Full disclosure: I will probably spring for the radio package so I'm all skull and no crossbones. Plus, I always enjoy listening to the local spots - one of the best ways left to eavesdrop on everyday America!
To go along with that there is a special place in my heart for local business radio spots. Give me all your Cinelli Scrap Metals and Thompson Paint Supply's. Slingin' tires in a Cincinnati suburb? Got a multi-generational taqueria in Houston? Scummy lawyer business? I want to hear about 'em.
One time when my car was in for an oil change, instead of waiting in the waiting room I went for a walk along streets I usually drive on. One of them goes under the Wilbur Cross and passes some vacant lots near the parkway. Off in the woods, there were clumps of daffodils along some abandoned stone walls. This was right in town.
Same, although I'm a little concerned about the number of those players I've seen play. It's like I'm getting old or something. Beats the alternative I guess.
Same in KC, but I won’t even pay for YouTube TV. I see these little packages as at least an upgrade over Bally, because I happen to have prime, I will watch 1 Royals game (until the World Series, am I right?!)
Until then, I got a radio in my kitchen that will do just fine.
I share YouTube with 4 other people so it’s relatively reasonable but I get you. It’s just so impossible to get any sports league without multiple subscriptions (if one thinks baseball is bad, try following soccer, dear Gandalf is it split between an infinite amount of pay services)
same boat with Cleveland. It's either cable or AT&T owned DirectTV streaming. Both are over priced and suck. But hey, the Dolans got their money for the broadcast rights and don't care whether or not fans can watch the games.
Same here in Tampa. Frontier and Bally sports can't reach an agreement. So no Rays or Lightning. I am also not gonna renew my MLBTV this year. I will tune in for what ever is broadcast with my current subscriptions. Luckily, Baseball of all the sports, translates the best for radio broadcasts.
Exactly this. I'm very pissed at Bally for basically setting up a local monopoly with Comcast. Half the reason I switched to YT Tv was because they had almost all the sports networks that I desired. Sinclair can go eff off in general, not just for the way they're managing the regional sports.
I really do wonder about how long the current money making strategy can hold. Baseball thinks gambling can make up the revenue and I’m sure they’re right. But how much money do gambling forward sports like boxing and horse racing make?
Why give any of these corporations your time or money when every baseball game is very readily available with a very quick stream search? Sinclair sure ain't being ethical to you, so why bother being ethical in consuming the broadcast they won't let you watch?
Honestly, I am tempted to subscribe to Peacock, which would be way, way cheaper than getting cable. Peacock has a pretty good selection of movies, anyway.
BeReal sounds ghastly. But so does most of social media.
Anyway, opening day, and I really do hope it rains in all those places because if you planned to go today and had to change all your plans for no reason, or worse can't go tomorrow, it really sucks. The starting pitcher for the Mets will be Tylor Megill (whose name still sounds like a character from a fantasy novel). I saw his first start in person, so i have a mild vested interest in seeing him make it big. He projects to be a back end starter, so this might his only opening day, but you never know. We'll see if he goes more than five innings, and then get to see the Mets' biggest weakness in action as that bullpen looks very suspect. Let's go Mets!
I am convinced that the Alderson philosophy is "starters go seven, let's build a rotation." Which is how I like the game best but is clearly done for except in his head and on his team.
I'm not sure if the Republicans will *never* push back. As we saw with Madison Cawthorn, they will call out the crazy... but only when it crosses a line. What's that line? When it might be actually true.
The line is arbitrary and applied in context when there are exacerbating circumstances. I pretty much tell anyone who decides to vote for that party that if they care about anyone who is marginalized (I've said it once that "if that person has a month in which they're celebrated") they cannot logically vote for Republicans.
All that matters is that today is opening day. Look beyond any other nonsense and enjoy the 12 year old version of you that'd wear the baseball patch jacket, your lee jeans, your favorite team hat and your keds sneakers, go out into your yard and hit some fungos into the air!
