Matthew Futterman of the Wall Street Journal wrote an interesting piece examining the declining rate at which young kids are playing organized baseball. Here are some choice quotes:
“From 2000 to 2009, the latest year for which figures are available, the number of kids aged 7 to 17 playing baseball fell 24%, according to the National Sporting Goods Association….participation in youth tackle football has soared 21% over the same time span, while ice hockey jumped 38%. The Sporting Goods Manufacturing Association, another industry trade group, said baseball participation fell 12.7% for the overall population…studies suggest more people now play soccer in the U.S. than baseball, and lacrosse participation among kids has more than doubled in the last decade. The number of high school lacrosse programs has been growing by about 7% a year”
Now it’s not quite as bad as it seems there. Futterman goes on to state that baseball programs haven’t declined at the high school level and that it’s still the 4th most popular team sport among young people. Still, the facts are pretty alarming.
Futterman goes on to postulate that the pace of the play is one of the problems. Parents like to see sports as “active” exercises and baseball does involve a good amount of sitting around. He adds that MLB isn’t ignoring the problem either.
“Jim Brosnan, an executive vice-president for Major League Baseball, said the recent gloomy studies have prompted the league to order up its own research, which is ongoing, and to review the league’s efforts to grow the game. Since 1989, baseball has spent more than $50 million building and renovating fields and creating baseball leagues, especially in urban areas where kids have been abandoning the sport. It has also opened youth training academies in California and Texas to teach all aspects of the game—even umpiring. “We know if you play as a kid you over-index in your propensity to become a fan,” Brosnan said. “That’s our core right there, so any decline in it is going to get our absolute and full attention.”
That’s good news. As we know though, MLB acknowledging a problem doesn’t always make it go away (this is approximately day 464286 of Selig’s ‘studying the A’s in San Jose’ commission”). What can baseball really do about this though?
In comparison to basketball and football, it’s a lot less glamorous to be an amateur athlete in baseball. College football and college basketball are gigantic entities of their own. No one thinks of college baseball that way. It also takes a lot longer to go from amateur status to the pros in baseball. In college basketball and football, if you’re a good player, you get drafted and you’re in the league already making serious money and playing on TV. Baseball obviously takes a lot longer. Spending time riding around on buses for a few years isn’t quite as alluring as playing basketball in front of 20,000 people at UCLA or 70,000 Tigers fans at LSU and millions more watching at home. Sure you make decent money when you sign, but it’s nothing like the publicity, the contracts or the sponsorships in basketball or football. In 2010, SI’s ranking of the highest paid athletes had Matt Stafford, the Detroit Lions QB, ranked 11th. It was his rookie year. CC Sabathia was tied for 13th.
Obviously it’s in baseball’s best interest to attract as much top talent as possible. Is 50 million dollars over 23 years though really enough? That doesn’t seem like a lot of money for an organization like Major League Baseball. I always think about the way baseball markets its product compared to other sports. The NFL and NBA do a terrific job promoting their younger stars which is something baseball seldom does on a national level. Baseball is in a really great position in 2011 to do this however. The rookie class of 2010 was remarkable. In my opinion, catching up to basketball and football in terms of pushing their brand as a younger, mainstream and contemporary game would do a lot to attract younger kids to the sport. Is that enough though? I’m not sure. I would think that with this new concussion information about football players that some younger athletes would start to shy away from the sport. That may just be naivety on my part however.
It’s a very interesting topic for discussion and one in which I think there are few perfect answers. What does everyone else think?
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baseball is now more of an international sport than a domestic one. The number of players from such unlikely places as Australia has risen dramatically over the past 20 years, while places like Taiwan and Japan and especially Latin America continue to send more and more players to the majors. Soon China will be another source of MLB talent.
Meanwhile, outside of the US and Canada, American style football is far behind baseball. Of course hoops is still the biggest American sports export, but even college ball requires a person to have some height and athleticism-baseball really requires much less of either.
What it boils down to is whether fans will support higher and higher percentages of players from outside the USA. (I think they will.)
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mike Reply:
April 2nd, 2011 at 2:46 pm
Baseball is not international sport! Yes about 10 countries do play it but out of 220 countries in the world its pretty sad. MLB lie’s. When 25% of minor league players come from a tiny island in caribean with a pop. of 9 million people that is proof its not international.
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More kids would be playing baseball if the yankee’s were not stealing their fields to build a tax payer stadium. Only reason baseball hasnt died is because of public and corporate welfare.
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I watched a little league game last year and it was easy to see that about 25% of the kids were being forced to be there. Those kids will never become fans!
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smurfy Reply:
April 3rd, 2011 at 2:35 pm
Yeah, the best is to have plenty of places to play, so kids can have pickup games. In my neighborhood, we were developing, so there were plenty of open lots. There were schools with two backstops each within a block, but we loved our makeshift field, with trees in right, so it was cozy for eight or so to play pitcher’s-hand out.
We were lucky, too, to have a really well supported Little League, with announcers, lots of fans.
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Yeah I think the fact that a lot of talent comes from south of the border is a point the article overlooks as well. MLB has more international talent than the NFL obviously, and probably close to the amount of NBA talent as well.
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Very minor thing but the MLB execs name is Tim Brosnan, not Jim.
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