Essex Minor Ball Looks to Build from the Ground Up, News (Essex Minor Baseball)

In the eyes of Essex Minor Baseball President Joe Grondin, this year’s house league season was a home run. “It's doing very well. It was another great year,” he said between serving hot dogs Saturday during the annual Day of Champions event, which serves as a celebration of the sport.

“We got a great turnout [Saturday]. We're going to keep playing for a few more weeks. It's been a beautiful summer.” About 280 kids played baseball at some level in Essex this summer. That works out to 17 house league teams — most of them at the T-ball and rookie ball divisions — and seven travel teams in the Yellow Jackets program. Rookie ball is specially designed play that uses a pitching machine rather than a pitcher in order to give all batters an ample number of quality pitches to hit and develop their swing. Grondin said registration was “about the exact same” as a year ago. House league has been a focus for Grondin and the organization of late. “We're trying to build up the youth more, from the bottom up, more. We have a lot of travel at the older ages, so we're trying to get the housing programs going more from kind of T-ball and up,” he said. Fred Groves is the new convenor of T-ball. “Fred’s doing a great job of getting coaches involved and trying to do even more with the kids,” Grondin said. “It's really the goal with these younger ages; trying to make it fun for the kids, and fun for parents. We had a great group of coaches this year at T-ball and rookie ball.”