Monday, April 05, 1999
Baseball pitches to kids
Sport tries to lure young fans to game
BY HOWARD WILKINSON
The Cincinnati Enquirer
If you're down at the ball yard today for Opening Day, feeling old and jaded about the game you grew up with, take a look around you.
Somewhere within sight, you'll see a kid at his or her first Major League Baseball game.
You won't have to look far. Maybe just the seat next to you.
You'll spot this kid right away. Could be a little boy; could be a little girl. Just look for the one with the eyes that look like they're about to pop out of his or her head; the one bouncing up and down, clapping with sticky cotton-candy fingers for everything that moves and yelling at a .237 lifetime hitter to hit a home run.
If you're a baseball fan, you'll recognize this kid right way.
He'll look just like you did, way back when.
But when you were this kid — whether it was watching the Big Red Machine at Riverfront Stadium, Frank Robinson and Vada Pinson at Crosley Field, or Ernie Lombardi and Paul Derringer in an earlier day — chances are, you were hooked on the game we call “the national pastime” forever.
As for this kid you'll see today — well, the jury's still out.
The demographics of base ball have gotten some streaks of gray in the past few decades. For years, Major League Baseball has been trying to lure children and teen-agers back to a game that once was a rite of growing up in America.
In generations past, there was often little else for kids to do on a summer day than find an empty sandlot and play a pickup game of ball, all the while pretending to be their big league heroes at the plate and in the field.
“When we were young, that's what you did; you played ball,” said Ron “Bunny” Warren of North Avondale, a Negro Leagues player of the 1940s. “Now, you drive
around town and you don't see kids doing that like they once did.”
Now, there are the glittering, high-profile stars of the National Basketball Association to grab kids' attention. Show-business attractions like the World Wrestling Federation and slickly marketed, high-speed sports like NASCAR get under kids' skins. It is tough for a slow-paced, pastoral game like baseball to compete for the attention of children who are growing up in a world of video games, Internet access and MTV.
Major League Baseball, in recent years, has been particularly concerned about the drop-off in baseball interest among youth in America's cities. The cities once were where the game thrived, on urban sandlots and in the images of a young Willie Mays playing stickball with kids in the streets of New York.
Ten years ago, Major League Baseball started a program called RBI (Reviving Baseball in the Inner cities), where major league franchises and civic groups fund leagues for kids in low-income, inner-city neighborhoods who may not have access to the Little League and Knothole programs that still flourish in the suburbs.
This year, Cincinnati will finally have its own RBI, led by Chris Nelms, a 44-year-old Evanston man who grew up idolizing ballplayers at Crosley Field and once had his own dream of playing in the major leagues.
Mr. Nelms, director of the Lincoln Heights YMCA, said the league he is forming this spring is getting help from the Cincinnati Reds, the YMCA and Cincinnati Public Schools. If there is enough interest, there will be teams in Hamilton, Lincoln Heights, Avondale, Evanston, the West End and Mount Auburn, he said.
It will start with boys ages 13 to 15, he said, and at some point, Mr. Nelms said, he would like to start a softball program for girls.
When the RBI program is up and running full steam, Mr. Nelms said, he would like to see as many as 2,000 kids playing ball.
Kids will play the game, Mr. Nelms insists, “if they are exposed to it.”
“Basketball and football have done a real marketing job, selling themselves to kids,” said Mr. Nelms, a former Reds' farm system player who coached high school baseball. “Baseball's just now realizing they have to do that.”
Already, Mr. Nelms said, young sters who regularly come to his YMCA branch are asking about joining the RBI team. Fourteen-year-old Dionte Price and 15-year-old Leray Smith of Lincoln Heights said the only way they have been able to play on organized teams in the past is to leave their communities.
“I love the game,” Dionte said. “I love getting out there and getting dirty, having fun. It's hard work, but it makes you feel good.”
Leray said playing the game “makes me work hard. I feel good about it, because the more I work at it, the better I get.”
Mr. Warren, the former Negro Leagues player, says the RBI program is one of the few good ideas baseball has come up with to start attracting young people.
He and his friend Don Johnson, another former Negro Leagues player, have taken it upon themselves to do something about it. For eight springs and summers now, the two retired men have spent three afternoons a week at the Salway Fields on Spring Grove Avenue working on baseball fundamentals — hitting, throwing, fielding, running — with any young person who wants to come.
The young people range from 12 or 13 to the early 20s. Many of the youths they work with are young men who want to pursue careers in baseball, Mr. Warren said. Others, he said, “just want to play.”
“Once kids start playing, they're hooked,” Mr. Warren said. “It's the most democratic game there is. You don't have to be a giant. The baseball doesn't care how big you are when it's coming at you.”
The game got a shot in the arm in 1998, Mr. Warren said, with the record-breaking home run chase by Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa.
“Those two got the kids back in the game,” Mr. Warren said.
Chuck Harmon, a friend of Mr. Warren's and the first black player for the Reds, agreed that Mr. Sosa and Mr. McGwire “woke up the game.”
But he also agreed that the best way to learn to love baseball is to play baseball.
“These days, they try to make it too organized,” Mr. Harmon said. “They're also on them about this or that. Too much structure.
“The best way to make a bunch of kids love baseball is just dump some bats and gloves on a field and let them play.”
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