The Bird is the Word

This is not the picture that
caused all the trouble 

When I was in junior high school, the yearbook editor assigned one staff member the task of looking at all the group pictures that were to run in "The Key." The assignment: check out all the pictures and make sure that no one was giving anyone the finger, or any other inappropriate gesture.

And they produced a yearbook in 1964 utterly devoid of flipoffs, except for these two guys. In the picture of the Key Club itself, the people who produced the yearbook.

So, again, the cobbler's children run barefoot.  I drag this out, not to embarrass anyone who is nearing 70 years of age, but to point out to 12-14-year olds that giving people the finger in a group photo is not new.  I would guarantee that if there were a photograph of Washington's troops bivouacked at Valley Forge in 1777-78, there would be one wise guy giving half a peace sign.

It was no surprise that a girls softball team from Virginia found out the hard way that the 2017 version of a junior high school yearbook is called Snapchat.  And that a picture taken in the warm glow of victory in a softball tournament with six of the girls flipping the bird with the caption "watch out host" will wind up getting you in two or three fingers' worth of trouble. 

We're talking about the girls representing the Atlee junior league softball team from Mechanicsville, Va. They played and won a game at the Junior League World Series in Kirkland, Washington, recently, and half a dozen of them threw out Bronx salutes in a postgame photo.  There had been some contention with the other team  - reports say  a player and coach from Kirkland’s team were thrown out of the game for relaying Atlee’s signals from second base to their batters - but that's neither here nor there, as people always say for no good reason. 

This is.

The picture was Snapchatted, the other team howled, and the Atlee girls apologized Saturday, but as with most apologies, it was too late.

Kevin Fountain, a Little League spokesman, said the Snap was "inappropriate," telling a Richmond reporter that it violated the league’s "policies regarding unsportsmanlike conduct."


Atlee team manager Scott Currie found out about the photo shortly after the team posted it. He immediately reprimanded the girls involved, and had them delete the post and apologize to the Kirkland girls.  

He did not agree when the Little League brass told the team to go home, they were disqualified, however.

"It’s a travesty for these girls," he told the Richmond Times-Dispatch. "Yes, they screwed up, but I don’t think the punishment fit the crime."

Well, a long-standing tradition in jurisprudence says the guilty party does not have right of approval over their sentence. Sure, it was tough that the entire team was punished for the actions of a few of the girls, but that's another tradition: sometimes all of society suffers for the transgressions of a very few.

If nothing else, the girls all learned that lesson this summer. And that's Key.