That’s unfortunate to hear. Our local baseball and softball leagues are booming. No idea why because I agree; I see far fewer baseball hats/jerseys on kids than basketball and football. Might just be a lot of local variation though. Our facilities are newish and quite large so they’ve been attracting a lot of regional and east coast tournaments. Parents keep signing their kids up because it’s a nice place to go and see people from town.
I think a key factor is the skill/interest loss caused by missing seasons/practice due to COVID. It is really hard to be 11 years old and miss a year of baseball and then come back to play competitively. A significant number of eligible kids did not come back to our little league. That group is now entering high school and I've seen other local high school teams (in Maine) not being able to field a freshman team. The other factor for younger kids is travel baseball, which sucks, generally, and is damaging as it pulls kids from local leagues. Similarly, the American Legion teams were a huge deal in the 80s and 90s but have been almost completely replaced by pay-to-play options, with the only active legion teams in the more rural areas of the state.
No, what I’m trying to (apparently unsuccessfully) point out is that “baseball is dying” takes are as old as baseball itself.
https://www.nfhs.org/articles/nfhs-releases-first-high-school-sports-participation-survey-in-three-years/
MLB is profitable because teams have too much (too long) control of young players with low salaries and because there are so many games, not because it's really that healthy.
It's not dying. The fan base of MLB has long skewed older than other major pro sports. It's the nature of the game. Yes, baseball was more nationally popular in the 70s and 80s when a lot of folks here were kids. But so was tennis, boxing, college basketball, etc. We've gone over the reasons ad nauseum.
I was involved in Florida youth baseball for 15 years. The bifurcation of baseball accelerated even in my time. Overall fewer kids, but the drop out numbers were sad. Kids would start in the 7-8 year old leagues and less than half would go on to little league. My town had ONE babe ruth team at the end - it began with an 8 team league. The irony is the number of SERIOUS baseball players was pretty stable - and by serious I mean those on AAU teams who had paid coaches and who traveled the state.
I keep saying this on this site — that Oakland is an incredible place to see a ballgame — and people keep fighting me about it. Could the park itself be nicer? Sure. But building a ballpark and a multiuse arena at a multimodal transit hub that you were building to serve your airport is just a good idea.
I'm with you. I love baseball and I spend money to watch it on TV. My kids are small, but they still play Little League and are in the room when the games are on. It's bizarre to me that someone says they don't watch the games because they're not willing to pay for it and then blame the kids for not being interested.
Great points. And these are all macro issues that don't have much of anything to do with the core topic of this thread.
Just to add to this - it's everything you said AND the fact that it's been a multi-year trend.
I don't see how they can be disinterested in an asset that's worth $5 billion or more. I think it's more that they've committed themselves to doing things a certain way-rebuilding the farm and controlling payroll-but this entails a lot of risk of turning off the fans.
WMass/Northern Ct was/is a tough market to get into as the sports allegiances tend to overlap between Boston-based and NY-based teams. My dad and older brother never became Patriots fans because they both grew up as Giants' fans.
Henry doesn't actually have the final say anymore, though, and I think this is an important point most Red Sox fans and the media miss. When FSG brought RedBird Capital in as an investor, Henry's share of FSG dropped below 50%. He's still the largest shareholder, and together with Werner they can control the direction of the group if they're aligned, but he's no longer solely in charge of the Red Sox, and it's quite possible that RedBird invested with certain expectations of financial returns that FSG now has to meet.
I am probably going to start a thread about it because it is insane. I wanted to put some space to make sure it wasn't emotional in the moment but it is insane they are leaving that spot for the Trop.
Yes, the Munson-Nixon Line lies somewhere in Connecticut.
Drinking promos are usually going to be at night. Higher adult to child ratio of patrons at night.
I read this article, which gets into the issues that are separate from the fanbase stuff, awhile back and thought of it when reading your post:
I grew up playing Nashua South Cal Ripken in the late 90s and early 2000s when it was booming, and umpired throughout high school, and it's unfortunate that interest in youth baseball has shrunk to the point where there is only one league in the entire city. I remember there being a lot of interest and discussion about the Red Sox when I was playing, but that was during peak Red Sox fever and when the team had a bunch of highly marketable stars in Pedro, Nomar, Manny, Ortiz, etc. Today's team is just not that interesting and other than Devers has no fun to watch marketable stars, if you'd even consider him fun to watch, so it doesn't surprise me that the kids don't give a shit. Watching the Sox is a snooze-fest.
I did not, I don't remember where I first heard it from about 20 years ago. Someone on SOSH probably.
Bernie Madoff wished he had come up with something so easily profitable as travel baseball.
I don't know the exact numbers, but we are beyond pre-covid numbers as well. I think high schools are still feeling that impact as those impacted kids filter up and through.
Not sure why this matters, but they just had this same exact ticket & drink promo on May 2 for the 1:35 PM game against the Giants.
The New York Times credits Sports Illustrated with coining the term: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/04/23/upshot/24-upshot-baseball.html
Good find, not surprising that if someone thought of Trot N, it was while he was still around. Looks like it was Steve Rushin’s term, now married to Rebecca Lobo.
Living in Fairfield County now I think there’s a decent chunk of the population who grew up in other, Red Sox-hospitable, parts of CT that moved here. Along with folks who grew up in the rest of New England. Its definitely Yankees/Giants/Rangers country but the Sox/Pats/Bruins fans are numerous.
Plenty of people, probably mostly in Game Threads of games in Oakland. Who knows how many people were just basing it on reputation and it not being the world's most telegenic park.
I haven't fought and don't wish to fight @nvalvo but the Oakland Coliseum is one of the biggest shitholes I've ever seen a game at. What a dump. It was about 20 years ago, but I can't imagine it's gotten nicer since.
I wouldn't take anything related to that as necessarily indicative of baseball: The American Legion is crashing in general, membership is less than 60% what it was in the 1990s, and over the past decade or so it's dropped precipitously.
A shithole perhaps, but an extremely affordable shithole in a US city with like a top-three combination of climate, cuisine, and culture.
Great article. Call me old fashioned, but as I know have two kids that are playing Little League, travel ball is killing youth baseball.
Thanks or the response and sorry for waiting so long to respond (been busy).
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I mean I literally quoted this in what I just posted:
I think SportsChannel was eventually included in regular cable in the 90s prior to the Whalers' departure.
