High school baseball is its own world

I hadn't been to a high school game in....forever

My last post was about the College World Series. I had intended for this one to come first.

Like me, baseball writers love to write about the best players on the planet, the ones that play Major League Baseball. They can be mythic figures as we’ve seen with Babe Ruth, Joe DiMaggio and Ted Williams to name just a few. That makes them easy to write about. With dwindling local coverage of baseball, whether it’s your local MLB team, college, or travel amateur teams, we get less coverage in traditional outlets like newspapers and magazines than was the case even twenty years ago. Box scores are rarely included unless you are on a digital site dedicated to baseball or sports. High School baseball in the U.S.A., surprisingly (at least to me), is hanging on in terms of participation and interest.

Currently there are roughly 475,000 high school baseball players in the U.S. That number has been stable, which is good news as that means baseball is at least not losing ground at the high school level. The population of the U.S. keeps increasing so by staying in place, high school baseball participation at a minimum is falling as a percentage-of-the-population basis. Because many of tomorrow’s stars first play high school baseball in the U.S., the best high school players are found and heralded particularly as the MLB draft approaches.

Making it to the big leagues is a long shot

0.5% of high school seniors will be drafted by MLB. Of those draftees, less than 10% will ever play in an MLB game.

As a former high school baseball Dad (I never played baseball beyond Babe Ruth), I was very involved in youth baseball where my family grew up as my son Gordon (with whom I have recorded more than 300 podcast episodes), progressed from Little League through high school and even played a little bit in college. High school baseball in the Northeastern U.S. turns out fewer Major League talents than the sun belt areas, but the intensity of high school games and players is no different than it is anywhere else in the country.

I learned a lot while watching high school baseball games when my son played. The games are shorter, much shorter, at seven innings, and the time between innings is faster since there aren’t commercial breaks. But until last month I had not been to a high school baseball game in more than 15 years. In the past three weeks I’ve attended three. A

Why I went to three high school games in less than a month

I was lucky enough to have some great people work with me when I led a commercial print brokerage company. I also had partners (they were called vendors, but I never liked that description) that did the manufacturing. One of our employees met the son of the owner of a partner manufacturer when he came by the office to drop off customer job samples. The short version is that they fell in love, got married and had a son who turned out to be very good high school baseball pitcher. I was peripherally aware of his progress as he played on a championship Cal Ripken team. This was his senior year and the local team from Norwalk, CT had a terrific season as did the kid. The team vied for the league championship losing in the final and lost in the semifinals of the state tournament. What was more interesting to me was watching the entire dynamic of high school baseball without really having the nervousness of watching my own son play! This is unlike the father of the pitcher who I’ve known for 30 years who cannot sit in the stands to watch his son pitch and paces in the outfield behind the fence while watching from afar!

The actual games themselves had high school players giving a good account of themselves as they appeared to be well coached and well prepared. Good pitchers still seem to control the games just as they do at any level. But high school players make mistakes in judgement that you rarely see when watching MLB. I found myself once or twice in every game saying, ‘well the kid is in high school, and he’ll learn.’

In one of the games, the pitcher (who pitched a complete game in every game I watched), had a two-run lead in the seventh inning and the opposing team had two outs. A deep shot to the outfield on a cool cloudy day landed between the outfielders and the overly aggressive runner tried to stretch it into a triple and was thrown out at third base to end the game.

In another game, another tight one, a late game unnecessary throwing error by the opposing pitcher enabled the go-ahead run to reach base which eventually became the game winning run. But that spunky left-handed starter for the opposition also got a hug from his third baseman prior to the start of each inning. I had not seen that before. It was kind of sweet. There’s no crying in baseball but apparently hugging is okay.

High school players cannot be expected to have the same presence of mind and calmness that you see from MLB players. Before you give me examples of MLB players you can spout off who are generally considered poor fielders or baserunners, there is no comparison to any amateur! None.

The local kids from Norwalk lost the semifinal game when trying to put the tying run into scoring position with runners on first and second and two out in the final inning down two runs, they attempted a double steal with the runner being thrown out going from second to third to end the game. Live by the sword, die by the sword.

Seeing baseball in person, yes even high school baseball, puts you in touch with the game in a way watching or listening to a broadcast can never achieve. If you see a game going on as you pass a baseball field (am I the only one who ALWAYS looks at a baseball of softball field when driving or walking by to see if anyone is playing?), think about stopping for a few innings to watch. You may see things you’ve never seen before!

About the Author: Mark Kolier along with his son Gordon co-hosts a baseball podcast called ‘Almost Cooperstown’. He also has written baseball-related articles that can be accessed on Medium and Substack.