Baseball Sunday: Sandlot games disappearing

OMAHA, Neb. — Sandlot baseball, a slice of American life enjoyed for decades by boys from coast to coast, appears on the verge of extinction.

Many men over 40 remember those summer days when they headed to the park or vacant lot and played ball all day — or until Mom sent word that it was time for dinner.

Nowadays, most neighborhood ball fields sit empty on summer afternoons, the idea of unsupervised play having gone the way of the rotary-dial phones kids once used to round up the fellas for a game.

The reasons for the sandlot's demise, baseball coaches and sociologists say, go back to the changing family structure, video games, parents' fear of crime, and the proliferation of organized and so-called "select" teams for more-talented kids.

Johnny Damon of the New York Yankees says the structured environment of select ball sacrifices the fun kids get from playing on their own.

"I think nowadays kids are getting so worn out playing baseball year-round that by the time they get to the high school level they're kind of tired of it, and tired of the politics of it, instead of just going out there and playing baseball," Damon said.

Dan Gould, director of Michigan State's Institute for the Study of Youth Sport, put it bluntly: "The end of the story is, the sandlots ain't coming back, as much as we would like them to."

The number of ballplayers in the United States has remained fairly constant throughout the years, though studies have shown fewer youngsters from the inner city are picking up the game.

There were 16.1 million participants in 2006, according to the most recent Sporting Goods Manufacturers Association International survey. But almost 12 million of those play in organized leagues, while the remaining 4 million said their most common form of play was "casual."

"That number should be higher," association spokesman Mike May said of the sandlot players.

Don Weiskopf, a 79-year-old retired college professor from Eugene, Ore., advocates a revival of sandlot ball on his Web site, Baseball Play America.

A former player in the Cleveland Indians' organization, Weiskopf said youngsters learn the game best in an unstructured setting.

"The fundamentals of baseball must be practiced continually, even at the big league level," Weiskopf said in an e-mail. "The lack of pickup games and sandlot ball today has hurt the development of young players."