Tom Simon is waxing eloquent on baseball, the game that he lives and breathes, and its decline in popularity in recent years. Younger generations are just not as interested as they are in other sports, said Simon, 55. Gone are the days of impressive baseball card collections, or pickup games around the neighborhood.
He’s on the phone offering a reporter one of many ideas he has about how to reverse the trend — for example, that coaches should pick up the pace during practices to make them more exciting — when he gets a call from his 17-year-old son.
When Simon gets back on the line, he can’t help but laugh. His son, a baseball player at Burlington High, called to ask permission to be late to his American Legion team’s practice that evening. The European Championship soccer game between France and Switzerland was about to head to penalty kicks, and the teenager wanted to see it finish.
“Tell me that doesn’t sum up everything that you and I just talked about. You can’t even make this stuff up,” Simon said.
Simon, of course, told his son no — much to the teen’s disgust. But no other answer could be expected from Simon, a Burlington-based lawyer and author who founded the Vermont chapter of the Society for American Baseball Research. He’s come to love soccer, too, but today’s lesson was about honoring the commitment his son made to the team.
Simon said his son’s call typifies the state of the game among young people. For myriad reasons, fewer kids are flocking to baseball at earlier ages, and fewer still are advancing through to the high school level.
Baseball suffers from a steep drop-off problem, especially around the time kids graduate to the full-sized field at around 13 years old. The distance between the basepaths generally leaps from 60 feet to 90 feet — a hard adjustment even for quality players, Simon said.
The impact on the sport is dire. Almost 2 million fewer kids aged 13-17 play baseball than kids ages 6-12, according to a Aspen Institute’s 2020 report. No sport loses more participants by middle school.
It’s enough to make Simon wonder whether baseball, America’s favorite pastime, is now becoming America’s past.
“I think the pace of play has something to do with it, I think the steroid era probably has something to do with it,” Simon said. “But mainly it’s just progress, it’s Darwinism. [Young people] have better options.”
Top of the first
A recent Thursday is what might be called a perfect night for baseball. It’s a cloudless evening, and the crowd at Centennial Field in Burlington is drenched in early-summer warmth. The sun is hanging just over the third base line, causing the player in right field to flip down his flashy sunglasses.
All baseball players at this level, regardless of talent, know how to do the seemingly impossible: look cool.
It’s necessitated by a sport that involves a lot of standing around. The players chew, spit, make strange signals to each other with their hands and adjust their protective equipment. The result is a kind of unique swagger in which young men manage to look good in tight pants and button-front jerseys.
A cursory look around Centennial Field, where baseball has been played since 1906, suggests the future of the game is in good shape.
Earlier this year, that stretch looked in peril. Reshuffling at the top of the baseball structure resulted in the Vermont Lake Monsters losing their MLB affiliation. The University of Vermont, which played the first-ever baseball game at Centennial, dropped its baseball program in 2009.
After two weeks in limbo, the Futures Collegiate Baseball League announced it would welcome the Lake Monsters into its fold. Instead of developing pros, the teams would be made up of standout college players looking to stay sharp over their summer breaks.
The difference in quality is apparent to the trained eye, but most in attendance don’t seem to notice. Families corralling swaths of children decked out in official Lake Monster gear populate the stands. As of the first pitch, everyone is glued to the action.
But the action never comes — not really. The odd runner reaches on a softly hit ball that squirts through the infield, or reaches on an error. After three innings, the game is scoreless. Restless cries calling for Champ, the team’s mischievous mascot, soon break out among the younger attendees, and are soon matched by cries for snacks.
Bottom of the fifth
The Lake Monsters are an attractive outing for those plugged into the Vermont baseball community, and perhaps the best place to see homegrown talent at the next level.
This year’s roster has featured nine players originally from the state, including Sky Rahill, a Burlington High graduate who Simon saw play while still in Little League.
“Man, he really pursued baseball so hard to get to where he is at now,” Simon said. “He’s really one of the very few who did that.” Rahill plays college ball at sixth-ranked Salisbury University, and this year contributed to the team’s first NCAA Division III national title.
Many in the baseball community — and pro scouts — are also excited about Owen Kellington.
Geoff Green, Kellington’s high school coach, said the former U-32 High School standout was topping 94 mph on the radar gun during his state title-winning senior season. That’s enough to make opponents’ pupils dilate, and a pro scout’s eyes water.
“In my experience, I’ve never seen a pitcher in Vermont throwing that hard,” Green said.
Kellington’s numbers this year were extraordinary. Of the 147 outs he recorded across 49 innings, 133 came from strikeouts. Only 18 batters reached base safely via walk (11) or hit (7). On Tuesday, Kellington was named Gatorade Vermont Baseball Player of the Year.
Projected to be drafted by a big league team in July, he’s the type of player that Vermont doesn’t frequently produce.
Winooski-born Ralph LaPointe, the University of Vermont’s first superstar, debuted in 1947. After his death in 1967 at age 47, the clubhouse at Centennial Field was renamed in his honor. More recent are players like Hall of Famer and Bellow Falls-born Carlton Fisk, or Kirk McCaskill, from Ontario, Canada, who played baseball and hockey at UVM.
Until the draft, Kellington will be one of a handful of fellow Vermonters with the Lake Monsters. Kellington struck out three batters over two scoreless innings in his first appearance on July 19.
