MLB's Unfair European Youth Try-outs
No Swedish players have been selected for this year's MLB European Academy in Italy.
None of the 21 players aged between 15 and 18 who took part in the Swedish try-outs were considered good enough to take part in the European Academy. There's a really simple explanation. The try-outs are biased in favor of southern Europeans.
The MLB representatives showed up here in the middle of April, just after the snow melted. To add insult to injury they held the try-outs way up north in Leksand, instead of down south where the fields had at least been snow-free for a few weeks.
Worse than that, in mid-April the Swedish players have only been training outside for few days. Hardly anyone has actually played a baseball game by then. No matter how much you train indoors during the winter, nothing replaces actually practicing on a real baseball diamond.
Why do they start up here, and hold the try-outs farther south later in the spring? By the time the MLB scouts show up down there, those kids have been outside for weeks, in some cases, like Italy, they have probably been playing outdoors all winter.
If there is an American counterpart to the MLB European Academy, do they hold their first try-outs every spring in Alaska, and end up in Florida and Arizona? Because that is the equivalent of what they do here in Europe.
They don't hold any MLB tryouts in Alaska, youth or otherwise. The nearest adult tryouts to Alaska are in Canada. The bulk of scouts don't show up in Alaska until the Alaska Baseball League, one of the only wood-bat summer leagues in the US, starts in June, and then they're mainly scouting college players and exceptional high schoolers. I imagine that northern European kids have the same struggles being noticed that Alaskan kids do. But, still, we've had kids get drafted. April, however, is waaaay too early for a reliable idea of a sub-arctic kid's skill. Taking grounders on grass after using concrete floors all winter really messes with you for a week or so at the beginning of the season.
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