St. Louie Louie

Parents in the City of St. Louis looking to get their kids started with youth baseball should check out the various City Recreation facilities for Redbird Rookies T-ball programs. Buder on the south side is one that is accepting players now, and if you live in South St. Louis and have a kid between the ages of 4 and 7, you should give Art Watley a call at (314) 664-0327. Lots of these rec. centers participate in the program as City Recreation is one of the leagues that has participated since it was launched in 2004, and the greatest thing about it is it’s completely FREE. The leagues are part of the St. Louis Cardinals’ excellent Cardinals Care program, which is the team’s charitable arm whose purpose is to give back to the community in various ways that help kids, including building many beautiful, state-of-the-art ballparks where kids can play baseball with other kids from their neighborhood. This program is helping to promote baseball in urban areas where kids don’t play much sandlot baseball as they did in decades past. The Cardinals also provide all of the bats, balls, gloves, and uniforms (which include nice hats, shirts and baseball pants) for the kids to use… the idea being that you can basically just show up without any gear at all and play! To find out which of the City Recreation centers are participating this year, give Charles Tyson a call at (314) 589-6120 (it’s best to call after noon). By the way, if there are no City Recreation centers in your area that are participating in the league (for example, I could not get anyone at the Soulard Rec. Center to answer their phone), then you might want to consider some of the other leagues in the area. A complete list can be found here. Play ball!