Photograph by Dilip Vishwanat
During the more than 20 years Marcus Townsend has been coaching baseball at Mathews-Dickey Boys’ & Girls’ Club on North Kingshighway in the city, he’s seen the nation’s pastime have better days.
Yet the 39-year-old Townsend says baseball is coming back, and the Revitalizing Baseball in Inner Cities (RBI) program sponsored by Major League Baseball is at the core of the resurgence. MLB started the RBI program in 1989 to stem the decline of urban participation in youth baseball.
RBI is geared toward players who are 14 through 18 years old; St. Louis has six teams, including a “travel team” that goes to out-of-town tournaments. Townsend, the 2006 Baseball America Youth Coach of the Year, recalls a time 20 years ago when up to 90 teams played baseball at Mathews-Dickey, from T-ball through high school. Now that’s dropped to “maybe 40 overall.” He’s trying to increase participation, but it hasn’t been easy.
“When basketball started to go year-round, that took a lot from the baseball programs,” Townsend says. With the amped-up nature of today’s youth sports, even a 10-year-old can play one sport all year. Townsend worries that some kids who aren’t that adept at basketball can languish on the bench or play on “watered-down” teams when they could be playing baseball and finding out they might like it more—and are better at it.
“Basketball is a flash sport, and that’s what kids like,” Townsend says. “Baseball looks boring to them. I don’t mean that in a negative way to the Major League game, but if you watch it, it can lull a child to sleep. But if you watch high school and college baseball, that’s a very exciting sport. It’s the tempo, the way it’s played, the way it’s coached. They take more chances.”
He hasn’t given up yet, though. A grant from the Cal Ripken Sr. Foundation last year helped Mathews-Dickey with the purchase of baseball equipment. There are also efforts under way to get help from the Cards to upgrade the Mathews-Dickey field used by RBI teams. Just “eight or nine years ago” Townsend recalls, RBI teams had playoff games at Busch Stadium.
“Back in the day, we used to have all the preliminary rounds of the RBI championship down at Busch Stadium,” he says. “We’re trying to get the baseball program back to its former glory. We’re trying to get it back.”
