The travel baseball industry was rocked over the Memorial Day weekend by yet another shocking incident in what is shaping up to be one of the ugliest on record for youth baseball.
Did an Oklahoma 11U baseball coach order his pitcher to hit an opponent? Was that boy then ordered to throw a fastball at the opposing team’s dugout? Those are the accusations being thrown around by a coach out of Nebraska who says his dugout was targeted at a Kansas City USSSA tournament on Sunday.
“Today all of my boys learned a life lesson. While Easton was up to bat against Oklahoma Eleven, 11us coach- Mychal Ryals, told their pitcher to throw at Easton’s head. After Easton stepped out and told the umpire the coach said never mind throw it at their dugout instead. A 70mph fastball thrown into my dugout hitting one of my players,” the Nebraska coach, Brandon Magni, alleged on his personal Facebook.
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Are you the Oklahoma coach? Is there more to the story here? Were you there? Email: joe.kinsey@outkick.com
There’s no debating that a ball was thrown at a dugout. Whether the boy was ordered to do it is still in question.
Magni further claims that the pitcher was kicked out of the game, but he was allowed to stay in the dugout and the coach wasn’t kicked out of the complex.
“DO BETTER USSSA BASEBALL!!!! At the end of the game we shook their hands and were the better men/boys. The boys learned you can’t control what others do to you but you can control what your response can be. Ours was to use this as fire & close out the game,” Magni added.
What caused such an incident? A mother of a Nebraska boy took to Instagram to say that the team was “cheering for their teammate, excited to be up in the tight game and this just took it to a new level of youth sports, I never thought I would see.”
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In an interesting twist to this story, Magni also claims that when he pleaded for the Oklahoma team to be issued a forfeit, he was told that his team could forfeit or he could “call the police.”