In Memoriam video brought a few tears to mt eyes. Thinking of RemDawg today and everyday.
Ready for Opening Day! I’ll be in Kauffman hauling ass to the team store after Bobby’s first at-bat to buy his jersey! (Yes, you cant purchase his jersey until he comes up to an official at-bat. Ridiculous)
Baseball is dying. Network TV is dying. Cable TV is dying. Bookstores are dying. Music industry is dying. Newspapers are dying. Hound dog howling. Bullfrog croaking. Everything is dying.
(What's funny is that one of those mentioned above is an industry that has steady increase in record income each year over the past 25 years (with very few exceptions))
When you think about it, various cells in our bodies are dying and being regenerated all the time. A red blood cell only lives for 120 days before a macrophage eats it and a new baby one takes its place.
I’m confused by the “BIG RiBI Sandwich” which Is described as a yummy-sounding rack of ribs….yet it’s also a sandwich. Do people in Georgia just chew right through bones?
Might the move to Peacock games be related to current (fenway group) and future (Ricketts & Chelsea/who knows who else) ownership of Premier League teams?
I roll my eyes so hard at every columnist who cites declining Little League participation for why baseball is a dying sport (despite the long streak of record revenues every year). Little League participation is declining because parents and kids have realized that it's not a good baseball experience for most people. Most coaches are mediocre to outright bad, and half the kids don't want to be there. I love baseball more than almost anything on earth, and at the height of my obsession with it, I walked away from playing for three whole years because my experience was so bad in my age-11 and age-12 years in Little League (a nepotistic coach who let his untalented son pitch and play shortstop, who ignored two-thirds of the team almost entirely, and didn't do anything about bullying). There are better baseball experiences for kids out there than Little League.
Totally agree with this. I also blame the shift to focus on traveling programs. We've got 9-year-olds in my town grinding out an intense summer schedule and fighting through arm injuries before going to fall baseball and then winter training programs. The funny thing is, playing traveling doesn't have anything to do with talent - anyone can play as long as the check clears.
It doesn't guarantee good coaching either. You still run into the bad, nepotistic coaches. It goes beyond baseball, too, to all the sports around here. We're really going to turn kids off sports at the expense of "development".
When I was coaching my son's youth basketball teams we were pretty successful because I was the only coach in the county teaching man-to-man help defense. Everybody else just threw the kids into a 2-1-2 zone and dared the opponent to make a jump shot. Our offense was 75% break away layups off of steals. An AAU coach tried to recruit me to coach his defense by offering my son a slot. My son was last guy off the bench on a county rec team his dad coached!
My basketball experience was much better than my baseball experience because I was fortunate to play for perhaps the (former) best high school coach in the state, who lived three houses away and had a son my age. His son was never more than our sixth man (no nepotism), and by sixth grade we could not only play strong man-to-man but basically every variation of zone (2-3, 3-2, box-and-1, triangle-and-2, 1-3-1), and play them well. Plus we were all well-drilled as shooters.
There are many problems with the travel system. You are correct that kids arms do breakdown when exposed to that. You are correct that some coaches are terrible.
But if my younger kid didn't do travel, he would have quit baseball years ago.
I was a little league "helper coach." Despite my love for the game (a deep one), i never played LL but my youngest son did, so of course since its all volunteer, i'd help out. I had no training - I was just a dad helping the coach. Many of the volunteers are in that boat. Many may have played in college/hs etc like his coach did, but not I or most of the dads, most of us are pickup-softball level or worse but love the game. My son ended up "retiring" from LL because the experience wasn't dissimilar to what you describe - where the focus falls onto the uber-physically talented kids and the rest are somewhat ignored or humored at best. It wasn't fun, it was time consuming and expensive and there was lots of overall disappointment. But not succeeding in LL or having a bad experience has little to do with being a fan of MLB - these things can coexist separately.
That's a good point about how those things can coexist separately. I really like hockey even though I never played (except for one ill-fated year in kindergarten).
