRB, we occasionally had a feeling that the kids competing against us were older than they said they were. In the past few days, we've been inundated with the news that Danny Almonte, the southpaw hurler from the team in New York, is actually 14 years old. There are so many questions I have concerning that situation, and I'm not sure I have any answers for them.
But first, a funny short story about an incident that happened in BRB that mildly relates to the Almonte problem. We won the Pacific Southwest tournament in Mexicali, Mexico, in August 1970. The World Series that year was in Brawley, Calif., just a few miles north of the border, so we didn't have far to go to get there. As we were crossing the border, the car I was in was detained for a while. In my car was a 15-year-old player named Mosi Tatupu, who later starred in three sports at Punahou, then went on to successful careers at USC and the New England Patriots.
Mosi is of Samoan ancestry and the authorities thought he may have been a Mexican sneaking across the border, so I had to present his birth certificate for them to finally believe he was an American citizen.
Which brings me to Almonte.
Here are my questions:
1) Did he know he was too old? (Probably.)2) Did his teammates know? (Probably not.)
3) What about the coaches? (Probably.)
4) Were there other kids on the team older than 12? (Probably not.)
5) What about the team from Oceanside, Calif., that lost to New York and was eliminated form the championship? (This is the saddest question to answer. They were cheated and nothing can be done about it.)
6) What can be done to insure nothing like this happens again? (This is the first time that I know of that something like this has happened. They already have birth certificate checks, so what else can they do?)
Penalties have been handed down to the people who perpetuated this mess. I feel bad for the kids who were cheated.
All of them.
I feel bad for the players on the New York team who were of legal age, the players on the other teams who played against New York, and all of the kids in the future who will face undeserved scrutiny because inconsiderate cheaters decided to do what they did.
Pal Eldredge is a baseball commentator for KFVE
and former varsity baseball coach at Punahou School.
His column runs Mondays during the Major League Baseball season.
Star-Bulletin sports can be reached at 529-4785 or: sports@starbulletin.com