Baseball is becoming a popular sport in Australia with more children choosing the sport as their after school activity.
The sport’s growth has led to the demand for improved facilities, coaching and equipment with many stores teams having to expand to keep up with demand.
RBI Australia owner Matthew Redman said there now more opportunities for people and players to succeed through new tournaments and facilities.
“It allows them to do group coaching and academy-type things,” Mr Redman said.
“That helps kids that otherwise may drop out of the sport because they’re not having much success.
“Now they can be aided and helped a little bit by private industries like me”.
Mr Redman said the success these opportunities have created had helped players progress within the sport, and that this was evident in the 2024 number-one draft pick for the major league, 22-year-old Australian Travis Bazzana.
“Our Australian kid got picked first out of anybody in the whole world as the number one person by the Cleveland Guardians, to go into their system. That’s never happened before,” Mr Redman said.
Many other programs have been created, such as new tournaments that introduce kids to play overseas and help them to develop more skills.
Under 12s Red Bellies representative Mark Wilson travelled to the United States to play In the Cooperstown All-Star Village tournament.
“Our boys struggled on the second game of every day,” Mr Wilson said.
“The team that we lost to the last game, that was their fifth game that day They played two more games after us.”
Although there have been some changes in recent years through the development of baseball in Australia, Mr Redman said there was still a long way for the sport to go to be on the same level as the other Australian sports.