Although, I do feel like I have a stronger connection to baseball which I did play a lot longer. But that could be from a lot of different factors more than just having played it.
He regularly plays OOTP, listens to baseball podcasts and follows a team in a different state that I never rooted for.
My older plays travel, does strength and conditioning for baseball in his off time. Can't sit and watch more than an inning of baseball that he isn't playing in
I coached youth baseball (was never official LL) for about 8 years, until my son chose fencing over baseball at around age 14. It was less fun each season. The six and seven year olds were a blast to teach. But as they got older they listened less, their parents became worse to deal with, etc. Few of those kids were playing catch with dad or mom, hitting whiffle balls in the backyard, or doing anything to get better at the game beyond the six 1-hour practices we had before opening day. This was an upscale far out suburban neighborhood where both parents worked and had 1-hour commutes each way, so I get why nobody had time for baseball. And being the early 2000s, the kids certainly were not going to be free to organize pick up games on their own like we did in the 70s.
Little League baseball is a disaster. So boring. Lots of kids standing around, waiting for a ball that isn't gonna be hit to them. Both practices and games.
With soccer and basketball, even if the kids are inexperienced or lack talent, they can still run around and have fun. With baseball, kids gotta have some sort of base skill level to make the game resemble a baseball game.
I can sort of attest to this being my LL experience in the 90's. My coaches in Little League were mostly useless. They were happy to have the kids who showed up with latent athletic talent. They did not know what to do with kids like me who were just happy to be there. There is a TON of standing around, especially in Ye Olde Right Field. I recall one time when the ball was finally hit to me and I basically just froze out there. The ball dropped and my coach just screamed at me. Pretty sure I was mentally done after that.
Additionally, they recognized that I had a pretty good arm for a kid my age so they wanted me to pitch. Only they gave me ZERO coaching on how to pitch and threw me into a game where I promptly walked a couple batters and gave up an RBI blast, thus ending my pitching career. I don't recall a single conversation with a coach after that about what was wrong, what I could have done better, etc. I quit baseball after that season, joined a bowling league and never looked back.
It’s sad. These days kids only do activities they’re great at, that will one day open doors for them. No one would ever play baseball for fun, for a social outlet, for learning rules and teamwork. If you can’t get a scholarship someday, if it’s not a good network, why bother.
I coached for a few years because I knew how to fill out the paperwork. I did play in hs, but that was a looong time before and I am not a teacher, which is more important that "knowing the game" at that age
There is a distinction in leagues. Capital "L" Little League" is an organization. they pool all players and draft. "Pony" is another organization. they require (with exceptions) teams join already made. I don't know how babe ruth or cal ripkin work.
My youth baseball was fine, it was a local rec and park league that was eaten up by "Little League" as I was in college.
I did stop coaching my youngest by 10 because he was better than I ever was. He is in travel now and much happier. My oldest was never good at sports and quit. He is much happier now.
My point is your milage may vary on what is a good baseball experience and what isn't.
I saw this dynamic with myself and my little brother.
My hometown has a very robust youth baseball scene with beautiful facilities and I played on a Pony League team coached by my dad, who was an excellent instructor and fun coach.
I loved playing ball and did it through high school and coached for a while in my early twenties, first kids through MLB’s RBI program and then they tagged me to be a summer ball coach for high schoolers (for some weird reason high school coaches aren’t allowed to coach their teams in summer league in Texas).
My younger brother was a better youth baseball player than me and got recruited to the local little league all star team and hated it. The coach was a local small business tyrant (recently indicted for financial crimes) who didn’t know a lick about baseball and was an asshole, but he geared out the team in expensive stuff.
My brother ended up dropping baseball for tennis in high school and never regretted it.
Baseball is such a technical sport that it’s impossible to get good at it only going to little league practice or whatever, so the decline in participation does worry me a bit for the future. Most of my friends (early 30s) are baseball obsessed, but only a handful of us know how to throw a baseball and could teach it to our progeny.
