So is no one falling on the sword for 2018?

[SCCWS]

Sports trends on changing. I was never a golfer because my friends and I played softball into our late 20's. Now that I am retired, I spend winters in Florida. I was amazed at the number of golf courses when I started going. In 10 years, there has been a drastic shift. At least half the gold courses in our town have closed because simply there are not enough 55 and over residents who  golf.  A recent survey found 10% of winter residents golf on a regular basis. They may be better having hockey leagues w the number of canadians who winter in Florida. 

[Eminor3rd]

8 hours ago, caulfield12 said:

Those summer travel baseball leagues where they travel all over the region/country and cost at least $5000 per summer for parents to fund...that's what is killing youth participation.

It's winnowing down the numbers earlier and earlier.

It might not be a "white sport" because of the growing influence of Latin America, but no matter how much MLB puts into Reviving Baseball in the Inner City, the Bulls/Sox Academy, ACE...other sports are still drawing more kids, not just the NBA/NFL, but some of the secondary sports like soccer (in America), golf, tennis, etc.

 But like you don’t need to be in those leagues to play. You can play for your school every year, and find a local “travel league” where you only play towns nearby for a fraction of that cost. And at some point you can play American Legion. 

Kids just have way more shit to choose from for entertainment. Every generation has had more than the last. Things wax and wane. 

[southsideirish71]

2 hours ago, Eminor3rd said:

 But like you don’t need to be in those leagues to play. You can play for your school every year, and find a local “travel league” where you only play towns nearby for a fraction of that cost. And at some point you can play American Legion. 

Kids just have way more shit to choose from for entertainment. Every generation has had more than the last. Things wax and wane. 

 

I believe the issue is video games and electronic devices that have taken away from the pickup game mentality.  I have a 14-year-old freshman and have asked this very question to him and his friends.  His friends are split up between those who are active in sports and others that are not.  They all, however, want to play video games pretty much 24/7. They don't want to go outside as much as we did growing up.  And to be honest, if we had the same video games and access to electronics I probably would have been the same way. 

My son is very active in baseball.  We moved him from in-house/LL back when he was 10 years old.  I wanted to prep him for HS baseball and give him the best chance to do it. He was already throwing too hard for the kids in LL to catch and in fact, his LL coach moved him to the OF because his son ( 1b ) was too afraid to catch the ball.  Travel baseball has been great for competition in some aspects, but it's becoming too watered down.  I have a background in college baseball and focused on the development of the kids and getting the kids ready to play at the next level.  A lot of my fellow coaches, however, are trying to win all games and trophies.  We had a team last year in the area play 105 games and had a kid with almost 150 innings pitched.  That's insane.  Every kid on my team pitched.  I spread it out across all arms.  The parents in travel baseball are horrible as a whole.  They all believe little Johnny is going to not only make it to college but start at SS. I was helping our 10u team try out kids last summer and one of the mothers comes up and states that she wanted to know if her son was going to play SS and CF throughout his career because she wanted to get him the best baseball scholarship available.  I looked at this 9 year old and asked her, so anyone in your family have a background or pedigree who played baseball at an advance level.  Nope.  Why do you think your son is going to do this.  She just said she had money and that should solve everything.  I told her that this is a very complex sport to project a 9-year-olds development pattern and how they will grow if they like the sport, and what their long-term goals are. The boy was very much undersized as well.  He looked like a kid ready for tball.   I asked how tall was the father, she said 5'4.  She was 4'11.  No one in her family is over 5'6.  But Jose Altuve is short and made the majors.  I told her that citing a unicorn as a pattern of success is not a good thing to base future success with. I ran the tryouts.  The boy was afraid of the ball, couldn't catch, hit or throw.  I referred her to the local LL.  She was livid with me.  A week later I get a snarky email about how she made some travel team that has like 7 teams at 10u and is cashing a check at her son's expense.   I talk about how hard it is to move onto each level.  When we play in national tournaments like Perfect Game, Cooperstown, etc you see how you truly fit in.  It doesn't help to stave off delusion.    My son hit .750 in Cooperstown and I had some parent screaming at me to put their kid in at SS and to lead off over my son because some "mythical" scout was there to look at their 12-year-old. Its insane.  That boy was hitless and was striking out against advanced pitching at a rate of 85%. Parents treat travel baseball like free agency.  Each year they jump from program to program.  More worried about the brand than the training or what is best for their kid.  In travel baseball, exposure to professional training is probably one of the best benefits.  Those programs who focus on winning first probably are not going to build your boy into the player that they are going to be.  They focus also on the boys who mature early.  My son pitched last year in a tournament in Texas where one of the Texas teams was averaging a 14u player that was 6'1 and 200 lbs.   They were bigger than the varsity team at his HS.  

