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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13 Responses to Baseball’s Decline
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TIQ IQ
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.)
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.
I agree with Steve. Baseball isn’t really an international sport. The sport only has strong popularity in a handful of nations outside the US. Baseball is in strong decline in both Puerto Rico and Canada. It is also dying in Mexico. Even in baseball-mad Venezuela, young people are quickly discovering soccer (as the national soccer team is having newfound success and is poised to qualify for their first FIFA World Cup.) I wish Major League Baseball would wake up.
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.
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!
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.
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.
Very minor thing but the MLB execs name is Tim Brosnan, not Jim.
Before I suggest what I think is one way to reinvigorate youth baseball, I want to comment on the issue discussed in the article: whether or not kids are losing interest in baseball.
I think there is little doubt that America’s youth is losing interest in baseball, and that that will have ramifications for the future of MLB. People tend to watch sports that they have played, and thus can relate to. Look at the staggering lack of interest in the U.S. in the World Baseball Classic when it was last played – there were many articles written at the time concerning the lack of interest in the U.S. Conversely, look at the high level of interest in the World Cup last summer, the TV broadcasts of which went prime time in the U.S.
Foreign-born players already make up approximately 50% of MLB’s minor leagues, a significant increase over past years, and the percentage is only going to increase. One of the things that the Chicago Cubs organization was most excited about this past offseason was the purchase of land in the Dominican Republic to build a baseball-training facility for Latin American prospects.
As more and more foreign-born players play MLB, interest in baseball amongst the youth of this country will continue to decline. Why? KIds simply won’t have the role models to relate to when the stars of the game are mostly foreigners instead of graduates of their local high schools.
Those of you who follow Major League Baseball know that new rules were implemented a few years ago to protect Major League players by expelling and suspending pitchers who purposely throw at a batter. As a result, a Major League pitcher can now be thrown out of a game – and possibly suspended – if, in the umpire’s opinion, he purposely throws at even one batter, regardless of whether the batter is hit or not.
What this essentially means is that getting hit with the ball is no longer considered a part of the game by Major League Baseball – witness the probably 300+ pound Prince Fielder trying to storm the LA Dodger locker room after a game last season to confront the pitcher who had hit him with a pitch. The only thing that makes that story different is that Prince Fielder didn’t immediately charge the pitcher after being hit – as Major Leaguers many times do even if the pitcher just comes close to hitting them.
While simply changing the rules may work at the Major League level – where, prior to the new rules, many, if not most of the batters hit by pitches were hit purposely by the pitcher – it won’t work for youth baseball since hopefully all of the batters hit by pitches at that level are not hit purposely.
In other changes, Major League Baseball now allows the use of elbow protectors because – like the ribs of an eight-to-twelve-year-old child who has not yet developed any muscle mass in the torso – the elbow doesn’t have any muscle over it to soften the impact of a baseball. Major League Baseball also allows the use of rib pads to protect a player’s torso. Josh Hamilton of the Texas Rangers wore rib pads during last year’s World Series.
So while Major League Baseball has adapted, youth baseball hasn’t, and, since young batters and pitchers have not yet developed the physical coordination of older children and adults, young batters are hit by a pitch much more frequently than Major Leaguers.
Please note that my comments that follow address what are called the ‘house leagues’ in youth baseball, and not travel baseball.
Some people make the argument that the youth game has changed – and needs to adapt – because the skill level of young pitchers in the so-called ‘house’ leagues is lower than it was in the past, resulting in more batters getting hit by pitches. Among the reasons given for the drop off in the skill level of young pitchers are 1) the emergence of travel baseball, which takes the better pitchers out of the house leagues, 2) the emergence of first youth soccer, and then lacrosse, both of which siphon away talented athletes, 3) the relatively recent trend of many of the usually more athletic kids concentrating on one sport year around, 4) the recent implementation of pitch count limits, which results in more, possibly less-skilled kids pitching than in the past, and 5) the demise of so-called sandlot baseball, where kids could hone their pitching skill outside of formal practices or games.
One of the possible reasons for the decline in popularity of youth baseball is that children in the United States simply have more recreational options than children in many other countries, and when children are presented with more recreational options, those options viewed less favorably lose out. Is baseball viewed less favorably than other recreational options?
