Are there fewer boys of summer?
An email arrived in my inbox over the weekend that said the local American Legion baseball season was to begin Monday night.
Three years ago, high school summertime baseball split into two factions. The local Connie Mack League also will throw out its first pitch soon, if it hasn’t already.
The local American Legion baseball website lists 17 teams in its top two divisions; Connie Mack lists 16. So that would indicate summertime baseball is still a pretty big deal here.
Elsewhere, though, I wonder.
I wonder if Legion ball, or Cornelius McGillicuddy ball, is as big a deal as it was when I was in high school.
The official American Legion Baseball website suggests it’s still going strong — it says there are 5,400 registered teams, which sounds like a lot, and that almost 100,000 youths participate, which also sounds like a lot.
It doesn’t list the numbers for when I was a kid, though.
My guess is that they are down.
I couldn’t find any statistical data at short notice to support it, other than what my eyes tell me. This town has a lot of parks and baseball diamonds, and I rarely see kids using them to choose up sides, not even when the sunshine is cool.
The American Legion website talks about Bob Feller having pitched for Post 313 in Iowa, and Dick Cheney having played for Post 2 in Casper, Wyo., and Tom Brokaw having played Legion ball in South Dakota.
But a lot of people think today’s kids have moved on to other sports, such as football and basketball. Or they have moved on to “Game of War” on their computer and Android devices.
A lot of people saw this coming. One of the most famous sports writers of his day, the great Red Smith, saw it coming a long time ago, not long after Bob Feller was throwing high, hard ones against the broad side of a barn, which is where I imagined him throwing them.
I have a book of Red Smith’s columns about baseball on my nightstand, because one is never too old to learn. In the one dated Feb. 24, 1955, Red is driving to spring training in Florida, which is how the old scribes used to do it.
I could almost see him behind the wheel of a Chevy Bel Air or something. He’d probably be wearing a hat. This is how Red begins:
This could be nothing but coincidence, the merely happen-so, but this is how it is. On the drive south this year, not a single game of baseball or softball or one o’cat was seen anywhere along the 1,500-mile route from New York to Miami. Never before, over a period of years that has got much longer than a fellow would care to mention, had this happened …
Red said there usually would be snow on the ground when he left New York, and then he’d often run into fog. But by the time he got down into the Carolinas and Georgia, he’d always see kids playing baseball.
The only reason baseball is our national sport, instead of cricket or soccer, is that practically all American males play baseball or its equivalent — stickball on the city streets, softball on the schoolyards — when they are young. When they grow up they go watch the game, not so much to enjoy the thrill of appreciation that anybody must feel seeing a Phil Rizzuto scoop up a grounder and get rid of the ball in one fluid motion, but more because the spectacle restores their youth, warms them with nostalgic memories of the fun they had as kids.
It follows that if the kids aren’t playing ball now, they’re not likely to flock to the big league parks in great numbers tomorrow. Maybe they are playing, but they weren’t on the route down here. Kids were shooting baskets on the playgrounds and in one lot there was a football game going on, but not a baseball was seen.”
On a recent “Real Sports With Bryant Gumbel,” the comedian Chris Rock — a New York Mets fan of some enthusiasm — said how baseball was dying in the cities, that whereas baseball used to be 20 percent African American, it is now 8 percent, and that the Giants won last year’s World Series with nary a black player who was born in the United States.
No Mays, no McCovey, no Bonds, be it Bobby or Barry. No Jim Ray Hart. Not even an Eddie Milner to come off the bench in the late innings.
Chris Rock had statistics. He said participation in Little League is down 20 percent since 1995, World Series viewership is down 50 percent, and that the average age of a baseball fan is 53.
Perhaps it’s time baseball players who hit home runs should start flipping their bats high into the air, he said, as they do in the Korean League — without fear of reprisal from the pitcher the next time they come to bat.
That might be a story for another day.
On this day, when I sat down to write, the skies had turned the color of a baseball road jersey on a hot, humid day in St. Louis. Then thunder claps. Then rain started pouring down in a heavy fashion.
As the great Red Smith wrote, maybe it was merely happen-so. But I didn’t see any way they were going to be able play those American Legion openers.
Las Vegas Review-Journal sports columnist Ron Kantowski can be reached at rkantowski@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0352. Follow him on Twitter: @ronkantowski.
