Sean Kirst writes about a success story in creating a summer baseball program for 13-15 year olds in Syracuse.

The hard work of truly fashioning the league - schedules, signups, all that stuff - was done by Jimmy Oliver and Kevin Murphy. There were plenty of skeptics. There were people who believed these kids simply didn't care about baseball anymore. There were people who believed these kids, if they signed up, would get bored and stop showing up for games. The original list contained the names of roughly 100 kids, and one of the first questions was whether to have six teams of 16 or eight smaller teams.

After much discussion, we went with six teams. We figured the rosters would dwindle as kids fell away.

The result, however, was dramatically different.

The kids show up, every game. Every last kid. They are passionate. They are coachable. The other night, when we called off practice because a field was soaked by rain, I received calls from two different kids who went to the field and insisted - despite the mud and puddles - it was dry enough to play.

It's nice to see there is still some passion for the game in the youngsters.