Are we really the best baseball country?

crimson, those are very good points. maybe rbi should be redirecting its cash and energies, then, into building affordable batting cages for kids as opposed to running its city leagues (at least that's what they do in boston). or building those cages in boys and girls clubs and community centers that kids can access regularly, thus providing another athletic option for kids instead of flag football and deck hockey.

 

Hell, 10 years ago.

 

You need to be playing baseball every day in the summer, learning the game. Not shooting hoops, not offseason football training.

 

All that said, the American players will get more and better development after this point in their careers than the Koreans will. If that weren't true, then all the Asian players who dominated the American Little League teams in the 1970s and 1980s would have taken over Major League Baseball by now.

It really is about development and depth. Say what you want about top 9 versus top 9, but let's be honest: Our 25th guy will be better than most other countries' 25th guy. Same for 50 v. 50 and 100 v. 100. That's the difference.

 

On the flip side, if scared white parents weren't directing their athletic children in to so-called "white" sports, we'd see far, far, far more American-born basketball and football players.

There are dozens of NBA and NFL-level athletes who have wasted away at baseball, tennis, and swimming camps over the last 30 years; nudged into these things by parents. Some of the most athletic, undisciplined, relying-on-skill-only basketball players on suburban high school basketball teams are 6-5 white kids who have no idea how to play and no idea how to harness all that talent because they were working with a first baseman's glove at age 13 instead of working on an inside-out dribble in a camp.

 

Slim, that post is insane.

 

We would be the best baseball country if Tom Brookens still played.

 

While I agree with the point about lack of baseball players coming out of low-income in urban demographics, my point was that even in snow-white suburbia, there is still more appeal to basketball and football.

How many fans go to a high school football game on a Friday night in the fall vs. a baseball game on Friday afternoon in the spring?

 

About two years ago the NAACP rolled inot the county where I work and demaded that more basketball courts be built.

Not a word about baseball.

 

The Caribbean basin was producing better baseball players 25 years ago. There's nothing new about any of this.