By: David Washburn
Teen From the Future Writes School Report on Baseball Dying
“This article is based on fictional characters to make a point”
My name is Kayden Smith. I am 14 years old and live in Cincinnati. I was born in 2020, right in the middle of a plague, and can remember being little and my mom and dad taking my older brother and I to Great American Ballpark. I don’t remember much about the stadium then, but I remember everyone being happy and there being excitement. We drive downtown sometimes, and you can see the statues outside of the arena of the really good players. The place is a ghost town most days now, but I guess once upon a time it was buzzing all the time. Now, it looks like it’s falling apart. Lights need to be replaced outside. The ticket office windows are dusty and grimy looking. This place is nothing like it used to be.
When I talk to my mom and dad about baseball, I get mixed responses. I can tell that the game was important to them, but I can’t say it means anything to me. The way my dad talks about hockey is kind of how I talk about baseball. I never understood the game really. It was fun to play as a little kid, kind of, but there were too many rules. Coaches yelling to run through first base. Telling me how to hold the baseball bat, standing around in the outfield waiting for my turn to hit again. It kind of sucked.
My dad, when I ask him about baseball, will talk about the good times when he was younger. He grew up in the 90’s and says he remembers a strike or something happening, and the game was dying then, and drugs saved the game and made it exciting again. I looked into this and saw it was the steroid era in the late 90’s he was talking about. Players were taking drugs to get stronger and avoid injuries and it was giving them an advantage. My dad said watching homeruns was never more exciting than those years. He also gets mad when we talk about the Reds or MLB. He says ever since the lockout in 2022 the game never recovered. He says players and owners couldn’t agree on the rules and money. This doesn’t make a ton of sense because the rules were fine before he said.
My mom tells me that her family growing up used to go to the Reds games 2 or 3 times a month and that the stadiums would give away shirts, bobblehead figures, and cool stuff. There used to be firework shows and it was a big deal. She says her and my dad went a lot before I was born but now it is an afterthought. They would travel to other cities just to watch baseball also, and she talks about it like it was so exciting, but I’m just not sure I understand it. People drive hours, just to watch a boring baseball game? I can see my mom’s face light up though when she reminisces about baseball though.
My dad will occasionally strike up small talk in public with other older guys and talk about the good ole days when baseball was a bigger deal. You can feel what was once exciting to them and hear their hearts break at the same time when they talk about the game today. They talk about how there used to be levels to the minor league teams. Like, now there are just the development teams, but there were leagues all over America and the Major League teams would have multiple of these teams. Because of the lost interest in young adults there’s only a few Division 1 colleges that still play baseball. I saw the Olympics had baseball for a while as well! My dad says it’s because fans stopped watching and going to games after the lockout like 15 years ago. He says the game just never recovered after that.
My dad still has a bunch of old baseball memorabilia in his garage. A lot of it is in boxes and it’s fun to go through, but I don’t know why he holds onto this stuff. He has a lot of baseball cards also and swears they will be worth something later, but I have my doubts. He talks about giving them to me when he passes away, but I will probably just throw them out. What am I going to do with this junk from a dying sport?
My brother, who is 4 years older than me, tells me he remembers playing until he was 10 years old, but there were not enough kids to fill out a team. My old school has a park, and I can see where a fence is still in place where home plate and the dugouts used to be. Now grass grows there and there is a kids’ playset where the outfield was. There are other county parks that you can see used to have baseball fields but have let them become just grass. I can’t even think of where you can find a baseball field now. I think there are some indoor places but they are expensive so I guess I couldn’t play baseball even if I wanted to.
Most people who talk about the game dying seem to all refer back to 2022, when the players and team owners wouldn’t agree on money. Billionaires fighting with millionaires. The players were being screwed out of their best years and then when they were free to sign with other teams were well past their prime, but never got paid big when they were playing better. Owners seem like they might have been a little greedy also. Another thing that is interesting is listening or watching old interviews with players from that time. They would put together these great careers on bad teams, and the teams they were on would purposely lose, just so they could get better draft picks. One of the arguments between owners and players was that all teams should be trying to win, and they just weren’t. The really good players would never see big games that mattered because the owners had control of them, underpaid them, and then never gave them a fighting chance to win and build a case to be paid better.
My dad says they should let players use steroids again to try and save it, but I don’t know if enough people care anymore. Baseball doesn’t really mean anything to me, and I guess it probably is because of the lockout when I think about it. Part of me wishes I could be at a game where every seat was filled, and everyone was excited to see the game, and the games looked today, how they did in 2015.