To the editor: I am hoping that American Legion Post 139 reconsiders its decision to cancel the 2024 Post 139 baseball season.
From its Website, “The league still stands behind the traditional values upon which it was founded in 1925. American Legion Baseball has taught hundreds of thousands of young Americans the importance of sportsmanship, good health and active citizenship.”
Post 139 has a successful tradition of baseball in part because the team has lived these values: it doesn’t have the financial barriers of other travel programs and is a program that includes the entire Arlington community as kids from across the county and its high schools play together on one team representing Arlington.
To cancel the season, and especially to cancel it without explanation, teaches Arlington’s teens the opposite: that active citizenship doesn’t matter and that good sportsmanship isn’t valued.
These are the kids who already lost a year of baseball (and health) to COVID. It would be a shame to take another year of baseball from them.
Nancy Sharkey, Arlington
