Baseball Hotbeds of Talent

Baseball America recently featured an article highlighting the success of the East Cobb (GA) area and the plethora of young HS players who graduated from the program who were drafted recently.

Georgia Tech coach Danny Hall cited the influence of the Braves broadcasts on TBS into homes throughout Georgia fueling interest. Population growth fueled the growth of youth league programs which provided a pipeline for the HS programs. As we will touch on later and in subsequent posts, the soccer retrospectives post-World Cup cited the preeminence of HS programs as the linchpin for talent development in major sports across this country. The youth programs are the tinderbox that lights the fire under most successful HS programs in every major sport in this country. It is how we develop are athletic talent here in the States.

It got me to thinking about where some of the other recent Hotbeds of Baseball Talent are located across the country and internationally. Many of the factors that Coach Hall cites in the Baseball America article are touched on in the book The Talent Code.

FROM THE INTERNATIONAL FRONT:

Daniel Coyle, author of The Talent Code features the Curacao, Venezeula LL programs recent success
http://thetalentcode.com/2009/03/30/pabao-little-league/

The success of the Venezuela programs as well as the never ending stream of talent coming out of the Dominican Republic runs counter to the belief that you need expensive (travel?) programs and equipment in order to succeed. As part of the post-mortem of the World Cup, some of the comments from the introspection of the future of soccer in the US seemed to focus on success depending more on affluence and increased availability of inherently athletic players (recruited from other sports) rather than opportunity, quality coaching and time to achieve success. More on that in later posts.

Of course, Cuba always has to be considered in any list of hotbeds of talent and although the pipeline of talent from Puerto Rico seems to have slowed of late, they will always be a factor internationally.

FROM MLB.COM - TEACHING BASEBALL THE CUBAN WAY
http://mlb.mlb.com/news/article.jsp?ymd=20040127&content_id=631218&vkey=news_mlb&fext=.jsp&c_id=null

Of late, our neighbors to the north in Canada have been producing more and more quality first rounders and impact players, I don't know of any specific regions of the country that are over producing talent there.

The Hampton Roads / Roanoke VA area has recently been featured due mainly to the success of recent draftees like Michael Cuddyer, Ryan Zimmerman, David Wright and the Uptons (B.J. and Justin).

The Lake Charles, LA area consistently produces quality professional players through their successful youth programs and vaunted HS program Barbe HS which seems to provide a never-ending pipeline of quality players to LSU and other Louisiana college baseball programs.

Of course my former Florida stomping grounds, the Tampa-St Pete.-Clearwater area, are always fertile ground for prospects due to weather and the availability of good coaching in the form of former professional players. Miami, Orlando and Jacksonville are also always in the mix.

The entire state of California, especially the southern area, could be considered a hotbed historically.

Areas that are hosts for the alphabet soup of youth organizations and their tournaments also tend to develop into talent hotbeds. The Aberdeen (MD) area, home of Ripken Stadium, and Omaha (NE) which hosts youth tournaments around the playing of the College World Series are examples. Shawnee (KS) hosts many of the USSSA World Series qualifying tournaments and Cooperstown (NY), home of the Baseball Hall of Fame, are favorite destination points for many travel teams from across the country.

I'm sure I'm leaving an area or two out, it seems like the Seattle (WA) and Raleigh-Durham (NC) regions had their day in the sun as well, but these are the ones that came to mind for me.

Speaking of days in the sun, one factor that seems very intuitive (duh!) is the effect of warm weather on the production of baseball talent. Everyone acknowledges the effect, but I wanted to research how prevalent it was. So as part of a project for a statistics class, I put together a spreadsheet to find out the effect.

Baseball Players by State vs. Temps

http://www.scribd.com/doc/34586202/Baseball-Players-by-State-vs-Temps

I was able to find the number of MLB players whose date of birth was between 1976 and 1982 and sort them by state from the site baseballreference.com.

Then I compiled the % of each states population that is comprised of males age 18-24 from the census.gov site. From this we can derive the pool of males aged 18-24 that are available to be baseball players.

On a macro basis we take the Total Players Produced and divide by this derived Population of Males 18-24 to determine the # of Males 18-24 it takes to produce one baseball player overall.

Then we do the same calculation per state and produce a "production ratio" by comparing the macro rate versus each individual states rate of production.

Now we know, how successful an individual state is producing players versus the national average.

We compare this to the average state temperature obtained from NOAA-CIRES- CDC based on data from NCDC (whatever that means). Appraently, they keep track of these things.

From here we can correlate the effect average temperature has (if any) on the production of baseball players.

The data suggests that there is a .5408 correlation between the Rate of Players Produced versus Average Temperature. A moderate correlation.

This gives us a .2925 r-squared which indicates that about 29.25% of the effect on a states ability to produce baseball players can be attributed to Temperature.

Pretty cool, huh? Groan.....Now we know.