Posted on 05/21/2015 5:49:56 AM PDT by BlueStateRightist
Can a casual fan name the top-ten players? How many MLB ballplayers are doing product endorsements now. There is a definite lack of marketable players these days.
Heck, the US doesn't even produce the best ballplayers anymore, it's dominated by Dominicans.
I know why I quit. I couldn’t catch a grounder and I kept getting hit in the teeth.
-PJ
Add to it - expensive.
Select teams have killed baseball. Full stop. Used to be you could just go to school, play HS ball. Someone would see you and you’d go to the minors instead of college, or go to college and then to the minors.
Most wouldn’t make it, but some would, and that’s baseball.
Now a parent has to go poor on coaches, $500 bats, showcase tournaments, paid agents, and clinics in order to get noticed.
And that’s why baseball is dead. Like soccer, it was a sport for poor kids. Now its a sport for rich kids, and rich kids aren’t interested.
It’s that simple.
The irony is its STILL a game for poor kids in other countries and it is still one of the most popular sports in the world as a result. Baseball isn’t soccer. Hitting a baseball is still the most difficult thing you can do in sports, and pitching a no hitter is one of the most difficult things you can accomplish as an athlete.
In the US, a stick and a rubber ball and you had a day’s entertainment. Now the glove alone will set you back a C-note. If the cops catch a group of kids playing stickball unsupervised in 2015, you may just lose your kids.
But hey, be back before the streetlights come on, right?
“Well, here in Columbus, GA (home of the 2006 LL champs) the game is alive and well. Our SECTION of town has nine teams. The coaches are great. Balance of fun and discipline. My son played this year (he is six), and the improvement over one season one phenomenal. It is a commitment, and impossible to do here without a car (unless you are in walking distance to the field), but the coaches are very sacrificial, working even with the younger, and less talented kids.”
It’s dying because you have to be rich to play it anymore. It’s dying because you have to have coaches to play it. It’s dying because the idea of allowing them to play without helmets is enough to get you arrested.
I saw a kid get called out because she took her helmet off before she entered the dugout.
That’s why its dying - the adults took charge.
"Soccer is boring to watch, but it's fun to do....much like a fat chick"...Bill Schulz, Red Eye.
It bores me to tears, so glad my sons are out for track.
____________________
as a former track-parent of four I can say that track is not, by any means, a riveting sport. As a matter of fact, track is like watching paint dry without the plot.
In retrospect, I should have loaded the food baskets with a thermos of cool adult beverage for each meet.
My children didn’t. They liked baseball.
Inner city blacks do not have access to adequately maintained baseball fields as they did several decades ago. The only sport left for them now are the run down basketball courts.........
Blacks living in the suburbs have a much better chance to play baseball but all such baseball for kids is strictly organized leagues in Little League, or travel teams or Federation ball.
You never see a small group of kids by themselves playing "500" or "roll up" or "fast pitch" in a school yard with a square chalked out on a school building indicating a strike zone. In fact if you were to ask a kid if he plays any "pick up" ball with his buddies, he'll likely give you a funny look and say "whats that?".............
Kids have no imagination when it comes to baseball today, it all has to be organized with the parents at the center of it.
From the time to T-Ball they make the game “fair” by having no winner. So the game is no fun. Kids do something else that is fun, not baseball.
You were up to almost $300 in a couple of sentences. We’re both rich relative to the kids in the 40s and 50s who grew up playing this in sandlots.
That’s the thing, its dying because unless you can pony for participation in a league, you are toast.
Oh, and then there’s the car . . . .
I’m not a hater. I love baseball, and my daughter plays it. I keep the book at her games. Where I saw the sport really getting killed by the select movement is in women’s softball.
We’re a major industrial city bigger than 120,000 people, and we can’t field four 13 to 15 year old girl’s teams. Our league will not have an All-Star team this year - not enough girls want to play. Too expensive, the coaching situation is iffy, and they’ve got better things to do that travel all over the state.
All I can say is AT LEAST she caught the bug, and she’ll love baseball her whole life. Of the three kids, she’s the only one who does. My two SONS hate it. They hate it because they never played it, and when they did it was on an organized squad.
Kids used to learn by playing it day in and day out in the summer time. Even if football came and went in HS, as an adult you came back to baseball.
That’s not going to happen. MLB has a problem - a big one. So does the NFL. I suspect they both know it.
$300 ain’t what it used to be. It’s not free, but the glove, bat and cleats were ALWAYS an expense for real baseball as opposed to just playing in your backyard.
When I was a kid, my try out for Little League was in part sabotaged because my older brother was left handed, and my dad’s glove was worse than worthless on a seven year old’s hand. So, I knopw about the $$$ side.
I learned to love the game not just from playing in highschool and watching the Dodgers and hating the Yankees, but also through playing Wiffle Ball in the backyard with neighbor kids. Few neighbor kids these days. Wiffle ball can be played with very few kids (three is a good minimum), and kids can make up their own rules about invisible runners and you can throw the ball AT the runner to get the out. No helmets or gloves, either, but enough to get the idea of teh game and have some good fun.
