For Better or Werts : TV Worth Watching

GOOD SPORTS: Little League World Series this weekend

It's that most wonderful time of the year. Okay, maybe second most wonderful time, behind Christmas. (You know how I am about Christmas.)

It's time for the Little League World Series, which has become such a viewing favorite at our house that we forego weekend activities during the final two weeks of the annual youth baseball extravaganza from Williamsport, Pa.

You don't have to be sports fans like us to enjoy all the hoopla -- like the player introductions, where gaggles of 12-year-old boys wearing braces (and standing a foot taller or smaller than their teammates) shyly squeak or lisp their names and who their favorite players are. Or the on-screen graphics, listing each guy's favorite movie star, song, food or personal quirk. Or the cutaways to the stands, showing proud moms and dads, not to mention bare-chested tweens covered in body paint trying to prove they can be just as dumb-ass about sports as the grown-ups.

And let's not overlook the lineups' fun name game, counting duplicates to recall the trendy monikers of 1997. (Don't bother, I know from the prelims: Tyler, Jacob/Jake and Dylan/Dillon.)

Our fondness for the Little League World Series dates to the day we brought home our first big-screen high-def TV set five or six years ago, hooked it to the cable box (at a time there were only a handful of HD stations), and went channel-surfing for HD -- landing on ESPN/ABC's high-def LLWS coverage live from Williamsport.

We could see every green blade of grass! Every face in the stands! Every speck of dirt on the uniforms! Every pimple! Clearly! Wow!

So we have an emotional attachment to the Little League World Series in more ways than one. Forgive us. Join us. You won't be sorry.

Games for the final 8 American and 8 international teams start ~~round-robin fashion~~ in double-elimination preliminaries Friday afternoon (Aug. 20) on ESPN, and run all week, including some telecasts on ABC.

(Complete TV schedule here.)

The finals are next weekend -- U.S. and international championship games on ABC next Saturday (Aug. 28), with the third-place and world championship games on ABC next Sunday (Aug. 29).

ESPN3.com streams the games. And both stadiums in Williamsport have webcams.

Here are the event sites from ESPN and Little League.

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Diane Werts has been glued to the tube since she can remember, growing up in a household where the TV came on first thing in the morning and stayed on till bedtime and beyond. She worked for the USA Film Festival, then for The Dallas Morning News writing about everything from Shakespeare to macrame art to rock music (and has the hearing loss to prove it). She moved to New York's Newsday to edit their glossy TV magazine, then returned to writing about television, specializing in its stranger permutations. She's a past president of the Television Critics Association.

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