No baseball fields in the hood.
No swimming pools either.
Basically, baseball is a kid’s game. A back yard in a neighborhood can serve for elementary school kids to play baseball and as they move from 2nd grade to 4th grade they can switch to softball. With no yards of their own, and lots of inner city pavement, the kids will play basketball. It is just simply a case of housing patterns. How many kids in Texas learn how to ice skate on frozen lakes? And then play ice hockey on frozen ponds?
That’s exactly what I was thinking. If they don’t have the space to practice the game, they can’t get good at it.
But if the situation changes, they will perform extremely well.
There are fields but they are vacant. Inner city kids are playing basketball instead.
Growing up, myself and my buddies played sandlot baseball every day in the summer from morning to evening. Today you never see a group of kids playing ball, everything now is organized. From little league to travel teams and Federation ball.
Travel teams are ridiculous, the parents are forced to attend every weekend tournament wherever the team manager wants to play and that is expensive. It's a parental commitment they have to adhere to if they want their kid to play and it's common for the parents to switch their kid to another team the following season with the promise of a better coach.
A friend on my senior softball team used to coach kids baseball with the intent of keeping the team together as they advanced thru the different age groups. He gave up because each year the better kids would be poached by other teams that promised that better coach.