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Originally Posted by SanDiegoSteve
First, I don't recall baseball ever beating out football for ratings. That's not breaking news. But I don't know what playgrounds are like in your area, but out here I see pickup games played by kids all the time. Stickball, Wallball, 3 Flys Up, Pepper, regular hardball, or whatever. There is the world famous annual OMBAC Over-The-Line tournament (played with softballs, but by baseball fans and players) that grows in popularity every year.
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There are not doing it anymore. Not a bunch of kids all by themselves with no dids around. I do see kids all the time shooting at a basket or playing some kind of basketball game at a park or in a recreational center. I see more adults playing softball or 16' softball than I ever seen any kids doing this.
When I was a kid we played all kinds of baseball type games before all this organized baseball became popular.
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Originally Posted by SanDiegoSteve
Baseball is still alive and well here on the West Coast. Sure, when I was a kid I knew who all the top stars were. I also knew who all the everyday players were. I had shoeboxes full of baseball cards and those little metal discs that were so cool. I could quote stats all day. That was a different time then. There is so much more for kids to do these days and not as much emphasis is being placed on the traditions of the game. Today's youth doesn't give a crap about who Willie Mays or Joe DiMaggio were. But the last I checked, there are still millions of adult baseball fans who have been fans all their lives, and they still consider baseball to be the American Pastime. So many people live and breath baseball. The kids who don't care haven't taken over anything yet.
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And it is alive in Texas and Florida and even Louisiana where it is warm most of the year. No arguing that. But in the Midwest Basketball is clearly king and many kids play football and basketball and never want to play baseball.
And my contention was not about the adults. But there is going to come a time when the people who grew up watching baseball are not going to be around anymore. When I was a kid a lot of African-Americans wanted to play baseball. Now it is rare to even see a team with a lot of Black kids even want to play baseball. Hispanics are playing more baseball than African-American kids and in some cases the African-American kids are some of the better athletes and would easily transition to baseball. ESPN did a story about college conferences like the MEAC and the SWAC which are all Traditionally Black Institutions and most of them hardly had a single Black kid on those teams. And these are schools were well over 95% are Black. I have been to HS where the entire Basketball Team is Black and the entire baseball team is white.
Peace