Baseball is fun lately, but not for kids. And it’s not the best time to be young outside ballparks, either

“Hi, Mom.” Eloy Jimenez is childlike in a game for adults (Fox Sports)

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This might have been a really good week to be an American kid.

But it wasn’t. Actually, I’m not sure anymore that any week is good for American kids.

Baseball tried. Kind of. But is baseball, or any major sport, willing to put itself out to serve youngsters?

Is anybody?

The good stuff could have started with the Field of Dreams Game last Thursday. It turned out to be a memorable event, from Kevin Costner’s bravura overture to the White Sox beating the Yankees on a walk-off homer into the corn.

Great baseball stories Saturday night, too. Two no-hitters were foiled by homers, and one was finished by a Diamondbacks pitcher named Tyler Gilbert making his first start. A no-no on the first try? A little-kid fantasy if there ever was one.

Fox said more people watched the cornfield game than any regular-season game in 16 years. Not many were kids, I’d wager.

Baseball -- or any major sport -- is not oriented toward them anymore. Too expensive.

Long gone are the days when a kid could dig the price of a ticket out of the coins in the bottom of a pocket. Baseball games are more directed toward old guys and date night now. 

Not little boys, and certainly not their sisters.

If kids manage to develop affection toward their hometown team, they may be rewarded with a dozen of their favorite Cubs players being traded off at the deadline. Don’t cry, my babies: it’s just business. 

Teams do have promotions to drive kids into stadiums. After all, they are the future of the sport, they say.

What the teams usually don’t say is that they feel some actual responsibility toward children. Which is weird, no? They’re in the business of a child’s game but barely any children are involved. 

It’s about time that baseball admits it isn’t interested in future generations unless and until they have fat wallets.

It’s about time the rest of us do the same. 

For instance, our kids view us with disdain as we fail to make much progress on zeroing-out atmospheric carbon as critical deadlines for climate change approach. Most of us are totally unaware that the international COP26 Climate Change Conference was canceled last year, even though some scientists said coming to agreements right then was probably necessary to forestall a crazed future when our descendants will suffer and die.

We’ll try again in November.

But probably not very hard.

Some of those who contributed to the latest United Nations climate change report, released this month, say that the future is here now, anyway. We’re in the midst of the hottest summer in memory, spectacular storms are battering us, pole ice and permafrost are melting and drought-fed fires are raging worldwide.

What do we need to see to get excited and save our progeny? A plague?

Oh, yeah. Check.

We have managed to make our children the primary targets of the Delta, and post-Delta, phases of the COVID-19 pandemic. While we waited to make the vaccines available to our relatively COVID-19-resistant kids, a huge cadre of Amercans wasn't taking shots, making younger people susceptible to the newer variant, which likes the young more than they do. 

Hospitals are starting to fill with children, and we’re not going as nuts about that as one might expect.

The biggest reason for COVID-19 endangering our youth is, of course, the politicization of vaccination. Somehow, millions of Americans have been convinced it’s okay to risk the lives of the most innocent Americans for some ethereal political point.

We politicize our young people habitually. About 2,500 of them died in the political war in Afghanistan. Definitely political. If we were really trying to exact revenge for 9/11, and discourage its recurrence, we would have gone after the Saudis, who facilitated the attacks at least as much as the Taliban. 

But we never saw B-1’s over Riyadh.

Not enough evidence? We didn’t have any evidence at all supporting Iraq’s alleged role in 9/11 or most of the other crimes that nation was accused of in 2003. But that econo-political war had to move forward, against a much less economically significant opponent than Saudi Arabia. 

About 4,500 of our young people never moved forward again. Many more were seriously wounded.

It was just a fraction of the number of Iraqi and Afghan kids who died and were injured. There’s no way we worry much about them when we care so little about our own.

After all, we put politics ahead of gun control, and watch blithely as kids are shot dead.

Not true! American parents must certainly care, as they devote so much of their time and treasure to their own children.

That didn’t impress the millennials. They may have been doted upon as kids, but they know what’s up. A historic percentage of them want to postpone their own parenthood or eschew it altogether.

I guess we don’t miss everything, however. We’ve extended the child tax credit.

Good for us. Maybe parents can put the $250 or $300 toward funeral expenses.

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