Huge fan of Westlake and his darker alter ego Richard Stark. I used to say that the day any new Dortmunder novel came out should be a national holiday.
That point's already in my rearview mirror.
Me, too 🏴☠️🏴☠️🏴☠️
Full disclosure: I will probably spring for the radio package so I'm all skull and no crossbones. Plus, I always enjoy listening to the local spots - one of the best ways left to eavesdrop on everyday America!
To go along with that there is a special place in my heart for local business radio spots. Give me all your Cinelli Scrap Metals and Thompson Paint Supply's. Slingin' tires in a Cincinnati suburb? Got a multi-generational taqueria in Houston? Scummy lawyer business? I want to hear about 'em.
Amen. Whenever one of them says "tell 'em you heard it on TEAM radio" I'm always tempted to call long distance and do just that ;)
What is Manfred’s long term plan? Does he have one?
Hence all the rock walls. Even in the middle of woods that used to be farmland once upon a time.
One time when my car was in for an oil change, instead of waiting in the waiting room I went for a walk along streets I usually drive on. One of them goes under the Wilbur Cross and passes some vacant lots near the parkway. Off in the woods, there were clumps of daffodils along some abandoned stone walls. This was right in town.
Had no idea about the yearly In Memoriam video. Very respectfully done.
Same, although I'm a little concerned about the number of those players I've seen play. It's like I'm getting old or something. Beats the alternative I guess.
As for TV, I can’t watch my Twins because Bally Sports North and YouTube TV can’t come to an agreement
So, MLB tv for me and Go Mets
Killing the sport market by market
Same in KC, but I won’t even pay for YouTube TV. I see these little packages as at least an upgrade over Bally, because I happen to have prime, I will watch 1 Royals game (until the World Series, am I right?!)
Until then, I got a radio in my kitchen that will do just fine.
I share YouTube with 4 other people so it’s relatively reasonable but I get you. It’s just so impossible to get any sports league without multiple subscriptions (if one thinks baseball is bad, try following soccer, dear Gandalf is it split between an infinite amount of pay services)
same boat with Cleveland. It's either cable or AT&T owned DirectTV streaming. Both are over priced and suck. But hey, the Dolans got their money for the broadcast rights and don't care whether or not fans can watch the games.
You can watch any team
You want as long as it’s not in your city
Same here in Tampa. Frontier and Bally sports can't reach an agreement. So no Rays or Lightning. I am also not gonna renew my MLBTV this year. I will tune in for what ever is broadcast with my current subscriptions. Luckily, Baseball of all the sports, translates the best for radio broadcasts.
Exactly this. I'm very pissed at Bally for basically setting up a local monopoly with Comcast. Half the reason I switched to YT Tv was because they had almost all the sports networks that I desired. Sinclair can go eff off in general, not just for the way they're managing the regional sports.
Correct. I have no desire to give Sinclair one penny.
I really do wonder about how long the current money making strategy can hold. Baseball thinks gambling can make up the revenue and I’m sure they’re right. But how much money do gambling forward sports like boxing and horse racing make?
Why give any of these corporations your time or money when every baseball game is very readily available with a very quick stream search? Sinclair sure ain't being ethical to you, so why bother being ethical in consuming the broadcast they won't let you watch?
Honestly, I am tempted to subscribe to Peacock, which would be way, way cheaper than getting cable. Peacock has a pretty good selection of movies, anyway.
BeReal sounds ghastly. But so does most of social media.
Anyway, opening day, and I really do hope it rains in all those places because if you planned to go today and had to change all your plans for no reason, or worse can't go tomorrow, it really sucks. The starting pitcher for the Mets will be Tylor Megill (whose name still sounds like a character from a fantasy novel). I saw his first start in person, so i have a mild vested interest in seeing him make it big. He projects to be a back end starter, so this might his only opening day, but you never know. We'll see if he goes more than five innings, and then get to see the Mets' biggest weakness in action as that bullpen looks very suspect. Let's go Mets!
