Play bail! Or not.

• Author: Schley, Stewart
• Position: SPORTSBIZ

LET'S CLAMBER INTO THE TIME MACHINE, sports fans, and punch in the coordinates: Tuesday afternoon, June 1971, a ballpark near Arvada's Allendale Elementary. Look there! That's me, the kid with the red hair jutting from a cap, patrolling center field. Scan the area ballparks and you'll find pretty much everybody else there, too. Back then, most kids played ball. Or at least it seemed that way.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Not anymore. Youth baseball is on a downslide, with the number of kids who participate sliced by more than one-third over the last 13 years. The National Sporting Goods Association reports 5.7 million kids between the ages of 7 and 17 played baseball in the U.S. last year. That's a tiny uptick from 2014, but it's way down from the 9 million who took to the field in 2002.

Besides evoking a sigh for the nostalgia of youth baseball past, who cares? Well, Major League Baseball does. Its research shows the best predictor of whether adults come to ballgames is whether they played the game as kids. A declining youth player population spells next-generation trouble. Retailers care, too. The sobering bankruptcy of venerable Colorado sports retail chain Sports Authority signals broader troubles in the market for kids' sports gear, once a mainstay category.

A grab bag of usual suspects commonly gets cited for baseball's declining appeal. There's the siren song of video games, which often are blamed for keeping kids, boys especially, off the diamond and in the basement. There's the fact that parents are more likely to maintain dual careers, making it harder to shuttle kids to and from practices and games. There's the tilt toward early sports specialization that forces families to make (absurd) choices about devoting the next 10 years to a single athletic specialty. And finally, there's the cost. For elite players on club teams, it's not unusual for families to spend $5,000 or more per season on equipment, travel and tournament fees.

In Colorado, and probably elsewhere, there's another interesting influence: how good the hometown boys are playing. After the Colorado Rockies made a lone trip to the World Series in 2007, registration for southeast Denver's Centennial Baseball-Softball Association shot up by more than 30 percent, to around 1,500 applicants, says league manager Randy Seifert. Since then, the player pool has settled at around 750 kids.

Seifert, who started coaching nearly 20 years ago...