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Thank you for sharing.
Cuba and lack of baseball stems from what the communist dictatorship has done with the island. What we see on our living rooms coming from Cuba, kids with no shoes/shirts, old beat up cars, old dilapidated buildings that haven't been upgraded in 50+ years is nothing more than communism. The Cuban American community by contrast live very well. The only Cubans not free and living in poverty are those Cubans living in Cuba.
I look at declining numbers and the kids not playing baseball and I feel sorry. My youngest son is now in 8th grade, so the days of youth baseball are pretty much behind me, as it pertains to my family.
We have a small town (11K folks) in North Jersey and a PAL program. This year our baseball program had to merge with the PAL in a larger town to survive at minors and majors levels, though we do have a fairly thriving travel program. I've always heard that a lot of the kids don't want to play with travel players because they are too good, but that just seems like a convenient excuse. Now that we have merged, I hear from the parents (in my town) that the kids in the other town and their teams are too good. Another excuse?
In contrast, we have a basketball program with the same pool of kids in our town that is tremendous...in the same basic age groups we have thriving rec leagues for grades 2-8. We also have successful travel basketball teams from 4-8 (and these players have an option to play rec or not). When we look at it, we have two cultural ethnic groups that really don't participate in baseball. That hurts our baseball numbers a bit (probably 20-25 boys). Soccer is also strong from what I can see (I really don't pay attention to soccer, sorry).
So the hard reality IMO: I've been coaching baseball for 25+ years. I have always approached travel and rec a bit differently, making sure the pure rec player feels like he's important, that he has something to offer and gets to play a variety of positions. In a lot of cases, I don't always see that from other coaches. If you only play RF for half a game in a rec game over and over you probably don't want to come back next season. I know at least in our town, that the level of coaching knowledge and capability is pretty low from what I see. So even though my two sons are out of the program and on to HS and tournament baseball, I will continue with the program and ask that we work harder on training coaches. But I fear that it may be too late.
Rec-type baseball is declining for a variety of reasons...unfortunately Rob Manfred putting a LL team on Sunday Night Baseball isn't going to change that (because most kids aren't watching anyway). MLB has to do a better job of marketing it's stars (Trout, Harper, Stanton, Bryant) to the young like the NBA does to start.
I think I'm starting to ramble...so OUT.
Reasonable ticket prices would allow more young families to attend games, which could lead to fans for life and or passionate players.
I have never been a fan of working hard to bring in foreigners to play Americas pastime. I would much rather track a kid from Tulsa or Waterloo than a kid from Okinawa or Timbuktu.