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Mike Klisch suspected something was off when his son’s spring 2022 Little League baseball team, “The Grays,” slaughtered nearly every opponent,
winning at times by 15 runs or more, with many games ending early under
the mercy rule.

Seeing other teams getting stomped by 11- and 12-year-olds didn’t feel
good. “I would watch these games and I would just want to go home and take
a shower,” recalled Klisch, a lawyer.

It also didn’t add up. The Northwest Washington Little League, in a tony
part of the nation’s capital, had a draft system to spread out talent, so
no one squad could assemble a juggernaut like the ‘27 Yankees.

What if, Klisch wondered, somebody was cheating? Not tobacco-spit-on-the- baseball kind of cheating, but the kind that happens in the front office. Emotions can run high in Little League, a touchstone of childhood for
millions, and while blowouts sometimes raise suspicions of foul play, most parents keep the speculation to a whisper.

That isn’t the case when the moms and dads of Little Leaguers are law-firm partners, lobbyists and other Beltway heavy-hitters.

The result has been a bench-clearing brawl: Parents pitted against each
other, a lawsuit, and an investigation by a white-shoe law firm. Baseball-
gate even dragged parents’ employers into the bickering.

‘Whistleblower’

Northwest Washington Little League draws from Georgetown, Cleveland Park, Palisades and nearby. Students from prestigious prep schools such as St.
Albans and Sidwell Friends bolster the rosters. Barack Obama showed up to
play catch when he was president.

When Klisch and another parent, Erin Sweeney, who is also a lawyer,
started asking uncomfortable questions, they were skunks at the garden
party.

They eventually accused coach Ricky Davenport-Thomas, in a formal letter
to the league, of bending rules to stack his team with talent and
falsifying paperwork to bring ineligible players into the league.

They alleged the coach poached an elite player from a nearby league but
ranked the boy’s abilities as average ahead of the spring 2022 draft, so
he could choose him in the fourth round and avoid using his first pick. Davenport-Thomas was also accused of paying himself and his friends with
league funds to coach teams, even though the league was mostly volunteer-
run.

Davenport-Thomas didn’t respond to requests for comment. He has previously denied stacking his team and purposely falsifying paperwork.

The allegations were as polarizing as pinch-hitting for a pitcher in the
middle of a perfect game.

Some parents rallied around the coach, appearing at league board meetings
to defend him. They praised him for skippering two 12-and-under all-star
teams that went to Little League International’s regional tournament in Bristol, Conn., a precursor to its World Series. He had been the league president seven years.

Klisch and Sweeney didn’t relent, continuing to bat out the issue at board meetings and in emails circulated to league parents.

‘Holy grail’

Klisch argued that bringing in ineligible kids unfairly siphoned talent
away from surrounding leagues. He said it also gave Davenport-Thomas a
better shot of advancing his team to the Little League World Series in Williamsport, Pa., a pinnacle for the players and coach alike.

“He has made it clear to me in the past that his holy grail is
Williamsport,” Klisch said.

If you ask Little League parent Joshua Daniel, a board member and
Episcopal priest, the cheating campaign against the coach was pointless
and petty. Watching his son pitch in a game in Bristol broadcast on ESPN
was a moment of family pride, Daniel said.

Klisch and Sweeney’s actions “injected toxicity into the community,” he
said. “It just felt like a complete burn-it-all down campaign.”

The vitriol spilled into meetings of the Northwest Washington Little
League board, on which both Klisch and Sweeney served. Sweeney swung back
in a lawsuit in D.C. in which she sought access to league records. She
accused the league of stonewalling her and Klisch, and said they faced brushback from others on the board.

One board member said at a March 2023 meeting that this wasn’t a “Bank of America” board and that “shit falls through the cracks when you’re running
a Little League,” Sweeney said in her lawsuit.

And yet another board member warned Sweeney and Klisch, “either you end
this crap, or I’m walking,” according to the suit.

One Little League mom, a trial attorney for the Justice Department,
contacted Klisch’s employer to complain that his updates to parents about
the cheating allegations were uncivil and harassing, according to Klisch.

The parent who worked at the Justice Department “had to appreciate how her actions would be construed as an effort to chill a whistleblower and
constitute witness intimidation,” Sweeney said in the suit.

A special counsel

Klisch and Sweeney said they felt pressured to resign their board seats
for refusing to drop their crusade.

“There were 14 of them in the room constantly coming at me from different angles,” Klisch said of other board members. “People were raising their
voices. It was a very intimidating environment.”

The retaliation extended to their kids, Klisch and Sweeney said, claiming coaches didn’t notify their boys that tryouts had begun for a team they
wanted to join.

“They can beat up on me all they want,” Klisch said, “but you can’t be
doing it to children.”

As things often go in D.C., a blue-ribbon panel was convened and a special counsel appointed.

In September, the league’s board established a “Special Committee of
Northwest Washington Little League” and called in prominent white-shoe law
firm Steptoe, whose specialties include government investigations and high-stakes litigation. Clients have included royal families, ex-Goldman
Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein and Exxon Mobil.

This time Steptoe went to bat for Little League. Steptoe agreed to work
pro bono, and spent hundreds of hours investigating and preparing a
report.

The committee’s 39-page report, released two months later, said no one
engaged in fraud and while Davenport-Thomas, the coach, made mistakes,
they weren’t intentional. The report noted one parent told the special committee that Davenport-Thomas went out of his way to make sure less-
talented kids received playing time.

The committee made recommendations as well, including adding more controls
on determining payments of coaching stipends.

This was far from game-over, however.

The twist

In January, a wave of new candidates, who campaigned under a “fresh start” platform, joined the board of the Northwest Washington Little League.
Coach Davenport-Thomas was replaced as president on the board.

The integrity of the investigative report was also now in question on the board: A partner at Steptoe had a son on Davenport-Thomas’ team and backed
the coach. And the special committee included board members loyal to Davenport-Thomas.

What to do? The league thought it would be a good idea to have a
reconstituted committee review the report’s findings.

The latest twist came this week when the league settled Sweeney’s lawsuit.

Under the deal, the league acknowledged that two players Davenport-Thomas
had helped bring in were, indeed, ineligible, including one who had played
on the coach’s 2022 all-star team that went to the regional tournament in Bristol.

Northwest Washington Little League also agreed to make written apologies
to two neighboring leagues, where the players were actually eligible to
play. In addition its president is required to personally call one of the
other league presidents to apologize for some statements in the special- committee report.

And as part of the settlement, Davenport-Thomas was banned for two years
from coaching some divisions of the league—and the league said it would no longer pay people to coach a team.

Additionally, the board agreed to issue a written statement that the new committee’s review of the allegations and available information “raised questions about the accuracy, reliability and completeness of certain
aspects of the report.” And the board apologized for not addressing the allegations by Klisch and Sweeney sooner.

“The last year was difficult for NWLL, particularly for Erin and Mike (and their families), who brought valid concerns to the board’s attention,” the statement said.

Lawyers for Steptoe, which has also been representing the league in the
suit, didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Ahead of the settlement, Steptoe lawyers said in a court filing they were conferring with their ethics counsel about alleged conflicts that had been raised.

Klisch, who under the settlement is expected to be appointed the head
coach of the league’s 12-and-under all-star team this summer, sounds
satisfied. “We’ve made the place better for the most important group of
people and that is the kids,” he said.

Write to James Fanelli at james.fanelli@wsj.com

https://www.wsj.com/us-news/little-league-scandal-roils-washington-d-c- elite-e50873d1

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