I shut my son down for the fall to give his arm, body, and mind a rest before the HS grind picks up.  He plays for an HS travel team in the summer that starts working out in November.  He works out 3 days a week with a trainer.  Has a hitting instructor and I am his pitching instructor.  Unfortunately, the days of walking up and playing HS baseball because you want to are over. I have heard some of the HS coaches state they want relatively finished products in HS and don't want to teach kids fundamentals.  

[Jack Parkman]

13 hours ago, Chicago White Sox said:

Baseball is a rich white kid’s sport now?

In the US, yes. Other places in the world, of course not.

[Ducksnort]

2 hours ago, southsideirish71 said:

 

I believe the issue is video games and electronic devices that have taken away from the pickup game mentality.  I have a 14-year-old freshman and have asked this very question to him and his friends.  His friends are split up between those who are active in sports and others that are not.  They all, however, want to play video games pretty much 24/7. They don't want to go outside as much as we did growing up.  And to be honest, if we had the same video games and access to electronics I probably would have been the same way. 

My son is very active in baseball.  We moved him from in-house/LL back when he was 10 years old.  I wanted to prep him for HS baseball and give him the best chance to do it. He was already throwing too hard for the kids in LL to catch and in fact, his LL coach moved him to the OF because his son ( 1b ) was too afraid to catch the ball.  Travel baseball has been great for competition in some aspects, but it's becoming too watered down.  I have a background in college baseball and focused on the development of the kids and getting the kids ready to play at the next level.  A lot of my fellow coaches, however, are trying to win all games and trophies.  We had a team last year in the area play 105 games and had a kid with almost 150 innings pitched.  That's insane.  Every kid on my team pitched.  I spread it out across all arms.  The parents in travel baseball are horrible as a whole.  They all believe little Johnny is going to not only make it to college but start at SS. I was helping our 10u team try out kids last summer and one of the mothers comes up and states that she wanted to know if her son was going to play SS and CF throughout his career because she wanted to get him the best baseball scholarship available.  I looked at this 9 year old and asked her, so anyone in your family have a background or pedigree who played baseball at an advance level.  Nope.  Why do you think your son is going to do this.  She just said she had money and that should solve everything.  I told her that this is a very complex sport to project a 9-year-olds development pattern and how they will grow if they like the sport, and what their long-term goals are. The boy was very much undersized as well.  He looked like a kid ready for tball.   I asked how tall was the father, she said 5'4.  She was 4'11.  No one in her family is over 5'6.  But Jose Altuve is short and made the majors.  I told her that citing a unicorn as a pattern of success is not a good thing to base future success with. I ran the tryouts.  The boy was afraid of the ball, couldn't catch, hit or throw.  I referred her to the local LL.  She was livid with me.  A week later I get a snarky email about how she made some travel team that has like 7 teams at 10u and is cashing a check at her son's expense.   I talk about how hard it is to move onto each level.  When we play in national tournaments like Perfect Game, Cooperstown, etc you see how you truly fit in.  It doesn't help to stave off delusion.    My son hit .750 in Cooperstown and I had some parent screaming at me to put their kid in at SS and to lead off over my son because some "mythical" scout was there to look at their 12-year-old. Its insane.  That boy was hitless and was striking out against advanced pitching at a rate of 85%. Parents treat travel baseball like free agency.  Each year they jump from program to program.  More worried about the brand than the training or what is best for their kid.  In travel baseball, exposure to professional training is probably one of the best benefits.  Those programs who focus on winning first probably are not going to build your boy into the player that they are going to be.  They focus also on the boys who mature early.  My son pitched last year in a tournament in Texas where one of the Texas teams was averaging a 14u player that was 6'1 and 200 lbs.   They were bigger than the varsity team at his HS.  

I shut my son down for the fall to give his arm, body, and mind a rest before the HS grind picks up.  He plays for an HS travel team in the summer that starts working out in November.  He works out 3 days a week with a trainer.  Has a hitting instructor and I am his pitching instructor.  Unfortunately, the days of walking up and playing HS baseball because you want to are over. I have heard some of the HS coaches state they want relatively finished products in HS and don't want to teach kids fundamentals.  

Thanks for sharing. This is very insightful information and, as a married/childless 24 year old man, I am astonished at how parents think they know what is the very best for their kids and demand it be so...like is this for you or your child? Winning at a non-professional level is not everything. Learning and proper development is. I am glad there are coaches out there like you.

[Leonard Zelig]

18 hours ago, Jack Parkman said:

You're probably right, but that isn't a good thing. I ask you this question: Have you seen a random kid wearing Sox gear in the past 5 years? I haven't, and it isn't good. 

