Brief Conversation with a Baseball Manager By Alan Maher   My neighbor manages a local baseball team and I know that he has a good reputation in the area. I decided to stop waving “hello as I went by and instead stop and talk. So we talked about baseball.   I was full of questions. Do the managers get paid? No, never heard of it. “Any?” I said. “None,” he said. Do the mangers need a license or certificate to hold the position? “No” he said. How are new managers trained? “We just put one with an experienced manager for a year or two and turn him loose. That is it.”   Amazing.   Player burn-out: Here we had similar experiences. His league had 1,000 players under 13 years of age and about 100 over that age. He complained about the depletion of the ranks but felt little could be done. He assured me that youth football was the same way.   Athletic burn-out happens across the board at about the age of 13.   We were silent for a few minutes when he added that some managers had the kids play 110 games. He was most upset by that. There were far too many for his taste. He felt that the large number of games contributed to the burn-out.   How about Major League Baseball?   He felt that the foreign kids were less organized and just played pick-up games in the streets. Also, they were cheap.   I assured him that he was better doing it his way. He was saved the grief of a license program or many programs and saved from the ‘professional trainer’ whatever that means.   But we all have our problems and they do not seem to go away; just the kids go away.