Strikeouts are killing baseball

Like having pitchers work quicker, but what is the point of a 20-second time out?

 

I don't know. I can't keep track. It's just a mad scrum of 7- and 8-year-olds, dispersed among teams and leagues, to me.

 

I question the connection between the youth experience and being a fan of MLB. If that held true, barely any women would watch the NFL.

 

Kids get more out of playing baseball in the backyards with their dads than the organized crap they are playing at that age. If you are playing catch and maybe throwing whiffle balls to your kids they don't need to be playing organized baseball until they are older.

 

Doublechecking signs, mainly.

 

Nah, at 7 and 8 they can play semi-real baseball. And they definitely want to compete even if they don't want to go crazy about it.

 

I wish it was like that some days. It's pure joy on his face when we play sports in the yard.

 

My brother and I used to play pickle. I was 10, he was 8, and to give us runners to tag, we had our younger sisters and their friends play. We'd have five or six girls in the rundown some days. It was great.

I've never seen anything like that as a parent.

 

Other than competing, which if they play other sports they get, what more are they getting that you can't teach them.

I don't know, until they are playing kids who can actually play and want to be there, I'm fine with waiting.

I guess if the parent is incapable of teaching their kid I can see putting them in early.

 

There would have to be a limit on that stuff too. If a pitcher steps off more than a given number of times (maybe twice -- just spitballing), it becomes a ball (or maybe a balk).

One minor side effect might be to make stolen bases a more attractive strategy, too.

 

We did similar things. We would play hot box or stolen bases when we got down to three kids. We did this all the way to graduation. Our friend had a field and we would play hours of baseball with up to 14 kids.