Playing baseball and enjoying the game as a fan was a big part of my childhood.

Seeing baseball fade away seems to be a big part of my adulthood.

This past week has always been one of my favorites on the sports calendar. Pitchers and catchers report. That sentence was magic to me. It signified the long-awaited beginning of the Major League Baseball season.

But not this year.

The MLB owners and players union are squabbling over money. Again. This seems to have become an ongoing thing. They remain far apart on certain issues and starting the 2022 big league season on time March 31 appears to be in peril.

But baseball is in trouble far beyond the professional level.

I’ve talked about the empty field syndrome before. When I was a kid, we had to be at the local park by 10 on a summer morning just to get on a field for a pick-up game. Drive by any baseball field during the summer these days and it resembles a barren wasteland.

Kids were still playing, of course. Only now, they were playing organized baseball only. Put on the uniform and head to the local ball yard for an early evening neighborhood game.

Problem is, even that is fading away.

There’s no more Little League baseball at Memorial Park in Butler. That dried up a while ago. Highfield Park is no more. The East Butler Baseball Association has apparently dissolved after being home to more than 5,000 kids since 1952.

Every community had its own youth baseball organization. Meridian and Butler Township merged their resources a few years ago. The Butler County Area Baseball League — which replaced the county’s American Legion baseball circuit — fluctuates in number of teams from year to year.

Some communities can’t find coaches. Some can’t get enough players anyway.

What is going on here?

What has happened to baseball?

A lot of travel teams remain strong. That’s where youth baseball has gone, for the most part. Those teams are primarily for the more talented, more serious players.

Long gone are the years of tossing your ball glove over the handlebars of your bicycle and riding over to the field to join other kids who just want to play baseball for the fun of playing baseball.

The days of watching exciting major league games, with stolen bases, hit-and-run plays, suicide squeeze bunts, have been replaced by home runs, strikeouts and walks. A major league pitcher’s “quality start” is now considered five solid innings instead of a complete game. The latter has practically gone the way of the dinosaur.

The national past-time appears to be past its time — at almost every level.

For pure fans of the game such as myself, it has been a painful demise.

John Enrietto is sports editor of the Butler Eagle