Strikeouts are killing baseball

You learn about game situations and getting outs. And you do learn about hitting something other than batting practice -- I don't know if it's hugely valuable long-term for reasons I noted earlier, but it does have value.

Also, why is it OK to compete in other sports but not baseball?

Contrary to what you're saying, one main complaint of HS coaches seems to be that kids have spent too much time working on individual skills and don't know how to actually play the game.

 

I think situational stuff is mostly instinctive and can also be taught by you and simply watching the game.

Because baseball sucks under the age of ten.

This is all based on the parent being able to competently teach their kid the game. So for a lot of parents this isn't an option.

 

Eh, agree to disagree. It's no more scattershot than soccer or basketball in my opinion. The hybrid kid/coach pitch works -- if the pitcher throws four balls, instead of walking, the hitter's coach comes in to groove one.

You get a higher proportion of dickhead coaches, but that's just a condition of baseball all the way through. Aside from that issue, though, my experience has been that kids do like playing real games at that age.

 

I am assuming that kids are playing multiple sports, if this is the case and one sport must be chosen to be put on the back burner it is baseball to me. Or if you are playing multiple sports choose the other one.I don't agree that baseball is the same as soccer. As team sports go baseball is about as individual as you can get.

I guess if you are playing on travel teams at 8 years old it may be different but if you are playing regular baseball with kids who are picking dandelions I really don't think you are getting much out of it at all.

 

It's probably a separate thread if its own and it's also a tangent off the various kids sports threads, but in my childhood/ early teen days in the late 60s/ early 70s, I rarely played organized sports on actual teams with uniforms, etc etc, but I played vacant-lot baseball, backyard touch football, and driveway basketball probably 250 days a year in our subdivision.

Within a span of a half mile there were probably 20 boys within about a 4-year age span. There were probably a dozen houses with hoops, three or four big vacant lots and four or five backyards with 40-50 yard open spaces for touch football games.

We actually got quite organized leagues going. I know on some summer days we had 8-team 3-on-3 hoops tournaments with games going on at 4 houses at a time.

(Each home court had its own idiosyncrasies -- some rims were higher or lower, some backboards were rock solid and some were mushy, some courts were long and deep while some were wide and horizontal. A few had lights and parents who would let you play late into the night.)

We'd play something almost every day unless it was absolutely pouring -- and even then we might play mud-bowl tackle football.

In the dead-ass winter with snow on the ground, sometimes we'd play football and throw each other into the snowdrifts.

 

Our neighborhood was a pretty snooty suburb, the lots were usually 110 x 220 with the houses set back about halfway.

So if you had two yards adjoining side to side, without a fence in between, you'd have a rectangle about 70 by 30 yards open for football. That's a pretty good touch football field.

We even set up a "Polo Grounds" style baseball/softball field with 40 foot bases, 125 foot foul lines and 180 feet straightaway center.

We played with mushy dead softballs from our dads' city rec slowpitch games (a very big deal in those days).

The mushy dead softballs didn't carry that well so you could really tag 'em and not send them very far. A few times we played with fairly fresh baseballs and almost hammered holes in some aluminum siding.


NOW ... back to what MLB should do to cut down strikeouts without killing scoring ....

 

The players who strike out 3 or more times in a game are forced to sit out the first seven innings of the next game.

 

RAW thinking

 

In NJ and NY think it was Running Bases. Also we played one guy gets the football and just tries to run anyway as long as he can. When he gets tackled, he gives up the ball and someone else picks it up. We called that Kill The Man With The Ball. In college, some buddies from Mass said they called it Smear The Queer, quite homophobic.

 

In my MA town the baserunning game wash Pickle. The football thing was smear the queer or kill the carrier, more of the latter. I think pig pile was used sometimes. Around third grade we were banned from playing it at recess.