How HS Baseball Contributes to the Demographic Reality of Major League Baseball

My first full-time high school coaching job was with a school called Crawford High School in San Diego. Crawford had once been one of the traditional powers of the old city league decades before, but had long since fallen upon hard times as a baseball program. More than 15 years have passed since Crawford had a winning season, and in that period there have been seasons of 3-23, 2-18, 0-16, 3-20 (twice), 0-24, 1-24 (only win was by forfeit), 0-18 and 1-23 (only win was by forfeit), just to name a few. That's five seasons in 15 years where the baseball team at Crawford never actually won a baseball game. When I joined the program, it was in the midst of a losing streak that we ended at 46 games. In the two years following my departure, the program lost all 41 games it played.

Imagine being a baseball player entering high school, would you join a program with that kind of record? As a result, Crawford's program has no incoming ballplayers and a ton of attrition due to the fact that a lot of kids will not take those kinds of defeats over and over again very well. Especially when you throw in the fact that there are a lot of gang ties between the Central League programs. These traditional Central League programs are Crawford, Hoover, San Diego High School, Lincoln, Kearny and Morse, though the league changes slightly each year; one year it contained Clairemont and Mission Bay and that led to the Crawford team losing a game 38-0 in just 2.5 innings before having to come back to the same field the next day to play the same team again. To get the kids to come to the second game, I had to promise to buy them all dinner after the game. I literally used 10% of my team's budget for the whole year to buy them all Thai food because only one player on the team had ever experienced that kind of cuisine and I figured they might as well make a positive memory on a day when they had to go back to a field to suffer another humiliating defeat with no chance for victory.

Maybe you're thinking the records are the whole picture. Maybe the games are competitive but the Colts simply can't eek out the close ones. For the years 2015-2019 the Crawford Colts scored 87 runs total and gave up 1,167 in league play. The four main other teams in the league (Morse, Kearny, Lincoln and Hoover) all had positive run differentials in the same period and if you combine all the runs given up by those four teams, they would still have given up 10 fewer than Crawford did on its own. Lincoln, which was only in the league in 3 of the 5 years, still scored 193 more runs in Central League play than Crawford. Why would anyone want to play on a team where the average score of every game is Crawford 1, Opponents 19? 87 runs scored in total in five years...not five games, five years. Mission Bay High School scored 69 runs in 5 innings against Crawford in 2017 (they were a league opponent for that season), Crawford took three YEARS to score as many runs as Mission Bay scored against them in 5 innings.

FOR MORE ABOUT MY EXPERIENCE COACHING AT CRAWFORD AND THE LIFE OF A LOW-BUDGET HS BASEBALL COACH, LOOK FOR THE SECTION IN MY UPCOMING BOOK:  "YOU'RE NOT WELCOME HERE:  STORIES OF DISCRIMINATION AND EXCLUSIONARY PRACTICES IN BASEBALL"