The Metea Valley baseball team is having a difficult baseball season so far, not for their record but for the way opposing teams break them down. During the games, it is clear how unsportsmanlike the opposing teams act, but it’s impressive how Metea Valley has the strength to rise above.
At many of the Metea baseball games, the opposing teams have insulted the Metea players during the game. They have insulted our players by cheering, yelling, and making mean comments when a Metea player makes a mistake.
When a pitcher hits a player, they are allowed to walk a base, but they shouldn’t be allowed to go as far as calling the pitcher an insult to the sport who should never play baseball again.
This reminded me of Michelle Obama saying, “When they go low, we go high.”
If you have not attended a Metea Valley baseball game, I urge you to go out and see what our players are subjected to. They are harassed, taunted, mocked, and made fun of by their opponents in the dugout.
Why is this allowed in a high school sport? I don’t see this kind of bullying in any other sport. At no point do the coaches of opponent teams stop this behavior.
We should all be proud of our varsity baseball players. In the face of adversity, they go high. This occurs at every game home or away and I have never seen the Metea players act negatively. They take the high road and choose not to respond in the same harsh competitive trash talk.
This baseball season has seven seniors who have been tasked to lead a very young team. Last year, 13 seniors left the team, but some morals are passed down every year. This year, the leadership that is on display is nothing like I have ever seen before. It takes courage to be able to ignore the taunting and stoop lower.
The players that will step up in the next few years will keep these morals of not showing disrespect to other teams and will remind us all of the players before them.
When asked how it affects the players to hear this while up to bat and on the field, they simply say, “It’s just part of the game.”
This brings me back to the question of why this is tolerated at a high school level. These are teenagers who love the sport but why do they play a two hour game just to get mocked the whole time? This doesn’t happen in the MLB, so where did this come from?
In the MLB, taunting opponents used to be allowed, but now it is considered unclassy and unsportsmanlike. During the Cubs World Series against the Yankees when Babe Ruth was up to bat, the Cubs players were taunting him. Ruth pointed a finger at the scoreboard to show he had one strike left. Later, it was realized he could have gotten ejected from the game and so could the Cubs benched players.
High school baseball is an outlier, as this mocking behavior happens in no other sport. In any professional sport, it’s not allowed, and players would be removed from the game.
Players may believe that it does not affect them mentally and only shows how competitive baseball is. I asked a softball player if this behavior happens during their games and their answer was no. Softball and baseball are very similar sports, but why is it tolerated in baseball and not in softball?
This situation should be a call to action from a society that bullying should not be tolerated in school, sports, or politics anywhere.
Enough is enough.
At the high school level, the Metea Valley baseball players have stepped up and we should be proud that they represent our school well.
Editor’s Note: This article was edited on April 23. The original article specifically mentioned a Metea Valley baseball game against Yorkville High School. The article has been edited to clarify that this type of incident has occurred at several of Metea Valley’s games this year.
