Excerpt
Today, as I drive through my old neighborhood periodically, the baseball diamond that I played on more than twenty-five years ago is empty and covered with weeds. What was once the center of attention in our neighborhood every summer is now absent. I began to notice a change in the number of kids playing baseball when Senior League participation dwindled down to a handful of players in the mid-eighties. The coaches combined the best fourteen and fifteen year-old players
together and started a traveling all-star team, and those were the only guys still interested in playing baseball at SSLL. Most of them also played high school baseball, and playing summer league baseball was how they honed their skills. I would occasionally umpire their games in order to earn some extra money during summer break from college. The team lasted a year before the league folded entirely.

When I returned to Chicago for good in 1990, I seldom remembered seeing a recreational baseball game played in the parks around the neighborhood. I only see young Hispanic men playing soccer on the field where I once played baseball in the summer at Jesse Owens Park.

Why aren’t more Black kids from the inner city interested in baseball anymore? When my friends and I were kids, we would play baseball from early morning to sundown in the summer. We were creative—all that we needed was one or two baseballs, a couple of bats and four or five gloves that we shared to start a sandlot baseball game. When I went on vacations with my family, I was able to start a game in almost every city that I visited. I had relatives in St. Louis, Los Angeles; and Jackson, Tennessee. I carried a bat, ball and glove with me every vacation. You could walk around freely in a new environment and not be worried about getting robbed or shot, and making new friends was easy. I have fond memories of traveling to different cities and playing baseball with the friends that my brother and I made. Unfortunately, I don’t see the kids playing baseball like that anymore. I’ve noticed marginal attempts to revitalize baseball in my old
neighborhood repeatedly, but it doesn’t grow to the size that it once was because of the lack of interest collectively from the kids and adults. When I played, there were hundreds of kids who tried out for various teams in the spring. Other rival leagues had the same massive crowd of kids also. Only a handful of baseball organizations have been able to maintain its popular status over the years.

I have asked myself countless times why baseball has disappeared in many communities throughout the city, and I wonder about what can be done to revitalize baseball competition in my old neighborhood as well as other communities in inner-city Chicago. I see that Jackie Robinson West and South Side Little League were able to maintain solid programs, and Roseland Little League is an up-and-coming organization with a fairly new stadium on the far south side of Chicago. More organizations like these are vital in order to recapture the passion of summer league baseball in the community.

However, there isn’t any focus on the kids who are thirteen years old or older playing baseball. Thirteen-year-old boys have to adjust to playing baseball at the Major League level of ninety feet, and not enough coaches are helping Black kids make this adjustment. Little League organizations are now geared toward coaching kids up to twelve years old, and I don’t see any Senior League Baseball being played in the city.

I recall umpiring a high school game about twelve years ago for a friend of mine who was the frosh-soph coach of the Corliss high
school baseball team at the time. There were no parents or spectators present at the game, and the opposing team didn’t have enough players. However, they were able to borrow one player from the Corliss baseball team. The game was so badly played that I don’t remember which team won the game. Most of the boys lacked fundamentals, and most of them played like they picked up a bat and ball for the first time. This might explain why many Black kids don’t excel in baseball past thirteen years of age.

There are numerous factors that have contributed to the decline of Blacks playing baseball in mass abundance in the community like generations of the past. I want to examine the various social, cultural, racial and economic factors that caused baseball to nearly vanish in my community and communities nationwide. The interest in baseball isn’t as strong in the inner city as it once was, and very little is being done collectively to spark the interest in the sport again. More work needs to be done to promote baseball to inner-city youth before it vanishes completely.