I have always loved baseball, and it has always been my favorite sport. Many believe baseball is boring to watch and too slow, but I think it’s fascinating; I could sit there and watch games for hours and be completely happy.
I didn’t grow up an athlete; when I failed at tee-ball early on, I realized I never had a shot. So my love for baseball doesn’t come from playing, but watching the game and falling in love with it at a young age.
Kids now are different and don’t have the attention span to sit there and watch a baseball game for three hours. This shift is causing an alarming concern to the MLB. They’re noticing a decrease in kids playing baseball, which causes them to not watch or attend major league games. The median age of those who watched nationally televised games in 2015 was 56, nowhere close to what they want that number to be.
MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred believes some major changes need to be made at the youth level to get kids more involved with baseball. He said that getting kids playing the game will keep them interested and they’ll want to watch the games. Manfred hired Hall of Famer Cal Ripken Jr. in December as one of his special advisors for youth programs and Ripken has already thought of ways to change the game.
Ripken's ideas include starting every inning with a runner on first, starting each inning with a different count, having five batters per inning and requiring players to steal. When I first heard about this, I thought Ripken was insane. I love "The Kid," but how can he just make these drastic changes to the sport that made him who he is?
After some thought, I realized these changes would make the game faster and more exciting, which is Ripken's end goal. Starting each inning with a runner on first and requiring players to steal would almost start every inning with a runner in scoring position, which would be fun to watch, and having five batters instead of the traditional three outs would help make the innings go by faster. However, so much of the excitement comes from the innings where players score five or six runs, and this rule wouldn’t allow that to happen. Another problem I have with Ripken’s ideas are that they’re essentially lying to kids to get them involved. What happens when they move up to a higher level and have to play the traditional way? What about when they go to a game or watch it on TV and it’s different from what they play? Will they still be interested and want to continue playing? It seems more like these changes would just have children fall in love with the idea of baseball, instead of the actual sport itself, which is sad when there is so much to love about it.
There are definitely changes that could be made to the youth level, but Ripken's are not ones that would be helping the sport. Thankfully, Manfred and Ripken have time to come up with a plan, because it’s doubtful these changes will be coming any time soon.