Yes, I've got you on ignore, but since this isn't a politics thread, I still read it anyway.
Anyone who's ever dabbled in the athletics business will tell you it's tough to remain willfully ignorant after seeing the insanity going on around you. Personally, it's impossible for me to remain so after working in the athletics field for two years (or more, if you count work study jobs during undergraduate and law school, umpiring intramural, beer league, and the occasional youth games, and volunteering during NCAA tournament events). This wasn't SEC country either, but a private D3 school, an Ivy League school, and a Missouri Valley school.
It's almost never the athletes themselves, though certainly there are some class 'A' *****s (really? pri(c)k is an expletive?) among them (which are more amusing than anything else when they're puffing up about being a starter on a crappy D3 lacrosse team with 150 people in the stands). It's the ancillary stuff: the parents, the boosters, the alums, the upper administration, the media, etc. It's the drunken 30 year old who didn't even go to college but is ready to commit suicide and/or murder when State U loses, and throws a beer bottle at the 70-year old official scorer simply because he's wearing the striped shirt (as required). It's the guy treating his Sunday night 'C'-league game as the NHL. The assistant coach who wants everyone on the ice awarded an assist, or a goal changed a week after the fact.
In terms of little league, the system was at best politicized and at worst downright corrupt 20 years ago when I was going through it, I can only imagine how much worse it's gotten today with the increased presence of helicopter parents. The parent-coaches holding grudges and playing favorites based on house teams and travel teams. The rules-sticklers who, instead of informing the other coach of a technical rule violation in time to make it a non-issue, hold onto it until it's too late to do anything so that they win by forfeit. The "super parents" and their cousin, the "coordinated cheer" parents, who take it as a personal affront when little Johnny didn't get a home run every time up to bat. And we never even made it out of the district tournament, let alone state or regional.
What it boils down to is that if you watch it simply for the baseball, great. If you watch it because you think it's purer than college or pro sports, it probably is at some superficial level, so I won't hold that against you. But if you actually get emotionally invested in a game being played by 12-year olds, as though the team representing your state/region affects your status in life (like apparently half of Pennsylvania is doing), then you really need to take a step back. And if you think there isn't a corrupt underbelly to this, I've got a bridge to sell you. It's not IOC or FIFA levels of corruptness, but it's there.
