Part 1 — Gordon Beckham…Where Are You?

Posted on October 4, 2011 by admin

I watched with great amazement when I saw Gordon Beckham play at the University of Georgia. He was arguably one of the best shortstops to play at the collegiate level.

I saw Gordon play the University of Arizona the first home series of his senior year. In the first game, he hit a monster 440-foot shot over the fence and, in the same inning, laid out for a ball in the six hole and got up and hosed the guy at first.

I know everyone in Georgia was proud when Beckham was selected eighth overall in the 2008 Major League Baseball Draft by the Chicago White Sox. As I watch him now in the
major leagues, I wonder where all the Gordon Beckhams—the All-American kids—have gone.

Gone are the days that the local high school kid makes it to the majors in this great sport.

Gone are the days when you can watch a game on TV and the announcer introduces a
player and mentions his local U.S. town or college.

This situation is one of the reasons why we developed the Hitting Jack-It™ System, the
leading variable weighted hitting system: to help encourage young American kids to take up the sport of baseball and become good hitters, the essence of the game. Baseball hitting aids, good baseball equipment and bat training provide a solid foundation for players to hone their offensive skills.

Baseball–Increasingly Global

Here are the stats for Major League Baseball (MLB) reported in a 2010 study by the University of Central Florida’s Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sports. Information in the report is based on the 2009 work force data provided by MLB.

• As of Opening Day, 28 percent of Major League players are foreign born, representing 15 countries and territories.

• Major League rosters in total are 27 percent Latino, 10.2 percent African-American and 2.4 percent Asian. The percentage of Latino and Asian players declined by 2.1 and 0.4 percentage points, respectively, from the prior year.

For black U.S. players, the 2009 percentage turned out to be a high point. The percentage of African-American players on Major League rosters on Opening Day this year dropped to 8.5 percent, the lowest since 2007 and half of what it was on Opening Day 15 years ago, according to MLB statistics.

Since 1990, baseball has seen a sharp decline in the number of black players, which peaked during that period at 19 percent in 1995. The numbers bottomed out at 8.2 percent in 2007.

What is happening to slowly diminish participation in baseball among young adults in all groups in America, the home of the grand game?

We’ll take an in-depth look at some key factors in Part 2 of this blog post, coming shortly.