Pursuit is a sports feature series highlighting athletes, coaches, and staff and significant sporting events from North Bay and the surrounding area.
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It may be "America's past time" but Canada and Canadians alike have laid claim to some of baseball's biggest moments and brightest stars in the almost 150-year history of Major League Baseball. There's Joe Carter's home run that won a Canadian team, the Toronto Blue Jays, a World Series on Canadian Soil. There's Chatham-Kent, Ontario's Fergie Jenkins and Maple Ridge, B.C.'s Larry Walker who are immortalized in baseball's Hall of Fame. And with the dawn of every new season, there's anticipation and excitement for what's to come in the months ahead. Will 2024 be the year the Blue Jays finally get back to the World Series? Will Etobicoke, Ontario's Joey Votto have one more great season at age 40? Or will someone in North Bay discover baseball in 2024 and let it be a game they come back to every summer for the rest of their lives?
Paul McLean is certainly hoping that last one rings true. He says baseball in North Bay is growing again and he is hopeful that the trend continues this summer and over the next couple of years within the North Bay Baseball Association (NBBA).
“Baseball locally has kind of a funny way of following the Toronto Blue Jays. When they do well it captures the imagination and the interest of more kids,” says McLean, the Commissioner of NBBA who adds they have over 400 kids already registered for the various leagues from T-Ball through to Bantam (16U).
Although the Blue Jays have been swept in the Wild Card Series in their last two playoff runs, the team is young(ish) and exciting to watch and McLean says the game itself has transformed.
“It’s modernized itself, it's become the cool sport again for kids and they have more access to the players they look up to through social media, so we’re seeing that uptick in local numbers," he noted.
"We’ve made some adjustments this year as well to make space for everything.”
That includes revamping the fundamentals and looking at alternative spaces for T-Ball. He adds House League is now being retitled “Local League,” and they will continue to expand upon the Panthers travel ball team.
McLean says this is connected to Canadore College, as the community college is in the early stages of planning to field a competitive team in the OCAA.
“They have a club program in progress right now and are hoping that the city program can eventually provide players for that team.”
McLean says with the construction of the indoor turf field owned and operated by Canadore, there’s a greater chance more kids will be able to focus on baseball year-round.
“We’ll be able to hold tryouts earlier than we ever have. We can start throwing programs and keep those players working on those skills and those fundamentals all year round.”
Tryouts have been held for the 9U, 11U, and 13U age groups while the tryouts for the 15U age group will take place this coming April.
“We got feedback over the years that there is an appetite out there for players who want to be a part of that travel team," noted McLean.
"But we always had difficulty in figuring out who they play and where are they going to go to play those games.”
The first way to solve that problem is to mix the travel ball players in with the players in the local league. Those Panthers players will have additional practices, games and tournaments.
Secondly, McLean says he borrowed an idea from some local soccer leagues to create a development team.
“Those kids will get to play a weekly intrasquad game and get to play at a higher skill level. This will help us down the road because as the kids get older, the interests change with jobs, and other things going on and this will give us a bigger pool of players to pick from. It also gives kids a chance to not fall too far behind those players at the higher end of the skill level,” say McLean.
McLean says another change this year is to use a pitching machine every other game.
“Once a week you’ll bat against the machine, the next game you’ll face the pitcher. I know we need to develop pitchers, but we also need to keep kids engaged and the issue is that at a younger age there’s just a lot of walks and so with the machine, the thinking is we get more players to swing at the ball and put it in play.”
McLean says the hope is that with these changes they can also recapture the imagination of some people who have moved away from the game. He credits local player and NBBA Director of Operations Kurtis Winrow for keeping interest in the league going and looking outside the box for ways to get more kids to want to play the game.
At last year's “Baseball in the Bay” event, Winrow and Jacob Brown, Commissioner of North Bay Men’s Baseball, worked together to put an event together to showcase the working relationship between the two leagues and the willingness to grow both.
Winrow said to Baytoday, “For all the Kids in the North Bay Baseball Association, this is a great opportunity to expose themselves to the higher levels of baseball within the city. For the adults in the senior league, it is an opportunity to set a great example and be leaders in the city. I believe that sport creates a strong community in itself, and having baseball give to the North Bay community will make for a very rewarding event for everyone involved.”
McLean echoes that sentiment. He says, “We need people to come back to baseball and this is an opportunity to do that.”
He says they are also looking for volunteers.
“For all those players that played Stingers baseball and looking to be back around the game, or the people who played before but don’t yet have kids of their own, we can use them and their knowledge to help grow this for that next generation. That way we can restock the senior leagues and the high school leagues and regain that high level of competition and eventually build up to that competitive team at Canadore.”
For those interested in playing, registration is online here: https://northbaybaseball.ca/ and McLean says there is always a need for volunteers in a variety of roles.
