And here we go again with the Little League shit...

Didn't take me long to find this one, and I'm not surprised in the least!

We've got another Little League scandal, this one not unakin to the badminton match-fixing of a recent Olympic Games.

This one is in Little League Softball -- the women's analogue -- so I can't quite rail on the ESPN-ization of Little League when the network turns over three weeks or so of it's schedule to Little League, with the (sadly) predictable results to follow.

That said:

South Snohomish, Washington was one of four teams to participate in pool play at the Little League Softball World Series.

They defeated a team from Central Iowa on their way to winning their first three games of the tournament.  Central Iowa then went and won their other three games of the five-team pool.

It is unclear whether the third team involved in this would've been the third team in the tie, but the last game South Snohomish played was versus a team from North Carolina.

In the basis of a 3+ team tie, runs allowed appears to be a tiebreaker.  Central Iowa would've advanced to the semifinals if North Carolina had given up at least three runs or if South Snohomish had defeated North Carolina.

One problem:  South Snohomish's coaches didn't want Central Iowa in the semifinals, because (as in the men's LLWS) they'd have to play their American counterparts.

So the ladies from South Snohomish were ordered to bunt and get no-hit to lose 8-0 to eliminate Central Iowa.

They threw the game.  The game was rigged.

Central Iowa protested and the LLSWS erred in only giving them a one-game playoff.  South Snohomish should've been thrown out of the tournament and their coaches banned for life from Little League Softball.  The president of Central Iowa's Little League agreed, saying it was a "cop-out" to allow the playoff.

But should we be surprised?  Should we really be surprised in a world of biscottos and arranged results that this kind of stuff would occur?

It's time to either clean up Little League in a real sense or get it off the national networks which have poisoned it with the venom that big-time sports has poisoned the well with.