An American pastime … in crisis?

One of the original purposes of this blog besides all these wonderful but possibly irrelevant opinions around web sites, and geography was to write some thoughts about baseball. I never actually got around to it until now, being involved with youth baseball for the past six or so years has been incredibly rewarding but also incredibly exasperating — mostly dealing with the adults who are around the game. I had intended to wax eloquent about lots of things, from why young kids need to learn to catch fly balls with two hands to approaching an at-bat with a runner at 3rd and less than two outs. The topic however, that prompted the first baseball post, is that a powerhouse baseball team in Northern California, Morgan Hill is not able to field a team at the 12 and under age level for the 2012 Pony West Zone Central Regional Tournament.

Who cares, and what is the big deal anyway?

Its actually quite fascinating. Imagine a program that consisently has wonderfully talented players and an excellent base of youth participants all the way through 10 years of age, suddenly finding itself unable to put together a team at 12? What would you say if Duke or the TarHeels had a fantastic freshman squad in their basketball program but were unable to put together a competitive seniors only team? Where did all the players go? Now, for NCAA Basketball, the answer is fairly obvious — the young men in question left for lucrative (and hopefully) productive NBA careers, but how can this be when it comes to 10- and 12-year old baseball?

Two years ago, in the summer of 2010, I was an assistant on the Los Altos-Mountain View PONY Baseball 10U (B) all-stars — that’s a mouthful for what was essentially the second team at the 10-year old age group. Playing in the PONY Sectionals at the time, we started off with a couple of wins against Fremont and Blossom Valley, both reasonably solid programs, but shortly after ran into Morgan Hill. With boys who were at least a head taller than our squad, this was a no contest. We lost, continued our run in the losers’ bracket of the double elimination tourney a bit, only to run into them again, and that was the end of our run.

Morgan Hill has consistently been a power house of youth baseball in the Bay Area. And in the summer of 2012, they are unable to field a team? The late start of the Regionals on July 14 could be one problem — even die-hard baseball fans need a summer vacation. Two hypotheses, one partially true and stated by their league, another speculation and indicative of one of our pet peeves with youth baseball

• Many, many kids lost to “travel baseball” — professionally run baseball clubs with year-round playing expectations and clearly, more important than your local PONY or Little League organization?
• Parents and kids fed up with “dad-set-infield-and-order” syndrome — after all who hasn’t been on a team where there are visible and clear biases towards the coaches’ sons for preferred positions on the field and in the batting lineup

The latter is probably the subject of another post, which I shall hopefully get to, but the former is an interesting one. Has youth sports from soccer to baseball to basketball (all ones that I have some first-hand experience with) become really a racket that takes away from the idea of playing with your friends in your community? I didn’t grow up here, but when I read about baseball and how Joe DiMaggio grew up playing in the sandlots near Martinez and the old San Francisco Marina, and went on to be the great Yankee Clipper — self taught, clearly not playing USSSA tournaments at Twin Creeks every weekend, is this the game that was? Of course, this is a bit of an unfair comparison, not even a single digit percentage of the 10-year old center fielders in the Bay Area is going to roam the outfield at a big league park.

Rather than play for the love of the game, which perhaps creates the marriage of talent and achievement, we send our kids to be coached by professionals at an early age and expect what exactly? Since when did you come across a Little Leaguer or Pony Baseball kid that said, he or she loved to play baseball and that’s what their coach wanted them to do — continue playing the game because they loved to do so?

Its sad but not all that surprising — at 12, there is no community or team left for the game, only a group of traveling all-stars that carry around expensive bats with multiple gloves, propped up by their parents, trained by professionals, and playing for what — love of the game? Not.