7/8 year pitching

If a parent can truly say his child is having fun, I don't care if he's only two, organized ball is ok with me. But having fun doesn't equate to learning baseball skills. It can, but one doesn't necessarily go hand in hand with the other.

Having fun means enjoying what's going on, even though there is a learning process going on. Getting the two mixed up is the wrong thing to do. As players get older and better, and the competition increases, it becomes much more difficult to have real fun so let them have it while they can.

Childhood doesn't last long enough in today's world. Riding bikes over homemade ramps, climbing trees, throwing rocks at old logs, swiping apples from a tree, teasing your sister, dying you hair green, and a million other things teach very important lessons and create fond memories. I wouldn't give up my baseball memories for anything because they helped shape my life, but so did all those other things too.

In a kids life, most things outside of school should be spontaneous. Some structure is good, but care has to be taken not to get carried away. I'm not sure, but I'd guess folks like Ag aren't against organized baseball per se.

They have been around long enough to know every organized league or team isn't run in a way that's really good for the kids. If they're like me, they'd rather err on the side of caution rather than see a child hurt or "turned off" of baseball. There's plenty of time for children to be allowed to be children and still learn to play baseball.

BTW, I'm not encouraging anyone to steal apples, or anything else for that matter. But kids do things like that. I learned how eating too many green apples will make you sick as a dog and there's no feeling like getting caught and getting hauled back to your house to face the "old man"!

For kids, there are a million lessons to learn, and although playing baseball will teach many of those lessons, billions of people have grown up, and even one or two have become world leaders, found cures for diseases, and all in all had pretty successful lives without ever playing baseball.