Here's your feel-good story of the day: The effort from the Chicago White Sox to bring baseball back to the city is paying dividends, as the team's various programs now support hundreds of young players.
Here's your feel-good story of the day: The effort from the Chicago White Sox to bring baseball back to the city is paying dividends, as the team's various programs now support hundreds of young players.
Baseball, once a core part of city life for youngsters, has been usurped in recent years by basketball as the sport of choice. MLB has made some effort to correct this with the woefully underfunded Reviving Baseball in Inner Cities (RBI) program, but it's really been up to teams to make the program work.
And so far the White Sox have. Two separate initiatives are designed to bring kids to baseball. As mentioned, the Amateur City Elite program now features five travel teams and 100 high-school players, with 14 alumni graduating to the college ranks. The RBI program now features 24 teams and 360 kids, and the White Sox's Inner City Youth Baseball program for 9-to-12-year-olds now has 30 teams with 450 kids. Baseball certainly won't solve every problem in south Chicago, but when you have hundreds of kids playing organizing baseball and graduating to college, it's a pretty good start.
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