What makes a kid random or not random?

[Jack Parkman]

47 minutes ago, Leonard Zelig said:

What makes a kid random or not random?

Random kid: 

Some kid walking in the store when you're out shopping that you have no idea who they are

Not random kid: 

You neighbor's kid, or other people's kids who you already know are Sox fans. 

Edited October 24, 2018 by Jack Parkman

[greg775]

12 hours ago, southsideirish71 said:

 

I believe the issue is video games and electronic devices that have taken away from the pickup game mentality.  I have a 14-year-old freshman and have asked this very question to him and his friends.  His friends are split up between those who are active in sports and others that are not.  They all, however, want to play video games pretty much 24/7. They don't want to go outside as much as we did growing up.  And to be honest, if we had the same video games and access to electronics I probably would have been the same way. 

My son is very active in baseball.  We moved him from in-house/LL back when he was 10 years old.  I wanted to prep him for HS baseball and give him the best chance to do it. He was already throwing too hard for the kids in LL to catch and in fact, his LL coach moved him to the OF because his son ( 1b ) was too afraid to catch the ball.  Travel baseball has been great for competition in some aspects, but it's becoming too watered down.  I have a background in college baseball and focused on the development of the kids and getting the kids ready to play at the next level.  A lot of my fellow coaches, however, are trying to win all games and trophies.  We had a team last year in the area play 105 games and had a kid with almost 150 innings pitched.  That's insane.  Every kid on my team pitched.  I spread it out across all arms.  The parents in travel baseball are horrible as a whole.  They all believe little Johnny is going to not only make it to college but start at SS. I was helping our 10u team try out kids last summer and one of the mothers comes up and states that she wanted to know if her son was going to play SS and CF throughout his career because she wanted to get him the best baseball scholarship available.  I looked at this 9 year old and asked her, so anyone in your family have a background or pedigree who played baseball at an advance level.  Nope.  Why do you think your son is going to do this.  She just said she had money and that should solve everything.  I told her that this is a very complex sport to project a 9-year-olds development pattern and how they will grow if they like the sport, and what their long-term goals are. The boy was very much undersized as well.  He looked like a kid ready for tball.   I asked how tall was the father, she said 5'4.  She was 4'11.  No one in her family is over 5'6.  But Jose Altuve is short and made the majors.  I told her that citing a unicorn as a pattern of success is not a good thing to base future success with. I ran the tryouts.  The boy was afraid of the ball, couldn't catch, hit or throw.  I referred her to the local LL.  She was livid with me.  A week later I get a snarky email about how she made some travel team that has like 7 teams at 10u and is cashing a check at her son's expense.   I talk about how hard it is to move onto each level.  When we play in national tournaments like Perfect Game, Cooperstown, etc you see how you truly fit in.  It doesn't help to stave off delusion.    My son hit .750 in Cooperstown and I had some parent screaming at me to put their kid in at SS and to lead off over my son because some "mythical" scout was there to look at their 12-year-old. Its insane.  That boy was hitless and was striking out against advanced pitching at a rate of 85%. Parents treat travel baseball like free agency.  Each year they jump from program to program.  More worried about the brand than the training or what is best for their kid.  In travel baseball, exposure to professional training is probably one of the best benefits.  Those programs who focus on winning first probably are not going to build your boy into the player that they are going to be.  They focus also on the boys who mature early.  My son pitched last year in a tournament in Texas where one of the Texas teams was averaging a 14u player that was 6'1 and 200 lbs.   They were bigger than the varsity team at his HS.  

I shut my son down for the fall to give his arm, body, and mind a rest before the HS grind picks up.  He plays for an HS travel team in the summer that starts working out in November.  He works out 3 days a week with a trainer.  Has a hitting instructor and I am his pitching instructor.  Unfortunately, the days of walking up and playing HS baseball because you want to are over. I have heard some of the HS coaches state they want relatively finished products in HS and don't want to teach kids fundamentals.  

What a post. I just can't believe modern day parents. They are lucky their kids just don't quit baseball cause of all the insane parental interference. We had plenty of guys in our LL go on to play at Brother Rice and other schools out of Mt Greenwood LL. And like I said parents never came to practice or games. I bet our talented yet older stodgy co managers would have quit on the spot in this modern environment of parents interfering. If a kid is afraid of the ball, parents, don't blame the fricking coaches.

[lostfan]

If you ask anyone who coaches youth sports they'll pretty much all agree to a person that the parents are the worst part.

