My Baseball Blog

I've started a listing for reviews of the Elite 24 World Series (my own review is quite extensive), but I wanted to make an unofficial list of my biggest pet peeves concerning this experience. I'd love to hear your own thoughts on this.

PEEVE: There is very little consolidated information available - anywhere - for the USSSA Elite World Series. This event is the crowning tournament of the season, and you'd think there would be a little better organization and promotion. This lone WS page was next to worthless, with "Disney" links that lead back to the USSSA main page. Pointless.

SOLUTION: One way to organize and promote is to host a single website dedicated to the qualifying teams, game schedules, brackets, and results for all six divisions. Furthermore, the website should include all info related to travel, discount event tickets, parking, maps, entry fees, rules, guidelines and restrictions. We tried to consolidate as much as we could find here at BaseballNation.US so that people didn't have to hunt and peck through the USSSA tournament search page. But try finding any information at all about the facility itself - that's nowhere to be found. (We didn't find out 'til the second day that we could bring in our own coolers. Big personal pet peeve right there!)

PEEVE: Sporadic game announcers. Some games had them, most didn't.

SOLUTION: Organize game announcers ahead of time. It can't be that hard to do - even to accept volunteers. Of course, a single website would go a long way to making the need known and recruiting volunteers. But each game should have a game announcer.

PEEVE: No ESPN sports coverage. Last year, the Elite WS had a few games televised and that turned out to be enormously popular. This year, no games were televised, much to everyone's disappointment.

SOLUTION: We heard that USSSA is in talks with ESPN for sports coverage in 2009. Great idea!

PEEVE: Every World Series should have competitions after the Opening Ceremony: Home Run Derby, Base Running, Banner Judging, etc.

SOLUTION: Schedule it. The boys love it, and it's a chance for them to trade pins. Speaking of which - how come there was no get-together scheduled for the boys to trade pins? Pins end up being a pretty big expense for any World Series, and most boys are too busy during tournament play to exchange pins.