A Taiwanese team beat a team from Las Vegas yesterday in the Little League World Series Championship, making it the first time since 2017 that the U.S. champion lost in Williamsport. This is probably fine. We’d won five straight, and I’m guessing Vegas is one of the cities that generates the least intra-American loyalty. Plus, the Taiwanese coach talked afterwards about turning their defense into their offense. Who doesn’t love a veiled threat towards China?
But while one loss to the Taiwanese is ok, two in a row would be too many. An American team must win the 2026 Little League World Series. The question is…how?
The three most common suggestions for how to ensure American youth baseball dominance are remarkably synchronized with the current political environment. You’ve got one tribe who thinks the government is capable of equipping every town in America with facilities and coaches which churn out 80-mph-throwing 12-year-olds. You’ve got another who thinks we should find the eleven best players in the country, sell the final roster spot to a Saudi prince’s son, then move this all-star team of all-star teams to the same city so they can play together, seizing the means of production from Little League® International if they fuss about the so-called rules. Finally, there’s the reasonable center, those of us who know the real way to bring the best out of 12-year-olds is to open up Name–Image–Likeness markets in which we encourage local athletic youths to play baseball instead of other sports. There’s gotta be a kid in Fairfield, Connecticut who hit puberty early and could hit the ball three hundred feet right now but doesn’t because he quit at the age of eight. He’s focusing on basketball. You think that kid isn’t the subject of AAU recruitment shenanigans? That kid should be a ballplayer! Come on, Little League! Let us compete!
If Little League is going to defeat the scourge that is 12U travel baseball, it’s time for a free market. With, of course, a twist.
Obviously, we want Little Leaguers to still be kids. That’s why we make them play on those tiny fields. So it’s important, once we start paying Little Leaguers, that we don’t only pay them money. We also need to pay them in ice cream and ping pong tables.
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