OFF-TOPIC Thread

A nice glove costs $300 dollars. A bat costs $300 dollars. Uniforms, a bat bag, Cleats all cost loads of money. My high school we had to purchase this from the team for hundreds of dollars... Perfect Game & Baseball America are ruining baseball for the poor and inner-city children, many of them black & mexican that simply cannot afford all this equipment AND the cost of travel in case the kid is actually good and plays lots of travel ball. My parents couldn't afford that for me. The system is fucking corrupt.

 

you can get a lesser glove and survive but the bat costs are insane these days I couldn't afford to get my get son most of them. Did it matter? Yeah to some degree.

 

sorry but ALL of the above apply

 

My point is if you want to get african Americans back into the game it needs to be affordable or free even. You think these teams or companies can't afford to create camps that supply all this equipment? Or provide transportation? Of course they can but they won't.

 

Ima tell my kid if niggas in Dominican can ball out with milk carton gloves he should be happy with a $20 Walmart glove. if he's really the goat then he can be the goat with any glove or bat.

 

I also think it's gonna take more black superstars to lure more black kids to the sport. Everyone wants to be Lebron or Steph Curry rn. Or Lesean mccoy or AP. when Barry bonds was the goat that was so good for the sport and black people. Kids idolized these players which influenced what sport they wanted to play and position etc. I wish the MLB was better at marketing their superstars (doyer mentioned this in an excellent post). If kids wanted to be the next mccutchen, price, stanton, heyward, upton etc that would be great. But outside of being a baseball fan you never hear these names.

 

Absolutely...and to top it off, for me, I grew up directly across the street from a stadium (460 ft. in CF), and it was open most of the time and kids would have 3/4 games going on simultaneously in different areas of the place...it was great. Could play all summer long until football season, when the local high schools had their daily practices. In the winter, the city used to store the snow in there, and make huge mountains of it.
It was so much fun; the ghetto had it's wonderful aspects to it.

 

Actually...I'M the one who fucked up his fantasy scores. We were head to head this week.

 

Watchu talkin' bout Willis? When I was a kid we played from before lunch (we hardly ever really ate any lunch) till sundown. If we came home before dark the parents were looking at us like "wtf are you doing here?" I was lucky, there was a little league park in walking distance of our neighborhood...and if that was being used there were several places nearby that could serve the purpose.

 

True. But teams have academies in the Dominican... Is there an academy in surburban Atlanta with free showcases w/ 100s of scouts? Hell no. Compton has one, but they fall into that Perfect Game trap too. I went to event there that had one kid from Sierra HS and everyone else from Harvard Westlake and shit.

 

True, it is more cost efficient to buy a basketball and a decent pair of shoes and go play basketball. If you want to become a good baseball player, you have to put in the work at home, which means you need tons of balls, cleats, bat, glove, and more. Much too costly.

 

Just signed into an old twitter account that I never really used and seen that Paco Rodriguez follows me.