Chuck, no. If a kid can play, coaches and scouts will find them no matter where they play. Your family bought the BS and believes it.
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I think that membership in self-appointed elite high school programs requires wealth, yes.
I not one clue what this means in the context of HS baseball.
First if all, I donāt communicate with my family in your pigfucker state and have no investment in anything they do. But whatever it is they believe, their experience is manifest.
And itās not just the experience of the people I mention. You have people here telling you, You know, I talk to high school coaches and others involved today and they tell me X and yet you continue to argue that this isnāt the case based on your experience a quarter a century ago. I donāt know, man.
Right! I lived on a culdesac for a while, and that was the most perfect concrete field ever. Poor family that had the house in dead CF with no trees in front, I think all of the parents chipped in and paid for those windows.
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Before games my mom would pitch bp to me in the front yard with a tennis ball, god bless her, and there were a few times weād call it quits after nearly taking out the picture windows in the house across the street.
But we didnāt really have cul de sacs in our neckerhood, so we lived a fairly carefree lifestyle when it came to tbbb.
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Ok, great. I bow to the expert. I forget I am old and know nothing about modern HS baseball. Thanks for the reminder my thoughts are 25-years old.
You have a talent for insulting me. I would like to say I do not care, but I do.
Backyard baseball, dad pitch, I still have the ball in a box of memorabilia from when I was 5 or so (he wrote the date and my age) āFirst Ball Over The Fenceā, he started throwing overhand and I eventually just drilled one, through the banana trees, ācrashā goes the sliding glass door of my neighborās backyard.
Best thing for sports and games was the cul de sacā¦'bout 20 kids, who brought the tennis balls?
Football was played through the yardsā¦āthat driveway is a touchdownā
Iām willing to bet Jim knows more about baseball than anyone on this forum and most everyone coaching baseball today. Not sure that itās too smart to play that card. We need more coaches that spot true talent and bring the best out of their players and make them want to win and get better. Not whose parents have money to drive their kids around to play ball year round, buy their kids the most expensive gear and buy the team dinner after the game.
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Iām not trying to insult anyone, and I donāt have anything invested in any of this. My kid doesnāt give one shit about sports or about competition and wouldnāt know how to navigate a team sports situation, all to my great regret, but ultimately Iām fine with the way things are with him and my family. Iām just observing from my personal experience, both with my relatives and others in the baseball crazy area I come from in Necktown, and the input from any number of people around here regarding their recent experiences. All of it leads me to the conclusion that if you live in a reasonably wealthy area that has aspirations to baseball success, all this bullshit is necessary. I donāt like it any more than you do, but unfashionable as it may be, I try to embrace objective reality. Iām not going to Noe this to death, so Iād like to think Iāll leave all this here. Famous last words.
We played football in my front yard and the yard next door. The house next door is a corner lot but faced the other street, so the focus of their yard was around the corner and there were no trees or anything to impede a fly route or a field goal. All this worked great until the Lorimors moved in.
We used to play a game we called Monster Monster, where one idiot was the finder and the rest of us idiots would scatter throughout the neighborhood and hide. Iām pretty sure weād set limits in terms of blocks, but everything else was totally in bounds, as long as it was outside. So backyards, roofs, sheds, trash cans, I mean, anything you can imagine. Needless to say, playing this game today would result in shootings.
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Ha. āWhat you think you know is 25 years old. I donāt know man.ā
Why would anyone think that was insulting.
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Again, people with recent experience are making assertions that you are refuting, and your objections are drawn, as far as I understand them, from your own experiences that are well in the past. People who know (not me) are telling you, Yeah, if you live in a reasonably wealthy area, itās all a pay to play scam. And youāre saying No, itās not! when you should be saying This development is bullshit.
Thanks for telling me what I should say. I am out of this.
ETA: Let me tell you this: I coached in Brenham as a young man, and my teams went to the State Tournament twice and won one. I came back to coach as a middle-aged man and my team took me to the State Tournament again. But now my experience and I are too old to express an opinion about the travel team select craze? Things about kids and baseball do not change like you think it does.
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So if a regional or state tournament is on the line, the high school coach is going to risk his teamās success and his job and not play the better player because he did not play select ball. If a coach had this mindset, he most certainly would not be very successful.
The select ball parents are probably the same parents griping at the coach after the game telling him how to coach his team.
I can also see this select ball and tournament ball burning out a lot of kids. They need time to do other things.
Shortly after moving to our new house in Maplewood South, about 1965 or so, one of the local dads knocked on the door asking for permission to paint yard markers on the curb in front of our house. the whole field was marked goal line to goal line on the curbs. The older kids in the neighborhood had a almost continuous game of street football which lasted for more than a decade and at least a couple of generations of kids. I remember still seeing the faint remnants of the yard markers back in the naughties.
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Thatās amazing. I wish those markers were still there. I would absolutely drive over there to appreciate them in the event that Iām ever able to return.
Yeah, Lorimor was a dumbass. Thatās something I carry with me now, you know, you can do positive shit that people enjoy and remember forever or you can be a dick and introduce ever more negativity into a world that for a lot of people isnāt really all that great to begin with.
We be played with a tennis ball a lot too. Whatever we could find. Weād scrunch up
Paper cups and play ācup ballā.
āCork ballā, played with a wine cork and a broom handle, was also sort of a huge Tampa thing back in the day. Talk about honing your contact skillsā¦I donāt know if or how much itās still played. It was very popular with the āLatinā community back then.
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My wife lived in Maplewood. Not sure if it was East, West, North or South though. Prior to her parents buying that house in the early 70s, she had grown up, as both her parents had, in West U. Her dad worked for Shell downtown, and when he bought that house his coworkers and family were shocked that anyone would choose to live that far out and commute such a long distance. It was positively nuts. Right there at Braeswood and 610 was considered so far out in the sticks that only hillbillies and the insane commuter would live there.