Misc Yankee News

Has he posted on PP

I would ask him about but I've lost his email address.  I've know Russ for 15+ years from all of our years of posting on these boards. 

what an influx of Latin players from the Islands....good for them....baseball, as well as other sports is a way up for them....

I wonder what the difference is in cost to have your kid play competitively up until the point where they would be scouted and drafted, between the US and these island countries. My wife works with a couple who basically devote all of their income to having their kid go to hockey academies. The recent one he went to before getting drafted into the CHL was 100k a year. I wonder how many of these people who likely sink a couple hundred thousand dollars in the hopes their kid gets drafted and makes an NHL career. A lot of these sports are basically inaccessible to the non-elite of the world. I'm sure the cost is lower for baseball since there is less gear and whatnot. Even my boss at an old job to let his kid play and travel when he was about 14 was around 10-13k a year. It seems like there is a pretty large income divide in the states, so you likely have to have a ton of disposable income, and you kid has to have an interest in the sport, and be able to play it at an elite level. These kids from all of these island countries grow up hitting a ball with a stick and likely have next to nothing else, so becoming a baseball player is probably one of their only options in a country with very little prospects for long term work that is actually prosperous.

And, BINGO! You’ve found the issue that is killing youth baseball in the US. The money paid to an elite player has driven the game out of the sandlots and into organized leagues with lit fields and gates that are locked when there is no formal (paid) participation. It’s nice, but in another way...there is nowhere to play unless it’s organized. Even fields at churches are filled with scheduled leagues.

Of course our national tendency to show disrespect for the property of others is largely to blame, too. There is a once-beautiful water fall near my home that has been so horribly vandalized by spray painters that it’s off-putting to look at. Vandals would surely wreak havoc these days on an unlocked little league field that we used to play on as kids (if a game was scheduled, we would leave the field). I remember they used to charge $2.00 to rent your uniform for a season. That was the cost. Even then, my mom would never spring for the money, so I never played little league. Can you imagine? $2.00 won’t get you a bottle of water at a game now.

Kids in the islands play baseball because they love the game, like it was in the USA back when the players made reasonable pay to play a game part time and took other work in the winter. There is nothing worse than big business or government when it comes to destroying anything that is fun or relaxing.

Before I left MD, I worked a lot in Amish country. I was amazed at how much recess time the Amish spent playing baseball. It was also played at a lot of their holidays and weddings. Even the ladies joined in. Maybe we need to send scouts to the Amish communities. There may be a budding Randy Quaid like Amishman who will give one and a half times the effort of the English...

Ryan Bollinger has been promoted from AA to join the NY Yankees...

He was with the team for one day back in May and was DFA’d...He’s a 27 year-old lefty who will certainly be DFA’d again when the Yanks need to take out the garbage. That’s the ugly, smelly side of MLB...

Good luck to Ryan. Hope we get a 20-run lead so Boone will let him pitch 1/3 of an inning someday...

Damn. I didn't realize Lynn was listed at 280 lbs.