The Little League Baseball season is opening around town this week, meaning thousands of kids will be picking up bats and balls and gloves and playing the game we adults loved when we were their age.

Only this year there are a few changes. Bases can no longer be anchored to the ground unless they are the new, breakaway model that release when a child slides into them. Otherwise, the old bases must simply be laid on the ground. And in most leagues, young pitchers will be on a strictly monitored and rigidly enforced pitch limit.

Which all adds to one conclusion a number of us have been reaching for years. Sometime between our own childhoods and now, we've collectively lost our minds in a ridiculous pursuit of protecting our own kids from ever suffering so much as a bump or bruise.

Consider the new bases. They're designed to protect against broken ankles and other leg injuries. Good idea, right? Sure, until you ask our area's Little League district rep how many injuries he's ever heard of resulting from bad slides into bases in his 30 years in the game.

"I know of one," says Wes Snihur. "But nothing that was serious. I think you'd be hard-pressed to find someone who knows of something serious happening."

So we're forcing cash-strapped leagues to spend thousands of dollars to prevent against injuries that happen with some regularity to adults who are heavier and faster and less flexible, but hardly never happen to kids?

And the pitch counts? They're to protect kids from injuring their arms by throwing too much. Another smart-sounding idea, until you remember your own childhood during which you threw the ball until your arm nearly fell off yet you can still use it just fine.

Sure, the occasional child will suffer an injury. Then again, a small number will get bitten by dogs while walking home from school, too. Does that mean we have to ban pets? Require parents to drive their kids home? Or maybe force all youngsters to wear Kevlar uniforms?

This is all just the tip of a crazy, overprotective iceberg. Bodychecking has again been taken out of kids hockey. Throughout North America, schools have banned tag as too dangerous. Same with using baseballs and footballs on the schoolyard because they're hard and could hurt someone. Soccer, touch football, dodge ball and British Bulldog have been outlawed. One school in Boston has banned any unsupervised play during recess in the name of safety.

Chalk it up to some apparent belief that kids today are more fragile than any previous generation. Or in many cases, to a fear of a lawsuit being filed by parents who believe their kids should never be hurt and if they are, someone should pay.

It's not just physical woes we're worried about. Some schools have banned any games that involve the picking of sides because the last player chosen could be traumatized. We now give trophies to every kid, every season, because we're so scared of bruising someone's delicate sense of entitlement.

Let's be clear. Nobody wants to create dangerous situations for our youth. Then again, nobody's suggesting letting them participate in demolition derbies or enrolling them in bullfighting classes. Just doing the stuff kids have always done. Surely there's no real harm in a skinned knee, a bump on the elbow or having the wind knocked out of them.

Everyone who's over 30 survived such horrors. Some of us even broke a bone or two or needed a few stitches. Yet we made it out of childhood alive despite tag, playing with balls not made of Nerf, throwing a baseball as much as we like and playing games without adults complicating them and legislating against all risk of anything. We drank water from filthy garden hoses, breathed fumes from leaded fuel, rode in cars without seatbelts sometimes facing backwards in the station wagon, chucked lawn darts, and played games without being cocooned by adults.

No, they weren't all great ideas, but even with all this, are our kids really any better off than we were? Or than our parents were? Are we seeing fewer trips to the emergency rooms or just different reasons for those visits?

But back to the bases. You have to wonder what happens the first time a young player slides into the new magnetic second bag, it comes loose and slams into another kid's shin, leaving a nasty bump. Or cutting him. What then?

Maybe we should just skip right past this step to imaginary bases with a pretend ball and a whiffle bat and merely mime the game ...

sradley@thespec.com

905-526-2440