I play pick-up Senior Softball four mornings a week from when the snow melts in the spring to when the snow covers the ground in the fall with like minded retirees.
You ought to hear what they say about their grand kids. The girls are playing soccer or fast pitch softball tournaments almost every weekends and dittos for boys who are are playing on baseball travel teams as young as 10, 11, 12 years old! It's ridiculous!
Where we play in Warren, MI, there's a park with 6 diamonds and we've been unofficially granted exclusive use of one of the diamonds in the back that has no outfield fence.
Several weekends each summer the park will host a baseball tournament for kids between the ages of 12 to maybe 15, with different age divisions. You should see these teams when they show up. Each and every kid has matching cleats, pants, shirts, caps and roller gear bags associated with their respective teams. The gear bags themselves cost over $100 each..........
And the sad part about it is, if a parent wants their kid to play on this "super duper travel team", they pretty much have to commit the entire summer to the coach and his team if they want their kid to play........It's politics!
When I (and likely you) was growing up in my small northern Michigan town, all we had was one little league park and maybe 6 or 8 teams.............Then at the end of the season the league managers picked the kids to represent our city in the Little League World Series and we would start playing against the other small cities in our district......
When you think about it, there is no way a team from my old neck of the woods would ever be able to advance beyond the Regionals simply because the teams you would be playing against would have a pool of over 500 kids in which to choose from................
To reinforce my points, my old high school, Boyne City, went up against Ithaca High School which is west of Saginaw this past fall in the state semi-final Class C football championship. Ithaca came into the game with 69 straight wins and 4 consecutive state championships. Ithaca barely squeeked by with a 20 - 16 win over Boyne City and lost in the state final to St. Mary Catholic Central out of Monroe.
What's noteworthy about this info is the fact that Ithaca, with its winning football history, can recruit noteworthy football players from around their highly populated area and St.Mary Catholic Central can recruit players by offering tuition subsidies. Just as all the private schools do.
So when you look at a team such as Boyne City who only has its own kids to draw from, it's kind of hard for them to compete against metropolitan areas..........
Even wiffle ball is enough. We’d play this in bigger groups on the blacktop at our Catholic school.
More than good enough. Good enough to enjoy watching a well hit wiffle ball go over the head of an outfielder and imagining you were in Yankee Stadium.
You wanna talk nurture and nature - I was stationed in NYC for two years. I lived in Manhattan - Governors Island, actually. Say what you want about old George Steinbrenner, but if you were active duty, you didn’t need to go to the USO for a reduced price ticket to the ball game. He told the man at the press gate that if someone shows you an active duty military ID, you take a dollar from him and bring him up to the third deck. Back in the 1990’s a subway token was $1.25, so your ticket to the game cost less than the ride uptown.
Hard to hate the Yankees with a policy like that, and I grew up like you did on California Baseball. The 71, 72, and 73 A’s World Championships, the Giants - Willie McCovey and the end of the Willie Mays days. The Padres, Lasorda’s Dodgers (Now still Vin Scully’s Dodgers).
As a Giants fan, I still watch Dodger games just to listen to Vin Scully call the game. Loved them when Lasorda was King.
I’m a Yankee fan, and will die one, even though I’m an A’s/Giants fan from youth. People talk about supporting the military. Steinbrenner just did it.
On a hot summer day, you could pack a bag lunch, jump on the red line from South Ferry station, and see the Yankees for the change you could find in the couch - all because you were a GI.
How could you not love the Yankees for that, even if you were from Boston?
Someone once said, we fail to reach our goals not because of who we think we are, but who we think we are NOT. The Yankees go in every year convinced they are going to be World Champions. I respect that.
And that shirt was recycled next year to the new kids who joined the team............LOL!
I was a very good little league player but the following season if I wanted to continue to play, I had to join a "Babe Ruth" league in Boyne city that only had I think 6 or 8 teams. I was probably 99 lbs. and 4'9" tall trying to compete with 18 year old guys throwing fast balls. My uniform pants had to be pinned up at least 8 inches by my mom......LOL! After a couple of games I called it quits and never played hardball again........
This is the most insightful observation on this thread.
I agree with your statement Laz, and with that cultural change, I think it's directly related to micromanagement of today's kids by their parents who want their kids to excel in the sports "THEY" enjoyed.....
When you look at the vast numbers of baseball players from central and south american countries, what do they have in common with today's American kids? My answer is absolutely nothing!
Those baseball players as well as their well known soccer stars start out playing non stop sand lot games with their fellow kids, day in and day out. Here in the U.S., if your kid wants to play then he has to find a team that wants him.......
On my last couple of vacations to Honduras, I would see barefoot kids playing soccer on over grown fields or in the streets, totally oblivious of what was going on around them.
That was the sports atmosphere that both you and I grew up with...........and has unfortunately has changed due to our culture.
Of course you would never want to mention to these kids the opportunity to join the military and be a soldier someday......maybe that’s what this whole fricken mess is about, hhhhmmmmmm?
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