A New Jersey girls’ Little League team lost its state championship game last week after heavy rain stopped the game and umpires refused to allow the players to play the final inning as scheduled the next day, leaving kids and officials to question the fairness of the decision.
The Toms River Little League Majors 12-year-old softball team played its final game against Hanover on Wednesday, but the game was stopped before the start of the sixth inning due to a storm.
Tournament officials initially said the game would be played the following day, but Toms River coach Brad Bossou received an email the following morning saying the game had been called off and the score at the time the game was stopped would be final.
The win sealed the victory for the Hanover, New Jersey, team, which was leading 6-4 when heavy rain began to fall.
Bossou suggested the opposing team’s Little League district president “went rogue” by contacting league officials at 2:30 a.m. to pressure them into making the change.
“And that’s the vile, despicable part of this team,” Bossou, whose daughter is also on the team, told The Washington Post.
“In the middle of the night, he sent them a message saying that, based on Little League rules, the game was complete and Hanover should be announced as the state champions.”
The secret petition was sent to the tournament committee at Little League headquarters in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, who awarded the victory to Hanover.
Bossou said the ruling will likely stand. “My district representative told me that Little League never changes a decision once it’s been made and they never reverse it,” he said.
“It’s just heartbreaking for the girls. They were more upset by the fact that they were told certain things and then they weren’t followed through.”
Hanover was leading when the game was stopped, but Toms River scored in the fourth and fifth innings and continued to battle back to claim the win.
The match, played in Clifton, started at 8pm and was stopped about an hour later.
That’s when the rules started to get blurry.
“I think there was thunder in that area in the bottom of the third inning,” Bossou said. Tournament officials checked their weather app and determined the storm was far enough away that the game could continue — a reversal of their decision the night before in a similar situation, he said.
“So I thought that was kind of weird,” he continued. “They were playing on Wednesday night with their local district team. [Hanover] I was winning.”
Hanover won the first game of the three-game series Tuesday, 3-0. Toms River took the second game, 7-0, and Wednesday night’s final game will determine the state championship and a berth in the Connecticut regional tournament and the Little League Softball World Series.
Bossou said if Wednesday’s game had been stopped in the third inning, when the lightning was first spotted, the game would have had to be played to the end to comply with Little League rules that require at least four innings to be completed.
After players were removed from the stadium on Wednesday, Bossou and her 12-member women’s team waited in their cars to see if the match would resume.
“Around 9:30 I went to the tournament director and asked, ‘How is it going?’ and he said, ‘We’re going to do everything we can to play tonight,'” Bossou recalled.
Fifteen minutes later, he was called into the Little League office along with the Hanover coach.
“They said, ‘We’re not going to finish tonight, let’s come back tomorrow.’ And I said, ‘No, we’re going to finish it tonight,’ because on a good day it takes about an hour and 15 minutes. And we were on a roll and the core of our lineup was coming back,” he said.
It was not even 10pm when the team was told that the rules stated that the curfew for resuming play was 1am, a ruling that Bossou could not comprehend.
“I said, ‘We’re having thunderstorms this summer. These things happen all the time and they’ll pass,'” he recalled. “And they said, no argument. I talked to the Little League director in New Jersey and he said we could do it.”
This is the third time the Toms River Little League Majors 12-year-old team has reached the state championship finals. Last year, the team lost in the regional finals to Massapequa of Long Island, which went on to win the World Series.
“Massapequa was back, so we were hopeful we’d get back there as well,” he said. “We thought we were a good enough team, so we were excited for the opportunity. Unfortunately, the team we faced was a pretty good team as well, but we felt like we were the better team.”
