Baseball DIY

You know, lots of things were better when I was a kid: cartoons, the environment, my hairline. One back-in-my-day thing I had forgotten floated to the surface of my memory when, last week, I saw a commercial for a TV show hosted by Harold Reynolds that taught baseball fundamentals to kids. The commercial flashed shots of current MLB players running drills with Little League kids on a sun-soaked, chlorophyllicious field. Then the commercial cut to ordering instructions for this home video.

Come on. When I was a kid, there was a show in which contemporary MLB players ran drills with Little League kids on a sun-soaked, chlorophyllicious field, and I watched it and loved it, though I can't remember its name right now ("I think that would be "The Baseball Bunch," says the wicked-smart Jeremy "Grizzly" Murrish). I envied the kid who got to play catch with Ozzie Smith or shag fly balls from Tony Gwynn. Tell me why there can't be a show like this on television (either a big-four network or on cable) now, especially when seemingly everyone agrees that kids need to be brought back to the game. Why does it have to be a home video that kids have to remember to try to convince their parents to buy for them?

If you want to bring kids back, and you think that television is a large reason why kids have little interest in it, why not put one and one together and invade their small screen world? And why price some kids out of a love for the game? Not every family has 20 bucks to drop on a video hosted by Harold Reynolds. ESPN or ESPN2 definitely could use some quality programming like this to fill the time currently reserved for Teammates or Dream Job.