Pastime or past its time? Baseball tries to come back in inner cities – STLtoday.com

Nearly 45,000 fans filed into Busch Stadium on April 15, Jackie Robinson Day in Major League Baseball. They watched the Cardinals, all of whom wore jersey No. 42 in honor of the man who broke baseball’s color barrier 69 years earlier, slug a stadium-record six home runs in a 14-3 rout of the visiting Cincinnati Reds.

Earlier that evening, less than five miles away, the predominantly black high school teams from Northwest Academy and Roosevelt played a Public High League game at Minnie Wood Park. They had no scoreboard, an undersized mound and all-dirt infield, a backstop but no fencing, wooden benches but no dugouts, and fewer than 10 spectators watched a 19-10 game won by Roosevelt that at times hardly looked like varsity-level competition.

The experience for the Hornets and Rough Riders is typical of the baseball disconnect between urban St. Louis and other, more affluent parts of the area. Poorly maintained fields, the lack of interest and equipment, and the widening talent gap between rural and suburban kids from their inner-city peers in large part caused by the lack of access to select programs from an early age — all play a role in declining participation and opportunity for many would-be baseball players in St. Louis city, North County and Metro East areas like East St. Louis and Cahokia.

On this day, Roosevelt and Northwest accounted for more stolen bases and fielding errors than hits and defensive outs, and home-plate umpire Henry Lovings might have done as much rules explaining as rules enforcing. At one point he stopped the game because the Northwest baserunners, who had batting helmets but no caps, started running after their batter took off for first base on a called strike with a 3-0 count and the bases loaded.

Later, two batters after his team scored its final run on a wild pitch in the bottom of the fifth inning, Roosevelt coach Ben Corrigan called timeout and told the umps his team had gone ahead by 10 to invoke the mercy rule. The game ended after a discussion among the umpires, Northwest coach Brandon Wright and Corrigan, who doubles as the Roosevelt athletics director and had to step away from the field earlier in the inning to take a phone call and coordinate a bus ride for the girls soccer team.

Corrigan later discovered the Rough Riders led by only nine runs when the game was called, but the conference game remained completed anyway.

“It’s like a circus,” he said.

POOR FIELDS, DECLINING INTEREST

Gary Glasscock, a longtime coach and athletics director at Metro, who served as interim athletics director for St. Louis Public Schools during the baseball season, said none of the teams played all nine of the league games on their schedules, partly because inclement weather made the fields unplayable. PHL teams do not have their own baseball parks, instead using fields owned and maintained by the city’s parks department.

The quality of the fields, along with the quality of play, is far from ideal.

“Some might have athletic ability, but they don’t have the necessary skills,” Glasscock said. “They don’t know what a crow hop is or what a cutoff man is. They don’t know about taking leads, stretching, pitching, just the intricacies of baseball that any kid should know who’s played the game. They come in with little degree of knowledge.

“To make matters worse,” he added, “the facilities are horrible.”

Much the same is the case for public high school teams in other impoverished, predominantly black parts of the area, including North County and the Metro East area. Cahokia and East St. Louis, for example, went a combined 4-30-1 this year, with three of those wins against each other.

Normandy was the only North County or PHL team to win a Missouri district championship, prevailing in a six-team group that included Jennings and four PHL teams. Normandy then lost 34-0 against Duchesne in a Class 4 sectional playoff.

Glasscock said two city high schools that have athletics programs do not field baseball teams, although McKinley plans to add one next spring. He said it’s been nearly a decade since any PHL baseball program has fielded a sub-varsity team.

“It’s just very typical for what’s happening in a nationwide trend with the decline of urban baseball,” Cahokia athletics director Earl McDowell Jr. said.

Corrigan and McDowell said athletes at their schools are more interested in basketball, football and track, partly because baseball is a slower-paced sport that requires more players to practice and more of a financial investment in equipment and development. In addition, McDowell said NBA and NFL athletes are marketed more effectively to inner-city athletes who don’t see many MLB players who look like they do.

According to an April 15 report by USA TODAY Sports, 7.8 percent of the 868 players on opening-day MLB rosters this year are African-American, with one playing for the Cardinals. In 1986, four years after the Cardinals won a World Series with black players such as George Hendrick, Willie McGee, Lonnie Smith and Ozzie Smith, 19 percent of MLB players were black.

Ray Straughter and Derrion Watson, 15-year-old black players who compete for the St. Louis Browns youth baseball academy, said the game is overlooked by many of their peers. Straughter also plays for McCluer North, and Watson attends Hazelwood East.

“They think it’s a childish sport,” said James Moose, a pitcher and infielder for Northwest. “They think it’s easy. They don’t think it’s competitive enough.”

