The Future Of Baseball

[DrungoHazewood]

25 minutes ago, UpstateNYfan said:

You watch youth baseball (non travel) practices and kids are not involved. You watch games of 6-7 with kids pitching that have trouble hitting the backstop...kids picking dandelions in the field. Baseball is a difficult game to coach, let alone the rules. You wonder why baseball is failing. Watch other, youth sports like hockey and watch their skill developing programs..skill not games. Likewise, with youth basketball programs. A lot of rambling here, but baseball interests will likely continue to decline.

Baseball does need to take a cue from other sports.  I coach soccer and there's a big emphasis from the national level on down to getting more kids playing more soccer and doing less standing around at practice.  You start off practice will small-sided games, adding players as the kids show up. You alternate between skill development, conditioning, and play.  You always maximize touches on the ball for every player. You structure the drills to flow from one into the next with minimal transition time, by pre-positioning cones and goals and other things.

The youth baseball practices I've seen always involve a lot of kids standing in the field waiting for the ball to come to them, but often they'll stand there doing nothing for five, 10 minutes or more.  And they'll bat 2-3 times in a 90 minute practice.  They need to break into smaller groups.  Have kids pair up, one pitch, one hit.  Or one throws grounders to the other.  Do long toss... Maybe this kind of planning and practice structure exists, but it wasn't there when my kids were playing 8-10 year old baseball a few years ago.  Every single practice involved 30-45 minutes with players at every position during batting practice, even though half the kids were physically incapable of hitting the ball to the outfield.

[UpstateNYfan]

15 minutes ago, survivedc said:

I don’t think most of this is true. May be true anecdotally but from what I’ve read Youth Baseball participation has been up the last 4-5 straight years, at least in the 6-12 range. Football has taken a hit more than any other sport in recent years due to health concerns and hockey/lacrosse seem to be very geographically driven.

I think the basic premise is true...more choices, including staying in and doing video games. Baseball is certainly impacted by weather in the north. By observation and being on league boards, I know the number of teams have decreased significantly over the last half dozen years. 

[UpstateNYfan]

5 minutes ago, DrungoHazewood said:

Baseball does need to take a cue from other sports.  I coach soccer and there's a big emphasis from the national level on down to getting more kids playing more soccer and doing less standing around at practice.  You start off practice will small-sided games, adding players as the kids show up. You alternate between skill development, conditioning, and play.  You always maximize touches on the ball for every player. You structure the drills to flow from one into the next with minimal transition time, by pre-positioning cones and goals and other things.

The youth baseball practices I've seen always involve a lot of kids standing in the field waiting for the ball to come to them, but often they'll stand there doing nothing for five, 10 minutes or more.  And they'll bat 2-3 times in a 90 minute practice.  They need to break into smaller groups.  Have kids pair up, one pitch, one hit.  Or one throws grounders to the other.  Do long toss... Maybe this kind of planning and practice structure exists, but it wasn't there when my kids were playing 8-10 year old baseball a few years ago.  Every single practice involved 30-45 minutes with players at every position during batting practice, even though half the kids were physically incapable of hitting the ball to the outfield.

I agree, some sports have development programs and require coaches to be trained. Little League seems at least a decade behind in this area. I'm sure in some places it is done well, but for the most part not.

[Tony-OH]

6 hours ago, DrungoHazewood said:

But most of all for this moment, nobody is taking the MLBPA and the owners aside and saying, "hey, I know you want what you think is yours and you don't want to set a precedent in the new CBA negotiations, but (*whack*) you're killing baseball here!"  If they don't get their stuff together and give us some kind of a season, a lot of people will go through the summer without any baseball and they'll realize that it just wasn't a big deal.  And it'll be that much harder to turn it around with the younger crowd.

A lot of good point here but I wanted to point this one out. I think I would count as a baseball fanatic. I run a website dedicated to a major league team, watch or attend over 250 major and minor leaguer games, played the game until my mid 40s, have scouted amateur and pros, and have coached up to the High School level.

Up until this year, I couldn't have imagined what a summer looked like without baseball. so much of my time was dedicated to the sport over the years that I actively wondered what I would do. Well, hundreds of miles on my Harley, hours upon hours in my pool, hours and hours of playing board games with the kids/friends, hours and hours of watching new shows and even reruns of old ones that I used to enjoy, hours of hiking and walking, and even signing some Karaoke in my basement later, I found that life still goes on. 

I'm honestly so fed up with everything right now, that I'm quickly finding myself not caring about whether baseball returns or not. 

So if this is my opinion, what is the opinion of the under 40 crowd that already has baseball the 4th popular sport? Back in my day (70s-80s), my community alone would have six-eight team baseball leagues from age 5-15. When we weren't playing baseball, we were finding a field, good backyard, or "rightaways" to play whiffleball all while pretending to be our favorite players. 

