MVN - Most Valuable Network

R.I.P. Sandlot Baseball

If you’re a baseball fan and grew up in the 1980s or 1990s, there’s a good chance you’re familiar with the movie, The Sandlot. The film chronicles a group of young baseball players who spend their summers playing the sport in a rundown field located in their neighborhood, and has become a cult classic of sorts for its portrayal of America’s National Pastime. However, as the AP reports, fewer and fewer Sandlot-like scenes are unfolding across the country.

Sandlot baseball, a slice of American life enjoyed for decades by boys from coast to coast, appears on the verge of extinction.

Many men over 40 remember those summer days when they headed to the park or vacant lot and played ball all day - or until Mom sent word that it was time for dinner.

Nowadays, most neighborhood ball fields sit empty on summer afternoons, the idea of unsupervised play having gone the way of the rotary-dial phones kids once used to round up the fellas for a game.

The reasons for the sandlot’s demise, baseball coaches and sociologists say, go back to the changing family structure, video games, parents’ fear of crime, and the proliferation of organized and so-called “select” teams for more-talented kids.

I think the last item in that list is particularly culpable for the decline of sandlot baseball. Youth sports have become so freakin’ political nowadays that the fun is being lost at the expense of feeding the egos of ultra-competitive parents, pushing children harder than ever to play at an elite level, and adopting a “win at all costs” mindset.

And that’s a darn shame, because if organized baseball leagues became a little more laid back and a little less competitive, maybe the sport would still be fun for kids by the time they’ve reached junior high and high school ages. Maybe then we’d see a revival of the sandlots.

There’s also something to be said for the fact that playground basketball is as popular as ever, despite the rapid decline of sandlot baseball. Something about baseball just isn’t clicking with today’s youth. Perhaps the equipment necessary for each sport might be part of the equation — you need a helluva lot more equipment to get a game of pickup baseball going than a game of pickup basketball. Perhaps it’s because basketball is simply seen as a cooler sport than baseball nowadays.

And now, I conclude this post with quotes from The Sandlot:

• Oh yeah, the Great Bambino. Of course! I thought you said the Great Bambi.
• For-ev-ver! For-ev-ver! For-ev-ver! For-ev-ver!
• You’re killing me, Smalls!

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 19th, 2008 at 7:37 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.