Do many of you realize that in suburban Atlanta which was always a hotbed of baseball they now have trouble getting enough kids to field a league. The best of the best are now in year round leagues where if you arent in there forget D1 baseball scholarships etc. Baseball has lost the American youth to Ipads, video games, etc. They should now call it Major Latino Baseball MLB.
It isnt coming back to America no matter how rules are changed. Baseball’s heyday is gone. Like trains. Sorry for my pessimistic look but reality has to set in.
Lacrosse has replaced baseball as the American youth spring sport.
“Baseball’s heyday is gone.”
It certainly looks to be a problem. Before the official MLB academies began, a former minor league player, Epifanio “Epy” Guerrero, built the first talent development facility on a patch of farmland north of Santo Domingo in 1973 and even prior to that Ozzie Virgil became the first Dominican-born player to play for a major league team in the United States in 1956, NL Giants.
But according to Fred Guerrero, Epy’s son and current Latin American scout supervisor for the Minnesota Twins, “it was very hard for [Epy] to get players to commute every day to his field, so he needed to build some sort of a house where he could house them so they wouldn’t have to commute . . . that’s where it all started.”
By 2003, all 30 MLB teams had active academies in the Dominican. These facilities were places where players from ages 16 through 21 could not only practice on smooth fields, but also build up their bodies by eating well, lifting weights, and sleeping on bunks with sheets.
But the work within the academies turned into money. The clubs could pay as much as $700 a month to players in the academies and that would be more money at the time than their parents made in over 15 years annually. And when they did move on, the biggest money went to the developers and not the players developed.
And the clubs could bring up players through the system that had the talent to play at the MLB level and then if they did finally make the big club, their salary was so dwarfed by other players, they felt taken….and they were. But after a couple of years when they spent enough time in success and complained enough wanting more money, they were released, sent down and buried, or traded to a small market team that couldn’t pay them their worth so they faded out of the system when new “stars” came into the league.
A real good site for information on the camps in places like the Dominical and Venezuela is here:
https://www.repository.law.indiana.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1201&context=ijgls
Wy69