PAYING TO PLAY

Baseball, at least at a competitive level, might also not be accessible for inner-city athletes in St. Louis.

The Cardinals sponsor a free, introductory league for children ages 5-13 called Redbird Rookies, which according to Cardinals youth baseball commissioner Keith Brooks serves roughly 4,000 players in leagues throughout the area. The Cardinals also help sponsor the MLB-wide Reviving Baseball in Inner Cities (RBI) program for more advanced high school-aged players. St. Louis’ RBI program is run by the Mathews-Dickey Boys’ & Girls’ Club, which this year had one division consisting of 10 teams.

Vashon graduate and RBI alumnus Jared Odom, a coordinator in baseball operations and scouting for the Cardinals, said those programs aren’t yet producing many players who are good enough to compete at a college or professional level. The best youth baseball in St. Louis is played by select organizations that have superior training facilities and coaches and come with much more of a cost.

Odom said he spends about $2,000 a year for his godson, 10-year-old Herbert Burnett III, to play for a St. Louis Gamers program run in part by former major league players Scott Cooper and Matt Whiteside. Most of the players in the Gamers organization and comparable select teams in St. Louis come from more affluent, suburban areas.

The Browns, founded in 1999 by Baptist preacher Al Manson Jr., fields four teams ranging in age levels from 9-16. Manson said all his players are black and most are inner-city kids, and he charges between $300 and $400 a year. Manson doesn’t turn away players who can’t afford that, saying he often holds fundraisers at his church to cover costs.

“There are some competitive African-American teams that are out there, but they’re few and far between,” Odom said. “Financially, it’s tough to keep up with the Rawlings Tigers and St. Louis Prospects and St. Louis Gamers of the world. No African-American youth organization has the indoor facilities that these clubs offer year-round and the training and qualified coaches.”

That’s one of the reasons high school teams such as Northwest and Roosevelt play a far-less-polished brand of baseball than, for example, the squads from Francis Howell and MICDS, which won state championships this spring in Missouri’s largest classifications. The last PHL school to win a baseball state title was Beaumont, which closed in 2014, with an all-white team in 1960.

East St. Louis, which won its last Illinois regional title in 1988, hasn’t won a Southwestern Conference game this century. Considering the state of youth baseball in that community for much of the last two decades, it’s easy to understand why.

Keith Williams has lived in East St. Louis all his life, but that’s not where he played organized baseball for the first time. Williams, 19, first competed as a 9-year-old in Peoria, Ill., where a family friend coached a summer-league team and recruited him to take part.

Williams played in Peoria that summer and the next two as well but didn’t join another team until his junior year at East St. Louis. He didn’t know of any competitive youth teams or leagues in his hometown, because there weren’t any until the summer before his sophomore year.

“I didn’t know where to start. I didn’t know who the coaches were or any teams,” Williams said. “Baseball isn’t really big over here like that.”

The Jackie Joyner-Kersee Center, where the East St. Louis baseball and softball teams play their home games, started a youth baseball program as part of the St. Louis-area Khoury League in 2013. Mike Greenfield, programs and facilities director for the center, said the league has five teams ranging in age levels from 9-15 that compete against other Khoury League teams from nearby towns such as Belleville and Collinsville.

He said participation has about doubled since the first year to more than 80 this year. The Jackie Joyner-Kersee Foundation also supports a tee-ball league and has more than 130 kids enrolled in the Redbird Rookies program, as well as an American Legion team consisting of East St. Louis high school players.

Greenfield said there hadn’t been any such organized youth baseball in East St. Louis since the 1990s. That’s when the longstanding Jackie Robinson Khoury League program, which helped produce players such as former major league second baseman Homer Bush, dissolved.

The Jackie Joyner-Kersee Khoury League teams are “getting better,” Greenfield said. “When we started it, it really struggled. Kids had never played baseball in our community. There’s this generational gap of kids that didn’t play baseball.”

There might as well be in some of the other underserved areas in greater St. Louis. Rae Merriweather, who oversees the athletic programs for Mathews-Dickey, said youth participation is thriving in basketball and football but has declined in baseball. He said his organization has eight tee-ball teams this year, down from 20 less than a decade ago.

Merriweather said there are multiple reasons urban kids served by Mathews-Dickey opt for other sports. Some children and their parents perceive baseball as boring, with not enough action, and it’s more comfortable and convenient for families to pick up a sport played in an air-conditioned gym as opposed to an outdoor field exposed to the elements.

Economics also are a factor, both in terms of start-up costs and potential payoffs. Equipment, professional training and select organizations can be expensive, and players who earn college scholarships must continue to pay to play in many cases. NCAA Division I baseball programs are limited to the equivalent of 11.7 full scholarships, which generally are spread throughout a roster in partial scholarships.

