Baseball strike attitude trickles down

We keep hearing about three strikes and out, but how many strikes do the professional players get? The same signs of young players’ burnout are being exposed in commercialized sports.

Professional sports athletes, their agents, team owners, politicians and fans continue a constant dilemma over responsibility for and control of games for spectators, which we all used to enjoy playing for fun.

Baseball, the professional kind, just may strike out if the players strike again. Just as alarming is the copycat attitude of the commercialized “athlete’s rights” being adopted by school supporters.

All professional team sports are trying very hard to build up their fan base. Attendance in baseball, football, basketball and even sports that are TV-friendly continue to decline. The new affability of professional sports has targeted amateur and youth sports by design. Still you gotta wonder if the drive to win youth and families to their sport is driven by a newfound responsibility of caring for kids.

Or could it be driven by the need to fund their multi-million-dollar contracts? Or could it be the declining attendance at professional sports events? Or could it be that sports have become exciting only if they can match the thrills of bashing, trashing, beat-‘em-up professional rasslin’?

Major League Baseball, America’s game, has had work stoppages eight times in the past 30 years. And the problem today is in dividing up $3.5 billion?

The refusing to play concept (or diminishing effort attitude), cheered on by players union leaders and casual coaches, was never intended to become more important than the game itself. The threat of withholding effort or quitting a team by some high school kids is an early warning symptom of negotiations going on in youth sports.

Other early warning signs keep popping up. Although I can’t confirm the report, somewhere in a playground grandstand Little League Baseball parents, for whatever reason, sat on their children’s gloves demanding an umpire be removed. The game was forfeited and none of the kids played. Although uncomfortable sitting, the glove-sitters smiled about the game cancellation.

Since the emotional ups and downs are more intense among youth athletes than the pros, victories are short-lived and losses are long remembered.

Baseball just may be giving us a wake-up call about the burnout of youth sports. Here are five alarm-setting signs. Youth and/or education sports burnout is closing in when we are:

  • Getting tired of dealing with the negatives and “it’s not fun anymore.”

  • Narrowing our interest to one goal or experience and that rut is getting deeper.

  • Having emotional highs and excitement only at the top of the league.

  • Shrinking our family life rather than expanding it.

  • Becoming mechanical and putting in the time required in hopes it just gets done.

    One alarm can be put on snooze until we wake up, but if two ring true, we need wake-up and check our priorities. Three or more indicate we are burned out on youth sports and a review that the actual performance of a young athlete is the responsibility of the athlete.

    And if it looks like the “joy of the game” has little or nothing to do with playing. When the excitement of wanting what we have has become possible only by having what we want, education sports have taken the game away from kids.

    The good signs? Try the World Baseball Foundation (WBF). It is desperate for funding to carry on its mission of bringing baseball to the world. It offers camps to family teams of parents and their sons/daughters and even camps for single parents. It wants to build a Y2Y program, a youth to youth relationship of youth coaching youth in character development and skills of baseball.

    Just imagine, on his honeymoon, one baseball enthusiast takes a suitcase full of castoff baseball equipment to give to kids in Chile. At an empty, unused playground, the hope and thankfulness a tattered glove or scuffed baseball can generate in a kid overwhelmed him.

    And our kids won’t play if they don’t have the latest glove or bat or coach or name on a uniform?

    My-oh-my!

    Could it be sports entertainment costs too much? Or maybe we and the kids we provide entertainment for are becoming unable to entertain ourselves.

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