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There's an article in today's New York Post- it's not online, for some reason- that notes the shrinking of Little League baseball:

Rosters for Little League boys baseball and girls softball are down 10 percent nationmally in the last few years- from a peak of 2.99 million in 1997 to 2.68 million last year.

Coaches around New York agree that fewer kids have baseball fever.

Well, yeah, of course. This has been going on for a while, and Major League Baseball's turned a blind eye to it, praying that it'll turn around all by itself. It won't.

I love baseball, but it really does have some problems. Take, for example...:

1. It's boring. A kid raised on video games and hip-hop doesn't want to know from "moves at its own leisurely pace" and "unfolds slowly and tantalizingly." He just wants action, offense, movement. You get that with basketball. You get more than that with video games. Here's a little bit of an Electronic Games Monthly review of an upcoming game: "25 to Life thrusts you onto the mean streets, where you'll wake up to barking dogs, car alarms, and plenty of gunfire over the sounds of old-school and new-school hip-hop." If you're a suburban teen, which would YOU choose?

2. It's dad's. Dad wants you to play ball. You and your friends want X-Box and skateboards. You choose.

3. It's late. Baseball, like other pro sports, is starting games later and later, arrogantly assuming that they don't need younger viewers on school nights. But if those kids can't stay up to watch, are they going to even care about the sport?

4. It's lame. The NBA projects a sense of danger- tats, bling, trash talk. That's not to say all that's desirable on a moral level, but if you're a kid, who are you gonna follow, an attractively "dangerous" Sheed or Derek Jeter?

But it's not a recent thing- really, this has been developing for decades. I remember when ball fields were ALWAYS taken, sun-up to sundown. You had to fight your way on. The exodus started in the city- I remember driving through an inner-city Paterson neighborhood about 30 years ago with my Dad, and I can still hear him marvel at how the baseball fields were empty in mid-afternoon. Soon enough, they were empty in leafy suburban Wayne, too. Today, other than the actual Little League games on the weekend, the baseball fields around here in Southern California are wide open, year round. It's kinda sad, actually.

On the other hand, there ARE plenty of baseball games for XBox, PS2, and GameCube. I saw one on ESPN, a critical and disapproving segment examining one game that involves players randomly fighting on the field for no apparent reason- you could have your player take a whack at someone as he goes around the bases. The narrator, the mother, the psychologist, the players all thought this was a terrible thing, and they're probably right. But I'm not sure baseball has a whole lot of options left to it. If it takes a video game that encourages fighting, well, that's what they'll do.

And if it's really popular, they'll do it for real. Hey, if hockey's on strike, there's an opening for it.

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Benny Krass is dead.

Okay, you may need some schooling here. Fair enough. If you didn't live in Philadelphia over the past 30 years, you wouldn't really have any reason to know who Benny Krass was. Here's who he was: he was Crazy Eddie, Crazy Gideon, the Coronet Brothers. He was Cal Worthington and Joe Gegnas and the grown-up An-tho-neeeee! from the spaghetti commercials. He was Earl Scheib and Earl "Madman" Muntz. He was every late-night local pitchman you've ever seen, and less- at least 20 seconds less. And if you'd been in Philly, you'd be able to recite this with just the right intonation, the right nasal whine, the right level of shout:

IF YOU DIDN'T BUY YOUR SUIT FROM KRASS BROS., YOU WUZ ROBBED!

Krass Bros. was, until a few years ago, an anomaly, an old-fashioned men's suit store on a stretch of South Street that was until fairly recently a no-man's land on the frontier between the gentrified, faux-hipster shopping blocks closer to the river and the shakier area closer to Broad Street. Nobody- nobody- you or I knew would have bought a suit from Krass Bros., especially when you saw the commercials- Benny, a little skinny guy with slicked hair and a big mouth, wearing a lapel-less suit in which nobody could ever look presentable (OK, maybe a pop combo circa 1962 in matching suits, but that's it), or in a diaper or a cowboy outfit, screaming a stupid joke sell line, followed by the address and the slogan "Store of the Stars." (Stars? Who? Fabian? Jimmy Roselli? The guy who hosted the dance show on channel 17?)

But those commercials... you couldn't escape them, you'd notice them, you remembered them. And as annoying as they were, you laughed, and they reminded you that you lived where you lived, shared something in common not with the entire country but with just the folks in your little area. It was another thing that kept you local, kept you aware that not every place in the country is identical, those TV and radio commercials that could only be from your town. In Philly, it was Benny, and Big Marty, who "really does... sell carpet... cheaper," and "the bosses' daughter for Atlantic Transmission," and Joe Gegnas, who sold Chryslers with "none of THAT stuff" (a picture of a bull). There was the pre-Scandal Patty Smyth singing "Is it Franks? Thanks," and Dave Cash sliding into third where Richie Ashburn popped up with a bottle of Triple Cola. There was (and is, I suppose) the mysterious Ideal, where you'd go "if you have a passion for fashion... and you have a craving for saving...." You knew the answer to "hey! Where did everybody go?" (and that it was Betson's Furniture, unless you were at the shore, where it was Jason's). You knew who "the world's smallest Chevrolet dealer" was, and could imitate Ruth Rosoff. And if you lived just a few miles northeast in New York, you had the Coronet Brothers selling kiddie furniture, and the hard-hatted union guy from JGE being cajoled with "hey, Jerry! What's the story?" And if you grew up in L.A., you had Cal Worthington and Spot, Ralph Williams, and, these days, Crazy Gideon and those weird Spanish language car dealer infomercials with mariachi music alternating with car pitches ("Bobby Colon presenta El Show de Keystone Ford," as opposed to "El Show de Downey Dodge"). Wherever you grew up, wherever you lived, there was something in those commercials to remind you where you were.

Some of this stuff still exists, of course, but it's not as it was. We get TV stations from Denver and Boston and New York and San Diego as well as from L.A., and it's mostly the same, even late at night, with all those "dating" ads and jewelry chain ads. And the cities themselves seem less distinct- if you've seen one gentrified upscale shopping district with The Gap and Banana Republic and Abercrombie, you've seen, um, most cities in America. That's why we need to hold onto the Benny Krasses of the world. As long as those guys are out there, local guys with local accents and local crappy production values and local corny senses of humor, there'll be something to remind us that Cleveland isn't Dallas, Minneapolis isn't Miami, Philly isn't San Francisco.

Just don't make anyone buy lapel-less suits. Nothing is worth THAT.

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The funny thing about traveling too much from coast-to-coast is that at some point, you completely lose track of time and day. I reached that point on this round, abetted by the later and later daylight- it's still light and it's 7:45 pm? Geddoutahere- and different schedules. I just got back from a long day, and it's already past 9 eastern and I haven't written this yet and there's more work to do and- wait, is that John Mason introducing the starting lineups for the Lakers and Pistons?

Yup.

Gotta go.

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