There’s a war over youth baseball fields going on throughout this country. You’ll rarely read about this war in the local newspaper, but it is being waged in a number of communities. It’s a threat to our country. You might be surprised to discover the war raging in your own backyard.
The picture attached to this article symbolizes the war over baseball fields. What you see resembles a bomb crater, but it’s really a pitching mound that had a rude introduction to a backhoe. You see, there was a travel league using this baseball field and the school district owner wasn’t very happy about it. The travel league was undermining the efforts of the town’s recreational program by luring players away thereby threatening the existence of the town’s program. The school district didn’t want to say “no” to the travel league’s use of the field because it would upset the travel parents in the district. So the district found another way to say “no” by sabotaging its own baseball field. Yes, it dug up the pitching mound and claimed it was doing a field repair project, though nothing else on the field was ever touched except for the mound. The mound sat like this all season long and effectively prevented the travel league from using the field. It wasn’t until the end of the summer travel season that the field’s mound was repaired.
When private travel teams seek access to community baseball fields, things can get ugly. Read this article here and the comments about a baseball fields dispute a few years back in Barnegat Township, New Jersey.
It’s All About the Field
The future of youth baseball (as run by volunteers in local communities under the umbrella of non-profit leagues) all comes down to securing a baseball field.
Most of the epic battles in youth baseball politics involve access to a field. Sure, parents might spend a great deal of political effort promoting their child’s baseball merit and their rightful placement on any all star or travel team. This is probably the most heated political argument in most local baseball leagues across this country year after year. Here’s the rub: teams are readily replaceable; fields are not.
You’ll always need a field to play baseball on and access to a field is more and more difficult every day. This is where the battle lines are being drawn all around the country. Many non-profit, all volunteer baseball leagues have access to baseball fields that are grandfathered in going back to the 1950s when the likes of Little League and Babe Ruth first swept the nation making baseball available to every boy—regardless of skill level— who wanted to play. Later, this idea spread to include girls too.
The for-profits want these baseball fields or at least access to them!
The Professional Youth Sports Industry Gets Stronger Every Day
On one side of the war, is the surging professionalization of youth sports.
You can see this trend in many parents. Their short sightedness knows no bounds in pampering and preparing their children for a shot at a professional sports career. Parents by and large don’t know that 97.5% of high school players will not get any athletic scholarship money. They don’t know that the average received per year by any player is a little less than $6,000 per year, not a full ride. How do I know that they don’t know? Simple, this linked article gets the highest number of views on this site. The article clearly shows that the chances of getting a full ride baseball scholarship are between slim and none. Every day parents and players find this article and click it like crazy, like it’s some kind of revelation.
But you can’t be too hard on parents. The simple fact of the matter is that there is nobody with a vested interest to tell them the real deal, though I know there are some parents who don’t want to hear or can’t hear the message.
Dig a little deeper into the problem, and you’ll discover the for-profit interests—the travel teams, the rogue leagues, and the showcase promoters—who will charge ridiculous fees to cater to the stratospheric expectations of parents and players alike. They want parents and players to believe in the dream because that’s how they line their pockets.
Then there are the corporate sponsors who affiliate with these outfits and subsidize them, thus adding more fuel to fire the dream.
And let’s not forget the media circus that’s now embraced youth sports as a market. They have gone overboard by creating networks aimed at exclusively covering youth sports alone. The media perpetuates the dream too.
The for-profit interests want to take the youth baseball fields or, at the very least, they want access to them. A field is an expensive capital outlay and rogue for-profit leagues or teams will happily take the fields from passive volunteer organizations. They’ll dress themselves up as non-profits and say anything to get a field. I’ve seen it happen; I’ve seen local governments go along with it without asking any questions.
What’s at Risk
The stakes are high. What’s at risk goes to the core of our great country. If we let the for-profit interests take over youth baseball, the war will be lost and future generations of children will be without an outlet. You see, the for-profit interests often times provide baseball to a select few while they have the impact crushing the enrollment numbers of community leagues and causing them to go belly-up.
Read this article here to see what I’m talking about. If this continues, baseball will become another lost outlet for youth. We can’t afford to lose any more positive outlets.
Once the moneyed interests become entrenched in youth sports, they will never willingly get off their gravy train and there will be nobody around who will have a vested interest to unseat them. It will be over. Recreational youth sports will be lost forever to communities. Sure, there will be kids playing baseball, but only those whose parents who can afford the skyrocketing costs.
If you are like me and have witnessed a generation of kids grow up indoors except for the availability of youth sports, you should be very concerned. Kids need positive outlets or they will find outlets of another variety. School districts and local governments across this country are reducing the number of those outlets due to fiscal concerns. It’s up to families and their communities to fight against the for-profit interests to preserve community sports. It’s battle time: the for-profit interests versus our communities throughout this country. It’s time to step up to the plate now or say goodbye to baseball as a youth outlet.
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My upcoming novel, Saving Babe Ruth, is a story about a battle over a baseball field and one family’s fight against the moneyed interests. Click here to read more. It’s set to be released in 2014. Sign up to be on my mail list for alerts on more blog posts, the novel, or special offers. Get ready for Saving Babe Ruth !
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