CINCINNATI, OH--The Knothole Club of Greater Cincinnati will stop allowing bad athletes to participate in little league games because of the negative effect that sucking has on a child's self-esteem.

The decision was made by a group of concerned parents, coaches, and umpires in response to reports that a 7-year old player was seen crying after tripping on the base path and scraping his knee.

“The humiliation of being such a bad runner is far more painful than the injury,” said the boy's mother, Helen Hamilton, who admitted she hadn't actually talked to her son about why he was crying. “These are children. They'll never learn if we let them fail.”

The decision comes on the heels of an earlier announcement that any kind of negative chatter had been banned after some heated exchanges led to fights and hurt feelings. “If you're saying, 'Swing, batter,' and this poor little kid is swinging at everything, he feels bad and maybe he turns to the catcher and gets mad,” Knothole president Dave Epplen explained. “This move was the natural next step in protecting children from learning to deal with the feelings that they might have.”

The fact that the decision would exclude about 75 percent of the participants didn't bother Epplen. “Keeping these bad players out of games, heck, out of interactions with other human beings, is for their own good.”

Other measures under consideration include wrapping players in bubble wrap and replacing games between teams with single-player virtual reality in which the child plays only against CPU opponents programmed to lose.

“I like the idea,” said Hamilton. “The best thing I can do to ensure that he makes good choices as an adult is to shelter him from everything right up until the day I decide to leave him to his own devices.”