The push to put baseball into the minds of more North Philly kids is going to take a ‘brotherhood’

Everyone who attended Temple’s Dialogue on the Diamond event on Wednesday had the same hope: That it was a first step in helping more of Philly’s youth play baseball, specifically in North Philadelphia, where the Phillies originated.

Temple’s Klein School of Media and Communication hosted leaders in the Phillies organization to discuss youth baseball in the city. Speakers on two panels included former Phillies Jimmy Rollins and Doug Glanville, team president of baseball operations Dave Dombrowski, Philadelphia Parks and Recreation youth sports director Mike Barsotti, MLB senior vice president of baseball development Del Matthews, and Hall of Fame sportswriter and Temple professor Claire Smith.

The city will host of the 2026 MLB All-Star Game, and love for the first-place Phillies these days is running rampant.

At the youth level in Philadelphia, however, baseball participation has been lacking. While some diamonds have been refurbished, many lack the luster that they once had.

That’s where Dialogue on Diamond came in.

“I think it’s extremely important because it is a combination of everybody being involved,” Dombrowski said. “It’s really a brotherhood that ends up making it happen. It’s not the Phillies, it’s not the community, it’s not North Philadelphia. It’s all of us. There are a lot of people [who] are involved, and we have a lot of people [who] are dedicated to trying to make baseball involvement in the community within our organization.”

Rollins noted that as kids enter high school, they tend to play basketball or football instead of continuing baseball. Glanville spoke of his family from Philadelphia, who still harbored feelings about the treatment of Jackie Robinson following Glanville’s trade to the Phillies in 1997. He spoke about how teams need to understand the communities for there to be progress.

“It’s understanding where those communities come from,” Glanville said. “When we pass on that legacy, we’re connecting with these stories that go through generations, that are so fresh because we want to tell those stories.”

Rollins said helping refurbish fields wasn’t on his radar until recently. He was taking his daughters to Mount Airy, when he turned on Johnson Street. There, he saw a field that looked like it hadn’t been touched in years..

Not even a week later, Smith asked Rollins to speak at the event.

“Things happen for a reason,” Rollins said. “I made a right on Johnson Street, that’s different from my normal routes, to pass by this ballfield, to have this call from [Smith] to reach out and let me know about this, to do something about it.”

From there, Smith, a former Inquirer columnist who served as moderator, spoke alongside Dombrowski and Glanville and touched on how the Phillies can help with what the event was aimed to do. They encouraged youth baseball coaches in attendance to ask questions pertaining to baseball in the city.

“I think it’s a couple of things, one is there’s a dialogue aspect,” Dombrowski said. “It’s getting to know people ... so you can talk and banter about different ideas.”

But the biggest thing was getting kids to actually want to step into the batter’s box, and there still is work to be done in that regard.

In 1993, the Phillies started their RBI program, which helps fund baseball and softball teams. But they’re still looking for ways to grow the game.

“It’s an opportunity for us to get the game of baseball and softball into the neighborhoods,” said Jon Joaquin, Phillies director of youth baseball and softball programs. “A lot of people don’t know what we do, and a lot of it’s word-of-mouth.

“There’s a handful of people here that have RBI leagues, and that all stemmed from just the initial conversation for us to be able to further that and see how we can help them out, whether it be supporting a league, whether we support a team, or doing a clinic, or something like that.”