The following is quoted from an article on the Internet titled “Little League Losing its Grip on Kids” by Los Angeles Times Staff Writer Dave McKibben:
“A summer ritual will unfold next week in Williamsport, Pa., when the 58th Little League World Series (news – web sites) gets underway. Sixteen teams from nine countries will compete for the most prestigious championship in youth sports.
But in the United States, where the game was born, fewer young people will notice. Coaches and youth sports organizations say a lot of American kids are losing interest in baseball.
“Every year, it gets tougher and tougher to keep kids on the field,” said Mike Hirschman, administrator of the Little League in Northern Delaware that appeared in last year’s World Series. Even with that success, Hirschman has struggled to recruit players.
“It’s really getting disheartening,” he said. “I don’t think Little League will ever fade away. But kids are just spread so thin. There’s so many more options.”
Following is a segment from a PBS report by Jeffrey Kaye in which he interviewed John Young, who started Major League Baseball’s RBI program, which stands for ‘Reviving Baseball in Inner Cities’:
JEFFREY KAYE: “RBI’s founder is former major league scout John Young, who started the program in south L.A. in 1989. Young says even the toughest inner-city kids can be intimidated by baseball.”
JOHN YOUNG: “The toughest thing to do in sports is hit a baseball. So many kids that haven’t played are afraid of the ball. We get kids who come into this program, they are kids from tough neighborhoods– they see a lot of gang violence, you know, tough kids– but they are afraid of baseball. They are afraid of being hit by a baseball.”
Getting back to my point on reinvigorating youth baseball, as the above quote infers, I attribute the declining participation level and low retention rate in youth baseball to the fear of getting hit by the ball while batting – and the poor batting skills that result from that fear – especially if a player has been hit previously. There can be little doubt that the low batting averages that result from the poor batting skills – that result from the fear of being hit with the ball – slow down the game of baseball, making it less exciting and, thus, hurting youth baseball’s appeal.
To have a kid continually fail not only lessens the appeal of the game for everyone – the players, coaches, parents and spectators – it lowers a kid’s self esteem, and who needs that from a game being played for fun.
It’s interesting that in lacrosse – which has exploded onto the youth sports scene in sections of the country recently – many of the players, particularly at the youth level, wear protective gear on their torso – and seem to not only not mind it, but get a kick out of it. The wearing of protective gear must be a relatively recent development in lacrosse, because I doubt that the American Indians who started the game wore protective gear – of course that ball was probably no where near as hard as a lacrosse ball is nowadays. Regarding the wearing of protective gear for the torso in lacrosse, witness the following copied from a youth lacrosse-oriented website:
Scott said lacrosse, as a spring sport, has a lot of (to) offer children who don’t want to take up baseball…..He added the pace of the sport is part of its appeal. “The kids like the fact that unlike baseball, this is a moving sport,” he said. “Everybody’s a part of the action. It’s a continuous thing. Guys are running around everywhere. The other thing is the gear. Kids are gear junkies….