Green thinks Kellington’s success has already captured the attention of younger kids, which could provide a boost to the program he’s been building since becoming head baseball coach in 2019.
“It grabs them, gets them involved in baseball, and once they’re there, you can keep them in the system,” Green said.
It’s at a much-needed time for the sport. Around the country, Little League programs are struggling to fill out leagues, and high schools are finding it difficult to fill varsity rosters.
Those numbers are down locally, too. In 2018, 2,729 players were enrolled in Vermont’s District 1 Little League, which includes the greater Burlington area. That number plummeted to 1,893 during a Covid-dominated 2020 season, and the 2,064 reported this spring is hardly a recovery.
In the Central Vermont Little League, which feeds into the U-32 region, things are a little better. Enrollment climbed to 389 in 2019 from a three-year average of 375 before then, and enrollment was on track to increase once again before the pandemic limited the league’s program offerings.
Still, Green said the biggest challenge to running the U-32 baseball program is keeping numbers up, and kids matriculating through from middle to high school.
“A lot of the action that makes a game fun doesn’t happen as frequently at the lower level,” Green said. It can be a challenge for young pitchers to hit the strike zone consistently, leading to play that drags. Even when pitching is accurate, making good contact on a round ball with a round bat is one of sports’ greatest challenges.
For kids who are drawn to the action, comparably fast-paced sports such as lacrosse offer a tantalizing alternative. Both are played during the spring, making them direct competitors, even as more sports move to year-round models and the prevalence of one-sport athletes is on the rise.
When Simon was a kid, he said, the lacrosse team was made up mostly of the kids who weren’t good enough to keep playing baseball. Now, the sport has begun poaching baseball’s better athletes at earlier ages.
“Lacrosse is nonstop action; you are always doing something,” said Bob Johnson, associate executive director of the Vermont Principals’ Association, the governing body of Vermont’s high school athletics.
Johnson pointed to Bellows Free Academy-Fairfax, which he said didn’t field a varsity baseball team this year after years of success. The school’s relatively new lacrosse team, however, just notched its first varsity playoff win in program history.
It’s a tale of two sports: the best of times for lacrosse, and the worst of times for baseball.
Top of the ninth
Another thing about baseball: The game is long. Two hours into last week’s Lake Monster game, there were still four more innings to play. Heads of household start to trickle out, glumly referring to “work in the morning.”
As some people depart, an older man walks by in a shirt colored in unmistakable Catamount green and gold, bearing the message “Bring It Back.”
The “it” refers to the baseball program at the University of Vermont, which was cut, along with softball, in 2009 by the athletic department, citing budgetary concerns. Jim Carter, an assistant baseball coach at UVM when the program was canned, later formed the Friends of UVM Baseball to attempt to resuscitate the program.
“I think [dropping baseball was] the worst decision, in my opinion, that’s ever been done at UVM,” Carter said.
Carter has four reasons for why baseball should return: 1) Centennial Field is an iconic location, 2) Vermont has rich baseball talent, 3) It’s a relatively cheap program to fund and 4) The teams were almost always competitive.
Robert Corran, the previous athletic director, reportedly told Carter that his group would have to raise an eye-popping $15 million to fully endow the team. Officials reached that number by multiplying the $1 million operating budget for baseball and softball across several years, then adding inflation, Corran told Seven Days in 2016.
Jeff Schulman took over as athletic director in 2016, and for a moment it seemed as though baseball’s return could be on the table. Carter said the $15 million number has dropped to $1 million, but the alumni he’s spoken with have been unwilling to commit to donations without more initiative by the university.
All athletic departments are conscious of compliance with Title IX, a federal law that protects people in education programs from discrimination based on sex. A new men’s baseball team would mean creating the same number of positions and scholarships for a women’s sport as well.
Friends of UVM Baseball is now “totally dead,” Simon said — Carter suggests it’s “on life support” — even though the sentiment to “bring it back” is very much alive.
Even with a successful endowment, a privately funded baseball program would be in a precarious position.
Boise State University, which dropped its program in 1980, brought baseball back just in time for the 2020 season. After 13 games in a pandemic-shortened season, the university decided to terminate baseball once again.
Gary Van Tol, then-head coach of the Boise State team, told The Athletic that he had cobbled together the necessary funds himself. His daughter raised over $100,000 through a GoFundMe campaign.
It wasn’t enough to appease university officials, though, and Boise State became one of at least five Division 1 schools to drop their baseball programs during the pandemic.
It’s immaterial to speculate whether Kellington, who’s committed to play baseball at the University of Connecticut, would have considered suiting up for the Catamounts if the option had been on the table. Still, perhaps there’s something of a loss when the state’s best high school baseball talent in decades doesn’t have the option to stay home for college ball.
And it’s more than Kellington. Simon said the talent level in Vermont is “as good as it has ever been” — it’s not a matter of not producing good players, it’s a matter of getting enough players to fill out a competitive high school team.
Major League Baseball viewership among younger people has been in dire straits for years, but the league experienced a boost in that demographic during the pandemic. As the league appears to improve its ability to sell its must-watch superstars, lovers of the game will hope more kids get sucked in.
But being late to baseball practice to watch soccer would have once been unthinkable. Now it’s the state of the game.
“I know a lot more kids who follow the English Premier League,” Simon said, “than the MLB.”
Read the story on VTDigger here: Amid declining numbers, Vermont baseball lovers fear for the future of America’s pastime.
