Word that the Jackie Robinson Little League has been forced to vacate its 2014 American championship due to rules violations has predictably triggered a veritable second Great Fire in Chicago among local officials and parents. The outrage is itself outrageous. "Disrespectful," proclaimed one team member's mother in the Chicago Tribune regarding the action taken by Little League International. After asserting that "our boys not only played, they won," she went on to suggest that the action was taken because some "African-Americans exceed[ed] the expectations," so that "there is always going to be fault that is found in what it is that we do."

Not to be outdone when there's a chance for cheap, sensational publicity, Jesse Jackson has now stepped into the fray. CBS News reported that he held a press conference to ask, "Is this about [the league's] boundaries or race?" Remarkably--and insultingly--Jackson has apparently asked the Las Vegas teams not to accept the American championship title on the grounds that, although they participated fairly unlike their finalist opponent, they nevertheless "did not earn" it. Wow! And so the race card is played, and the thorny crown of victimhood is donned.

Feel bad for the team's players, sure. By all accounts, they were the unwitting victims of a scheme cooked up by adults whose interest in winning at all costs (and glorying vicariously in achievements they themselves were incapable of attaining) exceeded their responsibility for being role models and teaching good sportsmanship to adolescents. If true, they and their parents have indeed been victimized, not by the International Little League but by the coaches or other adults who engineered the original deception merely for the sake of winning.

It's not difficult to empathize with the Chicago parents' disappointment, but their anger is certainly misdirected. They seem to be immune to the notion that the Las Vegas (Mountain Ridge) runners-up played by the rules and did not inappropriately enlarge their "catchment area" to add high-skill players to their rosters illegally (which of course also simultaneously deprives other players who properly live in the league's legitimate zone from a chance to be on their local All-Star team). Nor have they acknowledged that the winning team from Japan did not cheat in this manner, nor as far as is known at the moment did any of the other teams participating in last year's World Series, all of whom could have benefitted substantially by pulling players from outside their designated residential zones -- a system designed, by the way, to promote fairness and ensure that the winning teams do not consistently originate in large cities with huge populations from which to draw.

Had the Las Vegas team followed the same practice, they might well have trounced the Jackie Robinson team. Perhaps a few moments' reflection on the values represented by their league's namesake, Jackie Robinson, might be in order before accusing everyone else other than the adults who set out to cheat in the first place. It's those individuals, and only those individuals, who victimized a group of young men and their families (including the players and families of the Las Vegas team, who now hold a "tainted" title they likely don't really want).