Sure there were All-Star teams, but we didn't have travel ball and parents weren't dishing out tons of money and time which of course puts pressure on the kids. We played until late June, sometimes into July for All-Star tourneys, and they we went and played all summer and didn't play anything organized.

When was the last time you saw some kids playing whiffle ball somewhere and pretending to be Trey Mancini or Adam Jones? 

Baseball is dying sport that probably would be fairly irrelevant in 30 years anyways, but if they just shut a season down due to the greed of the players and owners, I truly think that irrelevancy will stat it's spiral much quicker.

I've said this before, and I'll say it again, if baseball doesn't come back this year, I doubt the Hangout will be here next year. Or if it is, I won't be.

[O-Arm36]

I think one thing that might be fun is to go way back and do barnstorming again. Build on things like that Williamsport series, etc, and get the big league clubs and players out their playing in more accessible venues (and for more accessible prices). There are so many minor league stadiums/college stadiums/etc everywhere that could be used. It might help with marketing stars because people could see how their skills play up in more intimate settings. And getting 10,000 fans at those places would be an exciting and energetic atmosphere. Getting 10,000 fans in a  big league park, as we know, is depressing. It won't happen but it would be a fun way to get back to its roots in a new and interesting way.

Also since there's not as much contact as other sports I think they should do way more with the television broadcast. There's gotta be ways to make the downtime more interesting. Have guys mic'd up every game. Stuff like that to show off more of the personality.

[survivedc]

On the other hand, I would bet adult softball leagues are probably the most popular leagues out there (volleyball and kickball also seem to have high participation) at least it feels that way in Baltimore.

Outside of soccer, the major 4 sports are always changing, but so far basketball with emphasizing the 3 (which I don’t enjoy) and football emphasizing passing (which I also don’t enjoy to the level it’s at) have done much better jobs marketing and getting fans excited about their new styles.

[eddie83]

3 hours ago, DrungoHazewood said:

• I've been to countless DC United matches where one entire side of the stadium stands and cheers and sings and throws beer and yells and beats drums and waves banners and lights flares the whole game.  The Screaming Eagles and Barra Brava and El Norte are waaaaay more into the game than pretty much anyone at any regular season MLB game.  The average 2019 MLS match had more fans than a 2019 Orioles game.  And Portland and Atlanta and a few other places regularly draw 30,000-50,000 fans.  I doubt they all paid to be there only to be seen and be counted as cool at a sport they don't like.
• I get that it's usually in an employer's best interest to hire the people with the best qualifications.  But baseball is a company that has to think about not only their immediate needs, but the next generation of players and fans.  If you constantly take the Ivy Leaguer as your intern instead of the guy from Howard, the guy from Howard goes to the NFL or the NBA or college basketball and slowly takes a little part of the fanbase and future player base with him, and that's at least a small part of why large demographics don't really care about baseball any more.
• I shy away from broad generalizations about generations of people.  Yes, millennials have a somewhat different perspective than 40 or 50 or 60-year-olds.  But I have a bunch of them working for me as engineers and technicians and analysts who are fantastic employees, they work hard, they get results.  If baseball gives up on them because of stereotypes about how they won't watch games with depth and nuance, the sport will be worse off for it.

You can’t compare a sport that has 17 home games and one that has 81. If the Orioles has a 34 game schedule with mainly weekend games you don’t think their attendance average would rise? We have seen plenty of noise at Camden for big games. 

One big issue baseball has is a lack of scholarships in college. 11.7 scholarships that can be divided amongst 30 players. Basketball has 13 per team in a sport that only has 5 players on the floor at once. You can’t have only the wealthy playing at older ages.  

[eddie83]

1 hour ago, DrungoHazewood said:

Baseball does need to take a cue from other sports.  I coach soccer and there's a big emphasis from the national level on down to getting more kids playing more soccer and doing less standing around at practice.  You start off practice will small-sided games, adding players as the kids show up. You alternate between skill development, conditioning, and play.  You always maximize touches on the ball for every player. You structure the drills to flow from one into the next with minimal transition time, by pre-positioning cones and goals and other things.

The youth baseball practices I've seen always involve a lot of kids standing in the field waiting for the ball to come to them, but often they'll stand there doing nothing for five, 10 minutes or more.  And they'll bat 2-3 times in a 90 minute practice.  They need to break into smaller groups.  Have kids pair up, one pitch, one hit.  Or one throws grounders to the other.  Do long toss... Maybe this kind of planning and practice structure exists, but it wasn't there when my kids were playing 8-10 year old baseball a few years ago.  Every single practice involved 30-45 minutes with players at every position during batting practice, even though half the kids were physically incapable of hitting the ball to the outfield.

The key to this is the amount of coaches you have. If you have 3/4 coaches you can do this. Hard to do it if someone if by themselves. There is no reason to have kids standing around for long periods of time. If a team has that many coaches there really isn’t an excuse for it.  

