Manatee Baseball, Inc. Youth Club

We play "CLUB BASEBALL" in the tradition of the 1850's New York Knickerbockers Base Ball Club. Originally, "Base Ball" games were played by social and fraternal clubs seeking exercise among friends. Then money got involved. "Somehow or other, they don't play ball nowadays as they used to ... . I don't mean to say they don't play it as well. … But I mean that they don't play with the same kind of feelings or for the same objects they used to." said Pete O'Brien of the Brooklyn Atlantics in 1868, the year before the Cincinatti Redstockings became the first club to ackonwledge that it paid its players. Then, the game became "Profesional"; a commerical spectacle. Baseball has become professional baseball. It is its own focus and an entire industry. Our's really is more of a "club" than a "league". We seek to embody baseball's roots by rededicating ourselves to baseball's social and fraternal roots. Our focus upon the virtues of competition MUST be secondary to our relationships with each other as club members in a baseball fraternity! "If you are not prepared to be our friend, then please do not join our club."

"To me, America is like baseball. If I swing at a pitch and miss, what am I going to do, give up the next two pitches? If I swing and miss at this pitch, that's just a swing and a miss. There's no morality attached to failure. Failure morally has a moral component, but failure in a creative or professional sense is just information. That's one of the big things for me about the U.S. Our kids, by the time they're five years old, know that if they can hit a ball three times out of 10 pitches, they'll go to the Hall of Fame. They know that seven misses or seven failures are no disgrace. That's just playing the game. Beat that attitude!" - Craig Ferguson (Scotsman now American citizen)