The new Nationals Youth Baseball Academy is a “pristine, gleaming” $17M baseball complex that has “risen incongruently on the tumbledown streets” of southeast DC, according to Bill Pennington of the N.Y. TIMES. The academy, “one of several recently established or taking root in major league cities, is an important step for baseball as it confronts its most serious decline in youth participation in decades, particularly among African-Americans.” MLB is “confronting a sense that the game is boring, unfashionable and lacking the flash and flamboyance of basketball or football.” Baseball, especially at the highest levels, "is a sport for the most affluent, whose families can afford the thousands of dollars to be on elite travel teams and attend specialized clinics.” The Nationals “believe they have hit on a formula that not only stokes interest in the game, but also bolsters the lives of children in neighborhoods that have some of the highest crime rates and poorest academic achievement.” The children “pay nothing to attend.” The program “symbolizes the hopes of bringing baseball back.” What “makes the Nationals’ academy different is the collaboration” involving the city government, MLB, the team and private donors. DC provided $10.2M “toward construction costs.” MLB “contributed” $1M, and the Nationals and their charitable arm “put in” $3M. The annual operating budget, “supported by the Nationals Dream Foundation, the city and private fund-raising,” is about $2.25M. The Nationals “borrowed heavily from the experiences of Harlem RBI,” which “provides boys and girls of various ages with year-round sports as well as educational and enrichment activities.” The Nationals also “incorporated nutrition and cooking classes into a core of academic instruction and counseling.” What “resulted is a four-hour program of after-school tutoring in science, technology, engineering and math, in addition to baseball and softball training, for about 220 children in grades 3 through 8 from two of Washington’s most challenged districts” (N.Y. TIMES, 9/27).
