I'll always have a soft spot for Hawaii teams after their epic comeback against Curacao in 2005. I will never forget those little West Indies kids dancing and celebrating before the final inning and then crying their eyes out against the dugout net after Hawaii completed the comeback. The very definition of thrill of victory, agony of defeat.
I wish LLWS would upload more full game archives of their past games. They did upload a good handful last year to make up for cancelling the tournament but I felt it was sorta random in terms of years and teams (was nice to grab some games featuring Hawaii teams that I couldn't find on YouTube though). The only clips left from the 2005 championship game I could find are low quality TV recordings of the comeback inning and the walk off from YouTube. They must have the full game in HD since they also uploaded a compilation video of the last plays of the tournament from 1998-2019 and the walkoff clip was the most high quality I've seen for a recording from 2005. Would love to see old regional tournament games too. Maybe privacy issues with kiddies though or copyright or something, idk.
I also like the Hawaii teams since they're (typically) so humble and don't let the fame or pressure get to their heads. Like the New Jersey kid from the last LLWS who kept doing that stupid dance after getting on base...really annoyed me.
Looks like they have another good team going to Williamsport this year, definitely one of the favorites along with Louisiana, Tennessee, and Florida I believe. Shame that their ambidextrous pitcher is skipping out due to prior commitments to a travel team, as lame as that sounds. South Dakota, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey could be dark horses as well.
Yeah, it is too bad. I'm sure Jomboy would've done a clip on him or something. Although as much as it is impressive, in the limited game time I saw of him I felt it didn't make a huge impact and I felt he still had some control issues, but I don't claim to be a baseball expert. Don't know anything about the dark horses but I kind of just let the scoreboard speak for themselves. Like I remember times where the ESPN commentators would be all like "oh X team is so good, they're on a perfect run" or "they have X player who threw a no hitter the other day or Y player who was a beast in regionals" and then Hawaii would come along and just shut them down.
You're right about the Mo'Ne Davis shit too. Japan had already done the same a decade earlier but of course it doesn't matter if it's not a black American. Closest thing I saw to Powerful Woman was Delaware's manager but her team blew a three run lead in the final inning to miss out on a spot in the World Series.
Sounded like one of the Delaware pitchers was also prematurely celebrating, too. Can't be doing that, especially in little league.
Can't wait to see all the how do you do fellow kids stuff ESPN has in store though, like Favorite Memes etc.
Hawaii teams have a fun bonus of commentators continually butchering Hawaiian pronunciations. Favorite emojis and the flossing were also pretty bad last year, though it also gave me my favorite LLWS commentary clip.
(Wasn't really fond of David Ross as a commentator tbh, but now he's busy managing the Cubs, so yay?)
Besides the ESPN cringe, what do you think of how the game has changed (format, pitch count, bats, team quality, etc.) since the late 90s? (And I suppose will change in the future with the expansion to 20 teams and new regions.)
