McCutcheon (or "Cutch") was the National League Most Valuable Player in 2013. His performance last year was perfectly worthy of another MVP award, but Clayton Kershaw had an insane season for the Dodgers and won both MVP and Cy Young awards.
It's hard not to like McCutcheon because, unlike some players, he does everything. Dude can hit, field, throw, and do all of them really well. To top that off, by all accounts he seems like a thoroughly decent human being. He's the type who, earlier this year, let his trademark dreadlocks be shorn off for charity. He's the face of one of the good stories of major league baseball the last couple of seasons, a Pittsburgh Pirates team that hadn't won diddly since 1992 (the infamous Sid Bream slide, for those with such memories) before breaking into the playoffs year before last (in other words, the Kansas City Royals of 2013) and followed it up with a return trip last season. He is a thoughtful and articulate man, not given to the shoot-from-the-lip blather of so many athletes. His mom is a pretty proficient singer who belts a mean national anthem, for pete's sake. How do you not like?
So when Andrew McCutcheon threw up some red flags about the Chicago Little League team that got stripped of its titles after their much-publicized run, I guess I was a little more inclined to listen than if the words had come from a more average, hotheaded type. McCutcheon poses these questions not by charging bias, but by pointing to his own story.
It's sad and scary to think that one of the most successful, accessible, and popular players in baseball right now (and one of its most marketable players, if MLB could ever get its act together) would have been playing football if he hadn't torn his ACL in high school. But you have to wonder if his story is all that unique, except that those potential stars do end up lost to the game.
McCutcheon recognizes the tremendous hand-ups he got in being picked up and largely funded through the system of "travel teams" that increasingly rule the roost as far as those kids with baseball talent who get drafted or make it on to prime college teams. For McCutcheon, as he notes, college baseball was really not an option; with even the best baseball scholarships only covering 70% of tuition and costs, and McCutcheon not coming from a family that could even pay 30%, it was pro ball or bust.
A similar story with a different track belongs to Giancarlo Stanton, the man-mountain power hitter of the Florida Marlins. While McCutcheon got lucky coming from a poor part of a small town in Florida, Stanton flew under the radar in another baseball hotbed, southern California, where he was overlooked by the travel teams abounding in that region. (You need to get fairly deep into the story to get to Stanton's high-school experience.) Old-fashioned high-school success, and one scout who saw what nobody else saw, were his ticket to pro ball, and even he allowed that if he weren't well on his way by his third year he might well have turned around and tried for college football.
As it happens, both Stanton and McCutcheon are black. And, to be honest, most of the kids whose parents can afford to pony up the costs of those exclusive travel teams are white. On one level, this looks a bit like yet another example of the unspoken, systematic exclusion of blacks from equal opportunity, in this case opportunity in the chosen sport of Jackie Robinson, of all things.
There are, though, other cases that cut against this particular grain. McCutcheon's teammate, shortstop Jordy Mercer, came out of a rural Oklahoma background, one in which if you played sports, you played all of them; his high school no longer fields a baseball team.
I'm not a parent. I can't claim to understand the motivations of parents who direct their children towards whatever sport as an extracurricular activity. (I was a band geek myself.) One presumes that part of the encouragement has to do with physical activity, with learning to play with others well, teamwork and camaraderie and all that. One also suspects, though I can't know this, that if you play a sport or sports (much like playing an instrument or painting or acting or other such endeavors), if you apply yourself and develop your talent, you can go as far as that talent and desire takes you. Basically, this sounds like what we tell our children about what endeavor they choose, be it high school activities or choice of major in college.
To the degree that sports turns out to be another venue for disappointment in that respect, I guess it simply starts to reflect the larger society in which it is situated. To the degree that a sport like baseball increasingly draws its players from a pool determined even in part by who can afford it as opposed to who is good enough; and to the degree that a sport more generally accessible -- like, say, football -- comes with the caveat that it might well destroy your brain; what, then, are these games teaching the young people that play them?
In this regard I'm extremely curious to see how this proposal plays out. Sporting Kansas City, one of the more successful franchises in Major League Soccer, is seeking to develop what's called an "academy team" in the far west Kansas town of Garden City, as a part of its ever-expanding academy system.
Unlike other sports franchises, soccer clubs tend to develop extensive youth programs, including affiliated academy teams as well as youth teams more directly connected to the team. (Several of SKC's direct youth teams were big winners in one of the more recent tournaments for the different age brackets.) These teams and affiliated academies are very nakedly all about developing players for the major-league franchise; any other benefits are decidedly secondary. Still, it might lead to a college scholarship here or there, and even if your team eventually doesn't put you on its pro roster you're in a decent spot to catch on elsewhere. (SKC has several such "homegrown" players on its current roster, including Erik Palmer-Brown, who skipped his high-school graduation to play on the US under-20 World Cup team.)
The interesting thing about the Garden City potential academy is its very deliberate targeting of a demographic that would not fit into the profile of privilege suggested above. Garden City, and other nearby towns like Liberal and Dodge City have very large Hispanic populations, attracted in previous decades by opportunities in the meat-packing industry. SKC coach Peter Vermes alludes obliquely to the same kind of privilege tending to dominate soccer in the US in a way that perhaps it did not in his native Hungary, while directly wanting to work against that with the Garden City academy.
Let's be clear here; SKC is looking for players for SKC. Their principal hope is that some streetwise soccer kid from Garden City or Liberal will make SKC better in five or ten years. And yet, if this project comes off, that naked ploy to grab better players might just take some kid places he might never have dreamed of going. I have no idea what kind of life that becomes, or if there's even a sliver of education that is even possible in such a context.
What we ask of sports for our young people, or of our young people for our sports, is deeply due for examination. As a pastor you might be expecting me to complain about traveling teams taking kids away from Sunday morning worship services, but frankly my interests and concerns go a lot deeper than that. It's a huge topic, and one that could be a blog all to itself. But nothing is beyond questioning here, so questions will get asked when the need arises. Hopefully I'm not the only one asking.
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