Agreed. Their bullpen was already suspect when they traded away a solid innings guy in Castro for a lesser lefty.
I am convinced that the Alderson philosophy is "starters go seven, let's build a rotation." Which is how I like the game best but is clearly done for except in his head and on his team.
Mike Rizzo subscribes to the same philosophy.
Should be a high scoring weekend. Maybe let's just let Alonso and Soto have a home run derby.
I’d subscribe for Girls5Eva alone.
re: OK, groomer
I'm not sure if the Republicans will *never* push back. As we saw with Madison Cawthorn, they will call out the crazy... but only when it crosses a line. What's that line? When it might be actually true.
John Oliver covered this on Sunday, and for those of you who missed it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wrgYozAujxY&ab_channel=JohnOliverTV
The line is arbitrary and applied in context when there are exacerbating circumstances. I pretty much tell anyone who decides to vote for that party that if they care about anyone who is marginalized (I've said it once that "if that person has a month in which they're celebrated") they cannot logically vote for Republicans.
They push back when the crazy reflects poorly on them. As voters become more polarised, they’ll be more likely to cheer team elephant or donkey.
Happy opening day!
I didn't realize that I could watch the Apple TV games for free. I'll have to figure out how Apple TV works.
I think you'll need jumper cables, two potatoes, and obviously, an apple.
This seems to be the main page for baseball: https://tv.apple.com/us/room/major-league-baseball/edt.item.623c06a6-62cc-4d28-953b-444380dcd9b6
You'll need an apple account but it didn't make me subscribe
Curious to see how long BeReal goes without the lead rapper from Cypress Hill going after that name.
That’s B-Real. TOTALLY different
All that matters is that today is opening day. Look beyond any other nonsense and enjoy the 12 year old version of you that'd wear the baseball patch jacket, your lee jeans, your favorite team hat and your keds sneakers, go out into your yard and hit some fungos into the air!
I think I hit a fungo approaching the Tappan Zee Bridge a couple weeks ago. Had to get my car washed.
Randy Johnson relates.
In Memoriam video brought a few tears to mt eyes. Thinking of RemDawg today and everyday.
Ready for Opening Day! I’ll be in Kauffman hauling ass to the team store after Bobby’s first at-bat to buy his jersey! (Yes, you cant purchase his jersey until he comes up to an official at-bat. Ridiculous)
Baseball is dying. Network TV is dying. Cable TV is dying. Bookstores are dying. Music industry is dying. Newspapers are dying. Hound dog howling. Bullfrog croaking. Everything is dying.
(What's funny is that one of those mentioned above is an industry that has steady increase in record income each year over the past 25 years (with very few exceptions))
Which industry?
17 consecutive years of record revenue. https://www.forbes.com/sites/maurybrown/2019/12/21/mlb-sees-record-107-billion-in-revenues-for-2019/?sh=2764fce45d78
Everything is dying. But one of them is lying.
Also dying: me and you and everyone we know…just hopefully at a fairly slow rate.
All just a matter of degrees, imo
When you think about it, various cells in our bodies are dying and being regenerated all the time. A red blood cell only lives for 120 days before a macrophage eats it and a new baby one takes its place.
Yesss. Feed my pretties, feed on your predecessors!
😄
Craig made that point. Measured in money, MLB is a huge success. Measured in number of people interested? Both revenue models have pluses and minuses.
Did anyone see that $151 hamburger the Atlanta baseball team is selling ?
I wouldn’t buy it, but if someone gave it to me, I’d eat it.
To be fair, I’d say that about a lot of things
There’s also a $25,000 upgrade that includes a championship ring. I wish I was kidding
https://www.ajc.com/things-to-do/atlanta-restaurant-blog/new-food-options-at-braves-truist-park-include-a-151-burger-with-lobster-tail/MWAWRKUBLBDDFDMU6QTRX6DDUE/
I’m confused by the “BIG RiBI Sandwich” which Is described as a yummy-sounding rack of ribs….yet it’s also a sandwich. Do people in Georgia just chew right through bones?
