Jun 1, 2024 4 min read

The 2024 regular season is nearly complete for local teams, but some teams weren’t able to play as many games as others, despite a relatively dry spring.

The reason?

The recent creation of middle school baseball programs that are keeping kids from playing their rec games.

The Founders League, from which the Washington County entrant into the Pony World Series in August is chosen, has 21 teams competing in it this season. Yet looking at the number of games played per team shows that with a week remaining in the regular season, some teams have played as many as 13 games. Others have played as few as four.

What gives?

In school districts such as Charleroi, Beth-Center and California, the same players that comprise the Pony team also are the same ones who happen to be on the middle school team. And there’s only so much pitching to go around.

So, while all of the teams in Washington Youth Baseball, Canon-McMillan Youth Baseball and even the former Route 50 League teams, all of which also are now part of the Founders League, have already played double digit games at the Pony level, going into this weekend, Charleroi’s Pony team has played four games. California has played six, many of which have come in the past two weeks as the program scrambles to make up games it couldn’t play while the middle school season was taking place.

And somebody thought this was a good idea?

Baseball is a game of skill. It’s not easy to hit a baseball. It’s not instinctive for a person to stand in front of a hard ground ball or line drive and catch it. It’s not natural to throw a ball overhand.

Because of that, part of my duty as the president of the Founders League here in Washington County the past decade has been to provide more, not less, opportunities for our youth to play baseball. It’s a great game and the kids learn so much from it, first dealing with success, but more importantly, how to deal with failure.

And baseball is a game of failure. You’re not going to get a hit in every at bat. Not every pitch or ball that your throw is going to go exactly where you want.

That’s the beauty of the game.

Players learn to bounce back from those failures to succeed the next time. It’s an important life lesson.

And by killing our recreation youth baseball programs, which are already struggling with numbers because of declining populations, options in other sports and travel baseball programs, middle school baseball programs are hurting, not helping, the development of our players.

Here’s hoping the local athletic directors will come to their senses and work with, not against, their local youth baseball programs.

We had over 250 players in the Founders League this season. The two 14-year-old all-star teams that came out of the league last season competed very well against all-star competition from around the world. The team that played in the Pony World Series in 2023 made it to the championship game and trailed Japan just 2-1 entering the seventh inning. The team that was put together that played in the Host Zone Area qualifying tournament went 2-2, just falling short of giving Washington County two teams in the Pony World Series. And that was before the programs in California, Charleroi, Ringgold, Beth-Center and Bentworth were added.

With the addition of those areas, Washington County stands a good chance of winning the World Series and also qualifying two teams for the tournament.

But we can’t do it while also fighting against our own school districts.

• We’re now two weeks into Steelers OTA sessions and there’s been little in the way of real news to come out of the UPMC Rooney Sports Complex.

That’s a good thing.

Outside of a player getting a new contract, the only other news to come out of OTA sessions is typically bad.

After all, everyone’s in the best shape of their lives, while everything new is going to work great. So that’s never really noteworthy. The only other news to come out of these sessions typically involves an injury. And the Steelers have avoided that to this point.

• The NFL Draft being awarded to Pittsburgh for 2026 will be the biggest event to take place in the city in its history.

The draft drew 700,000 people over three days in Detroit this year. Given Pittsburgh’s relative ease of travel distance from so many other NFL cities, it wouldn’t be a surprise to see the area host 1 million visitors on draft weekend in 2026.

Dale Lolley hosts The Drive on Steelers Nation Radio and writes a Sunday column for the Observer-Reporter.