Baseball Tonight, Today, and Tomorrow.

All things in life have a Ying and a Yang.  When ESPN debuted Baseball Tonight way back in 1990, being a life-long student of the game, I thought I had died and gone to Heaven.  I'll never forget because at the time, I was playing American Legion ball in Albany, Ga. and every night when I came home from my game, I could catch up on what happened that day in the Big Leagues.

Within a few minutes I could find who won their game, who made a great defensive play, and of course, who hit a bomb that night!  ESPN had found a way to compress a 3 hour game into a 3 minute highlight and it was perfect, (or so I thought).  It was only years later before I could first see the damage this "briefing of baseball" was causing.

Today, kids play more baseball games than any other time in history.  With the continued growth of travel ball, it is not rare for a kid to play anywhere between 75 to 100 games a season.  And yet, if you talk to these same kids, you will learn that even though their skill level/ability is better than ever, their Baseball I.Q. is unfortunately, (in my opinion) lower than ever.

It is very rare for a kid to sit and watch a Major League Baseball Game in it's entirety.  I don't know if you know this or not, but Baseball is a 2 and a 1/2 hour game with 20 minutes of action.  And now that we have become a culture of quick, our kids are not learning the ebb and flow of pitching in early so you can pitch away late, the ying and yang of a lead-off walk (which scores 90% of the time), and the give and take of trading a ground ball for an out with the infield back in the fifth.

The solution...I don't know.  I just know it makes websites and forums like http://www.checkswing.com/ that much more important because the little things have to be passed on for our game to survive in a world full of Ying, and not enough Yang.