Jericho Scott's coach protested in his own way, by putting him in a game even after the league said he wasn't allowed to pitch. (Douglas Healey / Associated Press)

The Youth Baseball League of New Haven, Conn., has banned a 9-year-old from pitching.

His crime? Excessive velocity.

Jericho Scott throws almost 40 mph, a speed deemed too dangerous for other 8- to 10-year-olds to step in against. Though Jericho had yet to hit a batter as his team opened the season 8-0, his coach was told the boy must play some other position or the team would be disbanded.

When coach Wilfred Vidro defied the league directive and sent Jericho to the hill last week, the other team refused to play, packed its gear and left. Officials for the league say that Jericho's team has indeed been disbanded and that the players will be redistributed among other squads.

I hope Ken Burns got some footage for his documentary, The Death of Baseball in America.

According to those same league officials, Jericho's mother Nicole Scott went bananas after the other team forfeited rather than face her son.

"I have never seen behavior of a parent like the behavior Jericho's mother exhibited Wednesday night," said league attorney Brian Noble. (Quick, who was your youth baseball league's attorney?)

All I can say on behalf of Ms. Scott is hallelujah. I hope she went bonkers. I hope she went Lou Piniella on them and started tossing bases around. I hope she took a bat to the water cooler a la Carlos Perez.

When a decision is this wrongheaded, the only appropriate reaction is overreaction.

I don't know if these league officials have gotten the word, but we're trying to get kids in cities in America to start playing baseball, not stop playing baseball because an opposing pitcher has a little giddy-up on his fastball.

Meanwhile, while this was going down in New Haven, somewhere in the Dominican Republic a 6-year-old with no helmet and no shoes was digging in against an 8-year-old who throws 50 miles an hour. It begs the question, will the U.S. even qualify for the World Baseball Classic by 2018?

The league claims that parents were expressing safety concerns. But given that youth baseball helmets now have facemasks, what the hell could possibly happen to a kid who gets hit by a 40-mile-an-hour pitch? Yes, that's 27 miles an hour slower than Tim Wakefield's average knuckleball.

So much for The Blessing of a Skinned Knee. Or the blessing of getting knocked down, getting up and brushing yourself off. Of course, given that Jericho hadn't actually hit anybody, one has to conclude that some parents were more concerned with protecting their children from striking out.

It's as if these parents and league officials have banded together to teach these children an important lesson: if something is hard or scary, you don't have to do it. You can just walk off the field. We can skip the achievement-in-the-face-of-adversity-part and go straight to the ice cream.

Are parents that determined to create an entire generation of Timmy Lupuses? And wasn't there at least one Tanner Boyle on the team that forfeited who wanted to stand in against Jericho?

"Hey, where you booger-eating morons going? We can hit this guy!"

Seriously, are we actively trying to create the squeezably soft Cottonelle Generation? Because no kid whose old man wouldn't let him face a 40-mile-an-hour fastball is going to grow up to knock out the gun batteries atop Pointe du Hoc.

I've got a real quick solution to the problem. Let Jericho pitch and put the kids whose parents complained out of their misery by removing them from the other teams. If you have the genes of a parent who whined to the league about a 9-year-old pitcher who hadn't hit anybody all season, then sports will never bring you anything but misery anyway and you'd be better off quitting before they duct tape you to a goalpost in high school.

When I was playing Little League for the Strafford Roadrunners in the Central Vermont League, our team was terrified of a kid named Dennis McLaughlin. Before we had ever faced him, we heard he had no-hit South Royalton; that he was untouchable; that he was a giant (probably 5-foot-4 in retrospect); that he had a moustache.

He was a Central Vermont legend by age 11.

Dennis played for Washington, Vt., a 40-minute drive from Strafford, so our little stomachs had plenty of time to churn as our parents drove us to that game.

But we played. And we dug in. Some with more conviction than others. And you know what happened?

He completely dominated us. But nobody got hurt. And a couple of us even put the ball in play.

And the ice cream tasted a lot better for having some dirt on our uniforms and the pride of having stood tall against our fears.

Of all the things kids do on an athletic field, standing in against a hardball is probably the scariest. (It's also probably the safest.)

But as Alexis de Tocqueville said, "Life is to be entered upon with courage."

And baseball, for a group of adults in New Haven, is to be exited with cowardice.