We’ll agree to disagree. The real reason why kids pick up racquets less has absolutely nothing to do with athletic skills required.
..A point I have made for years. But there is one corner of the topic here that is very relevant. Tennis is much, much, much harder to get good enough at for most people to remain enthusiastic about to a level they want to continue playing. Just as important, the
parents play a large part in this. It is **** easy - beyond easy in fact - to chuck a ball around in the back yard as a parent with a kid even if the kid is completely rubbish at playing catch/hitting a ball. There's variations of this which cater to the less talented too.
Tennis by
huge contrast has hurdles in the path which dissuade the majority of people who try it to continue. And that's before you even consider the facilities aspect which you also mention
But, back to my previous reply to you. OK, give me an example of any role in baseball which requires even a tenth of the technique as playing tennis? There simply isn't one. The most techincally specific position is pitching - which roughly relates to serving
alone in tennis. That's it. Every other role in baseball is very low skilled by comparison or really niche in one specific thing.
Tennis is an expensive and inefficient use of facilities. One field keeps 18 kids busy at baseball, 22 kids at soccer and a BB court fulfills 10 individual ambitions. They often share bats, balls and gloves. Tennis keeps two kids in singles, four max in dubs and they all need racquets.
Beyond this - you haven't hit the core of this topic yet - is that
schools are the place where the majority of kids get into sports at any moderately decent level the most initially. And these facility and equipment efficiencies force schools to make the best use of what they've got so in America especially they massively learn towards the sports where it's easy to line 30, 40 kids up and make them do easily measurable activities (throwing, jumping, sprinting etc). This, in turn, becomes the top-end funnel to identifying who will likely suit a particular role in one of the classic American-centric sports.
This has the definite side-effect of not just steering kids towards those sport but also reducing the pool of potential tennis players not because
they chose another sport but because schools/coaches chose the easy (often sheer lazy) path because of the limited resources they have available to them.
Tell me how many tennis camps get opened for the poor kids in places like Cuba and the Dominican Republic, whereas MLB sends or hires local scouts to find the next generation of kids that show talents with bat, ball and/or glove.
Hardly any, if any. But this is completely irrelevant to the athletic ability/aptitude argument. It's just about resources, the same as the American school system but on a more extreme level.