[eddie83]

One big issue with youth baseball/softball is the pitcher. It’s a hard game to watch when the ball isn’t being thrown over the plate. The game drags, kids get bored and learn next to nothing. As someone who has coached girls softball for years I can attest. One game at 12u my daughters team won a game scoring over 20 runs while never getting a hit. Imagine a game with walks after walks, wild pitches etc. Now I would not say this was all the time but even imagine a game with half of that. Many of the better pitchers only play on travel teams. 

 

[DrungoHazewood]

40 minutes ago, eddie83 said:

You can’t compare a sport that has 17 home games and one that has 81. If the Orioles has a 34 game schedule with mainly weekend games you don’t think their attendance average would rise? We have seen plenty of noise at Camden for big games. 

One big issue baseball has is a lack of scholarships in college. 11.7 scholarships that can be divided amongst 30 players. Basketball has 13 per team in a sport that only has 5 players on the floor at once. You can’t have only the wealthy playing at older ages.  

Certainly a 17 game home season is very different than 81.  I was just responding to sevastras' post that said he'd bet a lot of money that a large percentage of people who identify as soccer fans are only doing it to be cool, that they couldn't care less about the sport.  I think that's no more true of soccer than baseball.

A lot of US sports have a problem with pay for play.  If you can't afford the equipment or the travel fees you don't play.  Soccer certainly has this problem; the US has millions of immigrants with soccer in their blood who have every incentive to make it a career, but they don't have the NoVa/Montgomery County parents with dual six-figure incomes to be on the team. I think that's the primary reason US men's soccer has stalled.  Baseball has similar problems.  Throughout the last 150 years people from lower socioeconomic demographics have succeeded at sports at rates well beyond what you'd expect.  Kids trying to get out of bad situations will fight to succeed in ways that upper-middle class kids just won't.  My kids' fallback plan if sports doesn't work out (and it won't) is going to a good four-year college.  If your parents make $30k a year you don't have a fallback plan.  Sports that shut out the kids without a fallback plan are failing.

[DrungoHazewood]

34 minutes ago, eddie83 said:

The key to this is the amount of coaches you have. If you have 3/4 coaches you can do this. Hard to do it if someone if by themselves. There is no reason to have kids standing around for long periods of time. If a team has that many coaches there really isn’t an excuse for it.  

I think every sports league in the country has fewer people volunteer to be coaches than they'd like.  At least every one I've been associated with is always looking for volunteers to coach.

[DrungoHazewood]

22 minutes ago, eddie83 said:

One big issue with youth baseball/softball is the pitcher. It’s a hard game to watch when the ball isn’t being thrown over the plate. The game drags, kids get bored and learn next to nothing. As someone who has coached girls softball for years I can attest. One game at 12u my daughters team won a game scoring over 20 runs while never getting a hit. Imagine a game with walks after walks, wild pitches etc. Now I would not say this was all the time but even imagine a game with half of that. Many of the better pitchers only play on travel teams.

I think almost every parent of a Little Leaguer has a similar story.  My oldest played in 15-12 game that had one clean hit, that an infield hit by my son.  There had to have been 27 walks and 32 wild pitches.  Heck, each team might have had 27 walks and 32 wild pitches.  Parents were close to bribing the ump to call off the game by the 4th or 5th inning.

[Enjoy Terror]

9 hours ago, DrungoHazewood said:

Baltimore is a minority-majority city, yet the significant majority of Oriole players and coaches and front office personnel are white.  I don't know if that's a chicken and egg thing (or what's the cause and what's the effect?)

Nothing about MLB's version of baseball sources from the cities it represents. Usually ownership, and perhaps some local jobs in the stadium and warehouse, but the players are drafted and internationally signed, the managers and scouts hired nationally for their experience.

[camdencrush]

Baseball is very expensive to play and you can't play it that effectively with no equipment and a couple of friends.  With football all you need is a ball 2 people.  With basketball a ball and a hoop and 2 people.  Baseball, unless you're hitting off a tee or throwing into one of those bounce back nets (which gets boring quickly), you just can't do by yourself.  Besides playing catch I guess.  But how much can you do that?  Baseball is going the way of the dodo because it hasn't (and probably won't) adapt to a changing environment.  We can't be mad at people for not being entertained by a sport that was basically the only form of entertainment aside from movies in its heyday.

 

 

[MongoBoy]

2 hours ago, DrungoHazewood said:

I think every sports league in the country has fewer people volunteer to be coaches than they'd like.  At least every one I've been associated with is always looking for volunteers to coach.

Main reason, that I see, is that volunteers don't want to deal with parents, especially fathers, who are trying to live their pathetic lives thru their kids and cause problems at every game.  And then, those kids mouth off to the adults cause they see their parents do it and it becomes ingrained in their tiny brains that it's alright.  No discipline from top to bottom.