I can remember this one mom particularly who told everyone in so many words I wasn't shit as a coach (this is a fair criticism honestly, if you think I suck as a coach you're allowed to think that) and that I didn't do anything and wasted her time (this is bullshit, I gave them at least 10-15 hours of my time per week FOR FREE on top of my day job - this actually deeply offended my wife more than me because she could see how much time and energy I was putting into this). But she was the main one who protested when I held practices at noon on Saturday afternoons and tried to complain about me to the commissioner, whose response was along the lines of "he is the coach and practice is when he says it is." She had a problem with the fact that her son didn't improve very much by the end of the year.

1. You bring your son to less than 50% of practices where I do drills with the kids for that specific reason

2. The season is only like 2 months, the fuck

3. The pitching rubber and mound are 45 feet. Your son can throw, on average, 44.5 feet. The only way he'll develop that arm is if he throws more and I left him in games to improve. He didn't, and I'm sorry if I couldn't turn your noodle-armed son into Chris fucking Sale.

[Greg Hibbard]

On 10/23/2018 at 6:04 PM, Balta1701 said:

Ok, you started in 1983 so I did the math starting in 1983. In 1983 there were 4 teams in the playoffs, in 1994 there were 0, in 1995 that ballooned to 8, and it went to 10 in 2012. Since 1983, therefore, there have been 250 playoff spots available.

I totaled up the number of teams that played in each season - counting the 2 expansions to figure out, on average, how many years would each franchise go between a playoff appearance if everything was random.

On average, right now there are 10 spots and 30 teams, so if everything was random right now each team would make the playoffs 1x every 3 years. Pushing that back in time, I find that over the time period starting in 1983, average performance overall would be just under 1 in 4. 

The average franchise playing over that full time period would have 8.789 playoff appearances in the stretch from 1983 to 2018. 

That makes sense to me. Thanks for doing the math. Given that baseball is perhaps more rife with payroll disparity in that era than other sports, wouldn’t you think the median would be lower than the mean, given teams like the Red Sox and Yankees who spent their way to the AL playoffs year after year after year, especially in the late 90s and 00s?

[Cyrano]

Ok, you started in 1983 so I did the math starting in 1983. In 1983 there were 4 teams in the playoffs, in 1994 there were 0, in 1995 that ballooned to 8, and it went to 10 in 2012. Since 1983, therefore, there have been 250 playoff spots available.

I totaled up the number of teams that played in each season - counting the 2 expansions to figure out, on average, how many years would each franchise go between a playoff appearance if everything was random.

On average, right now there are 10 spots and 30 teams, so if everything was random right now each team would make the playoffs 1x every 3 years. Pushing that back in time, I find that over the time period starting in 1983, average performance overall would be just under 1 in 4. 

The average franchise playing over that full time period would have 8.789 playoff appearances in the stretch from 1983 to 2018. 

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

So an average team would have Nine playoff appearances in the last 35 seasons.   The White Sox have 9 playoff appearances.......IN THE HISTORY OF THE FRANCHISE.

They have the worst playoff appearance percentage in baseball since the beginning of baseball.  This is why attendance is low.  This is why there is no national recognition of this franchise.  This is why it is the second baseball team in Chicago and likely now the least relevant professional franchise in town.  

This franchise was failure before Reinsdorf et. al. purchased it and it hasn't changed much since he did.

[Eminor3rd]

8 hours ago, Cyrano said:

Ok, you started in 1983 so I did the math starting in 1983. In 1983 there were 4 teams in the playoffs, in 1994 there were 0, in 1995 that ballooned to 8, and it went to 10 in 2012. Since 1983, therefore, there have been 250 playoff spots available.

I totaled up the number of teams that played in each season - counting the 2 expansions to figure out, on average, how many years would each franchise go between a playoff appearance if everything was random.

On average, right now there are 10 spots and 30 teams, so if everything was random right now each team would make the playoffs 1x every 3 years. Pushing that back in time, I find that over the time period starting in 1983, average performance overall would be just under 1 in 4. 

The average franchise playing over that full time period would have 8.789 playoff appearances in the stretch from 1983 to 2018. 

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

So an average team would have Nine playoff appearances in the last 35 seasons.   The White Sox have 9 playoff appearances.......IN THE HISTORY OF THE FRANCHISE.

They have the worst playoff appearance percentage in baseball since the beginning of baseball.  This is why attendance is low.  This is why there is no national recognition of this franchise.  This is why it is the second baseball team in Chicago and likely now the least relevant professional franchise in town.  

This franchise was failure before Reinsdorf et. al. purchased it and it hasn't changed much since he did.

What is the point here? Are you trying to talk everyone into not being fans anymore? I don’t get it. We’re all frustrated about not winning. So what?