BEAAUUTTTYY

While sitting in Little Red Hen, waiting for the next delivery, a blast from the past waltzed right through the door. Jay Zimmerman, or "Jay the Ump"(pictured to the right), is the main little league baseball umpire in Glencoe. He umped just about every single game I played in from 2nd to 8th grade. Jay the Ump was notorious for screaming "BEAAUUTTYY" (short for beautiful) every time he called a strike. All the children would attempt to impersonate his famous saying, but nobody could quite capture the charisma Jay had. I could say a lot of things about this Glencoe celebrity, but his most important quality, is that he LOVES baseball. He loves baseball so much that when I used to get walked, he would ask me "You wanna hit?" and then let me stay at the plate until I got a hittable pitch.
Anyways, he walks in the store, immediately recognizes me and asks me if I still play ball. After making small talk for a few minutes, he proceeds to tell me about how I never should have quit baseball. Granted, I had a pretty nasty curve in 7th grade. He told me about how kids these days quit too easily, and stop playing a sport just because.
He blames televised sports for this change he has seen first hand over his 30+ years as an Umpire. Jay's theory is that kids can now create sporting memories by just watching their favorite professional team play. At first, I thought this is just a generational gap, and this old man doesn't understand television, and therefore blames it for baseballs downfall over the past few years. But then I began to think about it, and how I heard earlier that day that this years Super Bowl had 115.5 million viewers: the largest viewership of any televised event ever. I researched it more and found that the record has been set four times in the last five years, proving television viewership is definitely rising. I began to think:  what if these seemingly unrelated trends were actually correlated? Does the heightened access and viewership of professional sports cause children to be less interested in participating themselves? 
The bolded question above cannot be answered without the raw data of the  Glencoe Baseball Association's (GBA) enrollment over the past two decades compared to youth viewership of professional baseball. Unfortunately, I do not have the access to this data, but I'd love to hear some people's opinion.
And by the way, for all the old Glencoe Baseball players, Jay did tell me that he believes the key to baseball is the "ready position". In case I had forgotten the thousand times he stopped the game to tell at the left fielder to maintain it.