Hahahaha, they may
Might the move to Peacock games be related to current (fenway group) and future (Ricketts & Chelsea/who knows who else) ownership of Premier League teams?
I roll my eyes so hard at every columnist who cites declining Little League participation for why baseball is a dying sport (despite the long streak of record revenues every year). Little League participation is declining because parents and kids have realized that it's not a good baseball experience for most people. Most coaches are mediocre to outright bad, and half the kids don't want to be there. I love baseball more than almost anything on earth, and at the height of my obsession with it, I walked away from playing for three whole years because my experience was so bad in my age-11 and age-12 years in Little League (a nepotistic coach who let his untalented son pitch and play shortstop, who ignored two-thirds of the team almost entirely, and didn't do anything about bullying). There are better baseball experiences for kids out there than Little League.
Totally agree with this. I also blame the shift to focus on traveling programs. We've got 9-year-olds in my town grinding out an intense summer schedule and fighting through arm injuries before going to fall baseball and then winter training programs. The funny thing is, playing traveling doesn't have anything to do with talent - anyone can play as long as the check clears.
It doesn't guarantee good coaching either. You still run into the bad, nepotistic coaches. It goes beyond baseball, too, to all the sports around here. We're really going to turn kids off sports at the expense of "development".
When I was coaching my son's youth basketball teams we were pretty successful because I was the only coach in the county teaching man-to-man help defense. Everybody else just threw the kids into a 2-1-2 zone and dared the opponent to make a jump shot. Our offense was 75% break away layups off of steals. An AAU coach tried to recruit me to coach his defense by offering my son a slot. My son was last guy off the bench on a county rec team his dad coached!
My basketball experience was much better than my baseball experience because I was fortunate to play for perhaps the (former) best high school coach in the state, who lived three houses away and had a son my age. His son was never more than our sixth man (no nepotism), and by sixth grade we could not only play strong man-to-man but basically every variation of zone (2-3, 3-2, box-and-1, triangle-and-2, 1-3-1), and play them well. Plus we were all well-drilled as shooters.
What happened to doing after school activities for fun?
Can’t get a scholarship for fun!
There are many problems with the travel system. You are correct that kids arms do breakdown when exposed to that. You are correct that some coaches are terrible.
But if my younger kid didn't do travel, he would have quit baseball years ago.
I was a little league "helper coach." Despite my love for the game (a deep one), i never played LL but my youngest son did, so of course since its all volunteer, i'd help out. I had no training - I was just a dad helping the coach. Many of the volunteers are in that boat. Many may have played in college/hs etc like his coach did, but not I or most of the dads, most of us are pickup-softball level or worse but love the game. My son ended up "retiring" from LL because the experience wasn't dissimilar to what you describe - where the focus falls onto the uber-physically talented kids and the rest are somewhat ignored or humored at best. It wasn't fun, it was time consuming and expensive and there was lots of overall disappointment. But not succeeding in LL or having a bad experience has little to do with being a fan of MLB - these things can coexist separately.
That's a good point about how those things can coexist separately. I really like hockey even though I never played (except for one ill-fated year in kindergarten).
Although, I do feel like I have a stronger connection to baseball which I did play a lot longer. But that could be from a lot of different factors more than just having played it.
My older kid is bad at sports. quit early.
He regularly plays OOTP, listens to baseball podcasts and follows a team in a different state that I never rooted for.
My older plays travel, does strength and conditioning for baseball in his off time. Can't sit and watch more than an inning of baseball that he isn't playing in
I coached youth baseball (was never official LL) for about 8 years, until my son chose fencing over baseball at around age 14. It was less fun each season. The six and seven year olds were a blast to teach. But as they got older they listened less, their parents became worse to deal with, etc. Few of those kids were playing catch with dad or mom, hitting whiffle balls in the backyard, or doing anything to get better at the game beyond the six 1-hour practices we had before opening day. This was an upscale far out suburban neighborhood where both parents worked and had 1-hour commutes each way, so I get why nobody had time for baseball. And being the early 2000s, the kids certainly were not going to be free to organize pick up games on their own like we did in the 70s.
