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Frank's Place: Spontaneity disappearing from kids' sports

It was the summer of 1996, and - stop me if you've heard this before - Philadelphia was enduring a sports slump.

Full length action batting portrait of Hall of Famer, Willie Howard Mays in street clothes, playing stickball in Harlem, NY, c. 1950's with bystanders and tenements in background. (Handout photo)
Full length action batting portrait of Hall of Famer, Willie Howard Mays in street clothes, playing stickball in Harlem, NY, c. 1950's with bystanders and tenements in background. (Handout photo)Read more

It was the summer of 1996, and - stop me if you've heard this before - Philadelphia was enduring a sports slump.

With little to occupy me here, an enterprising editor suggested a road trip, one whose primary purpose would be to locate pickup baseball games, the kind that once were hallmarks of American summers.

Discovering none on the first day out, I headed for what seemed like a logical destination, Cooperstown, N.Y., a town built on and devoted to baseball.

There I encountered skateboarders at Doubleday Field, a re-creation of 19th-century town ball, and an organized baseball tournament at the Field of Dreams complex. But no pickup games. So I phoned the local high school coach for a scouting report.

He laughed.

"There's no such thing as pickup baseball anymore," said Cooperstown High's Frank Miosek. "I invited a bunch of kids down to a nearby field for some pickup games in the evenings during the summer. I was expecting anywhere from seven to 25. One kid showed up."

The quest continued through the Northeast and parts of the South and Midwest. I don't recall how many miles I drove that summer, but I've never forgotten how many pickup games I found:

Zero.

It was verification of something Edward C. Devereux had written about 20 years earlier. The Cornell professor's research found that hundreds of traditional American games - everything from baseball to hide and seek - were endangered by what he saw as a disquieting trend toward organized activities.

"Little Leaguism is threatening to wipe out the spontaneous culture of free play and games among American children," Devereux wrote, "and that is therefore robbing our children not just of the childish fun but also some of their most valuable learning experiences."

By the 1970s, Devereux noted, more than 20 variations of baseball that children had played on their own a decade or two earlier were virtually extinct.

Since then "Little Leaguism" has acquired a more dangerous ally. The Internet, with its ubiquitous convenience and its infinite variety of entertainment options, has driven a stake into spontaneous play.

For the young in 2015, physical sports are no longer a pastime. Instead, they're increasingly viewed as professional apprenticeships or pathways to college scholarships.

To some extent, each generation has always lamented what it sees as the laziness of the next. And time has a way of skewing reality. In my mind, for example, I was outside playing baseball every summer day. Yet I also recall my grandfather's chastising me often for spending too much time indoors.

But the trend is real enough that it makes one wonder where American sports are headed. How long will it be before our professional leagues are stocked with robotic clones developed through the kind of soulless system we decried when our Soviet enemies employed it?

In many ways, we're already there.

We already identify our best players at an early age. We set them upon one-sport routes from which there can be no deviation. We segregate them into elite groups - travel teams and AAU-type leagues. They're tutored by private instructors year-round, rated and ranked by experts who observe them constantly, pursued ruthlessly by coaches at the next level.

Obviously, we're never going to return to that Roy Hobbs myth, the one in which super-talented phenoms emerge fully formed out of the rural mists. But shouldn't there be a place for those who would develop their skills outside the system, at their own pace and to their own liking?

If nothing else, this phenomenon helps explain why the number of American players in organized baseball continues to decline.

On opening day, 28.4 percent of those on major-league rosters were foreign-born. That number is far higher in the minor leagues, where only 53.5 percent of the 7,278 players under contract were born in the United States.

Nineteen summers after my 1996 excursion, I found myself journeying through the South with the Anderson Monarchs, a youth baseball team from Philadelphia.

In their vintage 1947 bus, these kids traveled to places in Birmingham, Ala., where the great Willie Mays had developed his remarkable talents. Without benefit of organized leagues, uniforms, or top-notch equipment, in dusty fields and on sleepy streets, Mays found room to grow.

Had he been raised in today's environment, you can be certain some coach at some elite baseball academy would have discouraged him from making the basket catches that became his freewheeling signature.

Recently, I saw Mays in a brief newsreel film from the early 1950s, when he was taking New York City by storm. The Giants centerfielder was playing stickball with neighborhood kids the way he sometimes did before heading to his Polo Grounds job.

The joy in all their faces - Mays' included - was striking.

All these summers after that 1996 assignment, baseball, newspapers, and the world are much different places. But there's one thing of which I'm certain:

If some editor asks me to find a stickball game, I've got a better shot at finding the Phillies in first place.

@philafitz