In summary, I think that youth baseball would be wise to contemplate changes more profound than the changes that have been made in the past to try to reinvigorate the youth game; otherwise it will probably continue to decline in popularity. I think that protective gear for batters would go a long way toward the goal of reinvigorating youth baseball. Given my impression that youth baseball has been slow to react to the decline in popularity that youth baseball has already experienced, however, I don’t have much faith that youth baseball will have the strategic vision required to effect the changes necessary to reinvigorate the youth game. Jim Gillen
Baseball, like other mature sports, goes through ebbs and flows (2010 8.9% increase on participation). Kids have more options today with longer seasons and more sports and recreational offerings. Kids today tend to play their sport of choice longer and then play a secondary sport for more recreational purposes. This leads to a lack of participation in all major sports. A sport like football has low participation but a large fan base, due to the fact the sport is an event played once a week and is an opportunity to throw a party, gamble or drink on gamedays. NBA baseketball is at an all time low with back to back years of falling attendance and Soccer participation has declined since 1997 according to a Highbeam Business article: “Participation in soccer grew 18.4 percent from 1987 to 1997, with some 18.2 million Americans playing the game at least once in 1997. Participation figures declined from there, reaching 13.6 million in 2009″
Baseball Attendance:
MLB Baseball has been experiencing it’s largest ticket sales and overall revenue the past few years. Plain and simple baseball is financially the strongest it has ever been: MLB and attendance and revenue continues to grow. See article: http://mlb.mlb.com/news/article.jsp?ymd=20101004&content_id=15410876&vkey=news_mlb&c_id=mlb
Youth Baseball Participation Huge Increase in 2010:
Sports Participation #’s in 2010 (see numbers below) Baseball reflects actual numbers of kids (7 yrs – 18yrs Male participants only, who have joined an organized league) whereas, many other sports like volleyball, tennis and basketball are ages 7yrs and up and both female and male participants. A closer look at the participants in other sports reveal different numbers. Because the poll asks people what sports did they participate in at least 1 time during the year the numbers are not true participation. Lets excercise some common sense… Tennis and Volleyball have 10 mil participants? Football has 9.3 million participants compared to baseball at 12.5 million? A look at any football league, in any size town, would more than likely show a much wider participation gap in soccer and baseball compared to football. For instance, in my town of 12k residents, we have approx 90 football players on 4 levels of teams (6yrs – 13yrs) In the same token baseball has 390 participants.
Team Sports Results
On the team sports side, there were large participation gains in the larger sports, but declines in others. Basketball and baseball led the team sports with 10.1% and 8.9% increases respectively in 2010.
Some of the results from Sports Participation in 2010 Series are below:
Basketball – 10.1% increase to 26.9 million participants
Baseball – 8.9% increase to 12.5 million participants
Ice Hockey – 7.9% increase to 3.3 million participants
Football – 4.8% increase to 9.3 million participants
Soccer – 0.3% decrease to 13.5 million participants
Volleyball – 1.0% decrease to 10.6 million participants
Poll Numbers Are Skewed:
1 time participation polls vs true organizations with insurance, league schedules, field permits, league board members, uniforms, etc. The question on these polls is have you participated in any sports in 2010 at least 1 time? If you are a male, age 30, with a family and have a full time job what opportunities would you have to play organized sports? most would find it easier to participate in some sort of pick up game of tennis, running, basketball, volleyball, etc. rather than joining a league to play baseball or softball. With busy schedules who has the time to make the commitment
Baseball Talent
With talent that has never been seen before like Harper and Strasburg and young emerging stars like Hellickson, Mike Trout and others baseball has a bright future.
Reduce the season to 100 games, at most. The season is waaaaay too long right now.
You may have opened my eyes today on this many thanks
Youth sports in America are all on the decline, baseball is taking this biggest hit. The reason money, isn’t it always about the money. Who’s at fault, well we can spread that around, coaches, parents, trainers,sports baseball academies, website entreprepreneaurs,elite teams, travel teams, etc. How many times have you went to a web site and read, if your child does not follow this instruction he will fail, if he/she does not play on a travel or elite team they won’t get the benefit of better competition. Web sites trying to sell you everything under the sun to enhance performance, then the following year it’s out favor and their trying to sell you a new and improved gimic. They play on the fear that parents are not doing everything in their power to enhance the childs experience. The cost of all this and the pulling of players out of community programs, has destroyed the grteates sports feeder program we have ever know “Community Summer Sports Programs”. So summer sports are now located in the suburbs of America and we have eliminated millions of kids in the innter cities and rural areas of America,who can’t afford the higher cost of elite,travel and academy teams. I have to say I am not against tose type of teams, only the timing of when they start. Tenty years ago players would play on the high school teams,then on their community teams and those that could afford it played later in the summer on their travel and elite teams, but coaches wanting more income change the model and started playing earlier in the summer leading us to the mess where in. So does all the new models produce better players and more of them, the answer is no. In 1990 in my state New York, when community baseball was strong, there was 54 players drafted by MLB teams, last year with all these elite and travel teams it was 21, a drop of 100%. We also see this on the rosters of MLB teams, 33% are now foreign born and in the minors the # is 45-50%. So the big question is how do we give every kid a chance to participate in a summer of fun, for a affordable cost.