“They are pricing kids out of baseball,” Merriweather said. “If you don’t pay, you’re not that good.”

BRIDGING THE GAP

That isn’t the case for all of St. Louis’ inner-city athletes, though. Some are playing baseball at competitive levels at little or no cost.

Merriweather said he’s seen a recent uptick in participation in the RBI program, which receives $50,000 a year in sponsorship. Brooks said an annual charity golf tournament hosted by former Cardinals player Ted Savage covers a chunk of that cost, and the Cardinals cover the rest.

Merriweather said the level of play in the RBI program is not on par with some of the area’s select programs. But there are RBI players, some of whom also have competed for select teams, who are experiencing success at the high school level and beyond.

One of this year’s RBI all-star teams includes Gateway STEM graduate Daniel Cross, who is playing for Harris-Stowe University, a historically black NAIA school in St. Louis. Some of his all-star teammates attend private or public schools in affluent areas and are succeeding at the high school level.

Florissant resident DJ Stewart, an infielder and pitcher for Westminster who will be a senior next year, was an All-Metro League selection and received honorable mention on the Class 4 all-state team. The 6-foot-2, 210-pound Stewart said he’s accepted a scholarship offer from Eastern Illinois, a Division I school.

Outfielder Andrew Jones earned second-team All-Suburban XII Conference South Division honors for Parkway North as a junior this spring. Jones attends Parkway North as part of the city’s desegregation program, which since the early 1980s has bused inner-city kids to suburban schools and allowed suburban kids to take advantage of magnet programs at inner-city schools.

The desegregation program also includes RBI all-stars James Bradley of Lafayette and Desmond Ingram of Marquette, both of whom have played select baseball for the St. Louis Sting.

Their all-star team is coached by Chris Smith, a longtime Mathews-Dickey volunteer who has coached high school baseball at Gateway STEM and Whitfield and said next school year he’ll be joining the staff at Webster Groves.

“There’s more resources for basketball and stuff like that,” Cross said. “With baseball, as long as you’re in the right program and you know a coach that will support you, it’s fine. If you’re dedicated to it and you want to play every day, then you’ll get it done.”

Williams, who lives with two siblings and a single mother in East St. Louis, also has been afforded an opportunity to develop his skills. He was one of four East St. Louis players who competed last summer for the Midwest Surge, a select organization owned by Kirkwood and Maryville University graduate Nick Herrin.

Herrin said a conversation with Harris-Stowe baseball coach CJ Bilbrey prompted him to check out Cross and then-East St. Louis player Kevione Winfield as prospective players. Herrin also saw Williams, LaRon Arnold and Anthony Wilson while attending a Flyers practice, and said he was impressed with their talent level, passion for the game and willingness to learn more of its finer points.

Herrin said he also realized the four East St. Louis players probably wouldn’t be able to pay the $1,700 he usually charges players to compete for the Surge, who hold tryouts for their 13 teams, travel to tournaments and have access to indoor and outdoor training facilities. So Herrin said he let Cross and the four East St. Louis players join the team for free, covering some of the costs through online fundraisers.

Arnold, Cross and Winfield now play for Harris-Stowe, and Wilson has become a coach for the Surge. Williams, whom Herrin described as a smooth, soft-handed infielder with good bat speed, said he’s hoping to land with a college program as well after being a third-team selection on the All-Southwestern Conference team.

East St. Louis coach Don Stovall said it had been about a decade since a Flyer was recognized as an all-conference baseball player.

“I think there’s definitely a good amount of athleticism, certainly from these areas. It’s just about getting the amount of reps and the right type of instruction,” Herrin said. “The unfortunate part about it is that it’s very hard for players, regardless of their talent level, to get a look or to be considered for some of the higher club teams because financially, it’s just rough. It’s a lot of money.”

Gamers director Mark Gallion, whose organization charges up to $4,000 a year for high school-aged players, said it had a partnership with the Cardinals when it was founded in 2007. He said the franchise donated money so products of the Redbird Rookies program could play for the Gamers, who had six low-income players in their first year, but the number of those players dwindled each year and the partnership fizzled out after a few years.

Gallion said only a few of the 200-plus players who now compete for the Gamers do so at a discounted cost based on need, and none has the fees sponsored entirely. He said the organization would be willing to do that if an inner-city athlete had the ability and desire to play for the Gamers but not the means, but said it’s surprisingly rare for players and their families to reach out and inquire about financial assistance.

“I wish there were more that asked. I’d go out and find somebody to pay for it. It wouldn’t be hard, really,” Gallion said. “It’s just … there’s no pipeline there at all. It’s just a matter of having a pipeline in place and having enough critical mass to get that done, and also someone taking the leadership to do it.”