Team focus fading in summer baseball
From Brendan McKay to Neil Walker to Stan “The Man” Musial, Western Pennsylvania’s best baseball players typically followed the same routine after their high school season ended.
Before the rise of AAU and showcases, players joined their local American Legion post and played upwards of 30- 40 games through the summer, competing against neighboring teams from around the county and keeping their skills sharp all while maintaining a focus on community and team- oriented baseball.
But times have changed, and so has the entire concept of summer baseball.
High school players with hopes of reaching the next level now tend to spend their summers traveling the country to attend a handful of “showcase” events, where they perform drills and hone their individual skills in front of college coaches and scouts. Others prefer to play for AAU or “travel ball” teams, competing in high- profile weekend tournaments across the region rather than staying home, and as a result, Legion baseball is fading fast.
Because of these factors, as well as America’s declining military veteran population, Legion membership is down from a high of 3.3 million in 1992 to an estimated 1.8 million today. States such as Florida, Texas and California, where showcases have become king, have experienced significant drop- offs in Legion enrollment.
After more than 500 teams populated the state in the mid- 1990s, Pennsylvania now has only 252 teams in Legion, and only 24 teams in Region 6, where the WPIAL- area teams are located.
Mark Saghy, who coached at Mt. Lebanon for seven years and won a WPIAL and PIAA championship before moving on to form the Western Pennsylvania Elite Baseball League in 2005, has witnessed the rise of travel ball and the fall of American Legion firsthand.
“When I was growing up and playing back in the ‘ 80s, Legion ball was it. It was big,” Saghy said. “The Allegheny County playoffs would be held out at the South Park Fairgrounds. There were people everywhere and it was a whole big event over a four- day weekend.”
Saghy, who now coaches the Steel City Wildcats travel team, started the WPEBL as a
compromise for parents and kids, seeking to bring them the best of both worlds of summer baseball.
“You had kids that didn’t want to play community ball anymore, but you had parents that didn’t want to travel all the time and deal with the expenses and the time involved with tournament teams,” Saghy said. “So we got together and said, ‘ Why can’t we have a tournament- type league where we just play in Western Pennsylvania?’”
The WPEBL had 12 teams comprised of what Saghy described as 80- 90 percent of the best high school players in the area, and the league thrived early on before participation slowly started to dwindle, causing it to fold last year.
“For the first five or six years, it was a tremendous success,” Saghy said. “It was really good, but unfortunately, more and more kids decided that you have to travel to be recruited by the top schools.”
Nowadays, if a player wants to get noticed by college coaches and scouts, many believe their only path is to attend as many showcases as possible while eschewing the idea of playing competitive summer baseball.
South Park baseball coach Steve Bucci, who coached South Park’s Legion post from 2000- 02, has a different idea when it comes to getting noticed. While Bucci doesn’t discourage his players from attending showcases or playing travel ball, he believes the talent they display on the field is more important than where they put it on display.
“It doesn’t matter what showcase you go to — just be the best guy on the field,” Bucci said. “Because if you are, people are going to hear about you. Is it nice to go to showcases and do things and get in front of coaches and get that extra exposure? Yes, I don’t think that’s a bad idea. But playing for the community, I think that should mean something, and it has swung the other way where it means less and less.”
Seton LaSalle coach Mike Wagner, meanwhile, said if he wanted to sign his son up to play Legion baseball in the summer, he wouldn’t even know where to look. Wagner played Legion when he was in high school because it was a “natural progression” from Colt League, but he knows his son, Brett, has plenty of other options to choose from now.
“I’m kind of surprised Legion is still around,” Wagner said.
While Bucci and Saghy both spent time coaching their local Legion teams while also coaching their high school ballclubs, time constraints made it difficult for them to keep managing both. But some high school coaches, like Blackhawk’s Bob Amalia, refuse to let the tradition die out.
Amalia, who just finished his 20th season as the Cougars’ high school baseball coach, has spent 32 years managing Blackhawk’s Legion post, winning one state title and making five trips to nationals along the way.
“Pretty much every kid who plays for us ends up playing Legion baseball, which is a big plus for our program, because you get an extra 25 or 30 games to practice, and you learn about kids, that’s the key thing,” Amalia said. “Every year you learn about a couple kids who showed us they could do it and we didn’t know if they could.”
Saghy believes installing a pipeline from high school ball to Legion ball like Amalia has done at Blackhawk is the key to maintaining a successful Legion organization.
“American Legion has kind of lost some luster, but there’s still some communities where it’s king,” Saghy said. “It’s big in Hopewell, it’s big in Blackhawk, and the reason it’s big in those communities is those high school coaches coach the Legion teams.”
Hopewell and Blackhawk proved Saghy right again this summer, as the two teams battled it out for the Region 6 championship last week, with Hopewell prevailing to earn a trip to DuBois for the American Legion state championship tournament.
Although Amalia’s squad came up short in the finals only a couple months after falling to Beaver in the WPIAL Class 4A championship game, he believes his players gained vital big- game experience that other local All- Stars are missing out on.
“Any time you put the kids in a position to play for their teammates and their community, it’s a positive thing,” Amalia said. “When you’ve got your friends in the community coming there watching, you’re representing a lot of people. So there’s a lot of pressure. It’s not like you’re just out there playing for nothing.
“And fortunately, we’ve had a pretty good tradition, and the kids know that.”