Wow, fencing - that's awesome! I wonder if anything that unique is offered within a reasonable radius of my boring 'burb.
I'm old but not THAT old and I sure lament the loss of pick up games. That was the most fun I ever had in sports, just playing with friends.
https://member.usafencing.org/clubs
Little League baseball is a disaster. So boring. Lots of kids standing around, waiting for a ball that isn't gonna be hit to them. Both practices and games.
With soccer and basketball, even if the kids are inexperienced or lack talent, they can still run around and have fun. With baseball, kids gotta have some sort of base skill level to make the game resemble a baseball game.
I can sort of attest to this being my LL experience in the 90's. My coaches in Little League were mostly useless. They were happy to have the kids who showed up with latent athletic talent. They did not know what to do with kids like me who were just happy to be there. There is a TON of standing around, especially in Ye Olde Right Field. I recall one time when the ball was finally hit to me and I basically just froze out there. The ball dropped and my coach just screamed at me. Pretty sure I was mentally done after that.
Additionally, they recognized that I had a pretty good arm for a kid my age so they wanted me to pitch. Only they gave me ZERO coaching on how to pitch and threw me into a game where I promptly walked a couple batters and gave up an RBI blast, thus ending my pitching career. I don't recall a single conversation with a coach after that about what was wrong, what I could have done better, etc. I quit baseball after that season, joined a bowling league and never looked back.
the people I saw coaching here in my area weren't that bad.
It’s sad. These days kids only do activities they’re great at, that will one day open doors for them. No one would ever play baseball for fun, for a social outlet, for learning rules and teamwork. If you can’t get a scholarship someday, if it’s not a good network, why bother.
if only it were more like that ideal...
I don't see that. My experience growing up in the 70s/80s was no one ever played baseball outside of organized leagues.
I did play little "w" wiffle ball, with my brother and two friends (also brothers) but never anything too regular.
There are plenty of kids that still play that aren't "good" but have fun. Like most of them. really.
I coached for a few years because I knew how to fill out the paperwork. I did play in hs, but that was a looong time before and I am not a teacher, which is more important that "knowing the game" at that age
There is a distinction in leagues. Capital "L" Little League" is an organization. they pool all players and draft. "Pony" is another organization. they require (with exceptions) teams join already made. I don't know how babe ruth or cal ripkin work.
My youth baseball was fine, it was a local rec and park league that was eaten up by "Little League" as I was in college.
I did stop coaching my youngest by 10 because he was better than I ever was. He is in travel now and much happier. My oldest was never good at sports and quit. He is much happier now.
My point is your milage may vary on what is a good baseball experience and what isn't.
I saw this dynamic with myself and my little brother.
My hometown has a very robust youth baseball scene with beautiful facilities and I played on a Pony League team coached by my dad, who was an excellent instructor and fun coach.
I loved playing ball and did it through high school and coached for a while in my early twenties, first kids through MLB’s RBI program and then they tagged me to be a summer ball coach for high schoolers (for some weird reason high school coaches aren’t allowed to coach their teams in summer league in Texas).
My younger brother was a better youth baseball player than me and got recruited to the local little league all star team and hated it. The coach was a local small business tyrant (recently indicted for financial crimes) who didn’t know a lick about baseball and was an asshole, but he geared out the team in expensive stuff.
My brother ended up dropping baseball for tennis in high school and never regretted it.
Baseball is such a technical sport that it’s impossible to get good at it only going to little league practice or whatever, so the decline in participation does worry me a bit for the future. Most of my friends (early 30s) are baseball obsessed, but only a handful of us know how to throw a baseball and could teach it to our progeny.
I loved reading Donald Westlake. His mysteries could be so funny, too.
Huge fan of Westlake and his darker alter ego Richard Stark. I used to say that the day any new Dortmunder novel came out should be a national holiday.