Is Baseball Becoming a Country Club Sport?

When I think back on various sports activities when I was younger, I had a particular disdain for those activities where the main skill being displayed was the ability of parents to write a check.

People had nearly universal respect for, say, the star center of the basketball team, or the all-county defensive back on the football team.  The person who was a national champion in dressage?  Not so much.

It's not that those kids weren't talented, but more that it was hard to know how talented they were since all but a few very wealthy people were eliminated from competing by virtue of economics.

Golf and tennis also fell into this category.  Most of the kids I knew didn't own a set of golf clubs and would never have been able to afford greens fees.  Even the ones I knew that I considered "rich" didn't reach that strata. 

This isn't to say that every kid on the golf and tennis team came from indulgent parents.  Some of them were truly talented, and some found ways to learn their sports on the cheap. 

However, most of them benefitted tremendously by the fact that the day tryouts were held, economics prevented the vast majority of kids in the class from having even basic skills.  When the tennis players and golfers earned their High School letters, there were very few who thought it was because of superior athletics, alone. 

Unfortunately, I see the same dynamics playing themselves out in baseball.  A century ago, it was a sport played by nearly every kid in every socio-economic strata.  Today?  The inner cities are devoid of baseball fields, entirely.  It is a game that's played almost entirely in the suburbs. 

Rural areas have baseball, but they don't have the same availability of coaches and elite teams.  So, for the most part, when I see tournaments, the teams come from areas that are generally devoid of poverty.  Far from being the national pastime, it seems that it's better described as the game of white kids from the 'burbs.

When I think of my own son's experience, it's something that's clearly priced out of the reach of people who are struggling financially.  Just paying the team fee and buying a minimal set of uniforms is about $600 a year. 

A minimal set of uniforms means you will do laundry pretty much every day throughout the season, and during tournaments, your kid will play most of the day in dirty clothes.  We're probably on the hook for more like $500 worth of uniforms.  It's not just the shirts and the pants, but the accompanying underarmor cold weather gear, warm weather gear, an extra pair of cleats, etc.

We also pay out of pocket for a handful of indoor practices.  Yes, the team has two indoor facilities that it uses for 3 or so practices per week during bad-weather months, but we also just chip in for facility rental in addition to that.

My son has a bat-bag with over $1,000 worth of bats in it.  A top of the line carbon-fiber bat is about $300.  Yes, the bats are better and yes, they make a difference. 

Baseball gloves for little kids aren't too pricey, but are on the lines of $50 or so.  Throw in another $50 for baseball spikes and various and other sundry, and $1,000 a year is probably on the lower end of what we end up paying just for the team fee and basic equipment.

Then, there are the travel tournaments.  We have 4 days in a hotel coming up.  There's gas to and from.  3 meals a day for a family. 

In addition, some of the kids get private instruction throughout the off-season.  Generally speaking, when last season ended, the off-season started and it involved about 7 months of workouts where I spent about $100 a month. 

We also send Logan to a local minor-league team's baseball camp every Summer.

All in all, I probably spend more than others do, but I probably spend $4,000 a year on baseball.  Yes, I realize how ridiculous that sounds.

In football, all the money in the world couldn't help you.  You bought your cleats, and beyond that, the rest of the equipment was provided by the team.  There were very few optional pieces of equipment you could get.  Forearm pads were about it, but you could play without them, like I did.  Nowadays, perhaps a cowboy collar and that's it.  Anybody who wants to play football can.  If you're big and fast and love to hit people, you can flatten a rich kid just as easily as a poor kid.

In baseball?  Spending the money helps.  It helps a lot.  I've seen the kids who decided not to play travel ball and who have instead decided to play rec league.  Some of those kids, back when the first tryouts for travel took place, were every bit good enough to make my son's team.

Today?  Not a chance.  The kids who travel end up with better coaches, better facilities, more games.  Throw in additional training, and even if you assembled a team of the absolute best kids in rec, they would be so far below the travel teams in terms of playing ability that it would be a waste of time to even play the game. 

By the time these kids reach High School the kids who played travel will be the odds-on favorites to make the team.  The kids who didn't travel?  Will have to beat long odds for the few remaining spots.

Especially because hitting and throwing a baseball properly are nearly impossible to stumble on by trial and error, early coaching pays huge dividends.  I wasn't even aware until I saw the coaching my son got, that there is a wrong way to throw a baseball.  What I'd been doing my entire life wasn't even close to being correct. 

Hitting?  It's such a refined science, with so little room for variation or error that you'll see that pretty much every major leaguer has the same basic swing.  If you can stumble on that by accident, more power to you.  Very few can and even fewer do.

Now, I guess I should like the current system because my son benefits from it.  I also do everything I can to give him an advantage, here.  He's one of the top few hitters on his team when he was squarely in the middle of the pack last year. 

I would like to think that this is due to superior genetics and his innate desire, but the fact that I got him private hitting lessons all year had something to do with it as well.  There can't possibly be any doubt about that.  So, even when you're talking about kids with the talent and dedication to play travel, the amount of money spent can yield results.

Who knows if my son would even be playing travel if not for the pitching machine I bought when he was playing his first few years of coach pitch.  $1,200 isn't a world-ending sum of money, but it's certainly outside of the reach of kids who are growing up like I did back in the day.  I was able to give him hundreds of balls of practice at a consistent speed and consistent location to get him to where he was distinguishing himself even in the early rec leagues. 

Could I have thrown the balls to him?  With my terrible arm and with what needed to be done?  Not as consistently.  Which means he'd have been more frustrated waiting for good pitches. 

It's also not my son's fault that kids don't practice baseball.  Yeah, they have an obvious disadvantage if they don't play travel, but the reality is that the baseball diamonds in my town are absolutely empty if there's not a team working out there.

Any day of the week, even during baseball season, there might be, at most a few hours a week where Logan and I can't walk onto any field anywhere in the city and take up the entire diamond so I can hit him line drives.  The city has very, very few hitting cages, and we've never had trouble getting one all to ourselves.

Those things don't cost any money and they're available to everyone.  So, on the one hand, yeah, the rich kids have a leg-up in baseball, but it's a leg-up that could probably be lessened by a determined bunch of kids who spent hours every day during the long Summer occupying a baseball diamond with a never-ending game.

The scenario that's portrayed in movies like "The Sandlot" and "The Benchwarmers" doesn't really happen in reality.  The uniformed travel teams are there.  It's the scrappy kids with a love for baseball that are missing.

Still, who can blame them?  Without the proper coaching, they'll simply be reinforcing their bad habits and will probably have severe limitations throughout their baseball playing days.

If you take up golf and ask for advice, unanimously, people will tell you to get lessons.  Swinging a golf club is too complicated for all but a very lucky and talented few to just figure out on their own. 

Swinging a baseball bat at a pitch that's moving at over 90 mph?  Same story.  You might stumble onto how to do it, but chances are you won't.  Even at my son's level (he's 9 years old), the hardest throwers are pitching in the mid 50s. 

In my grandmother's day, she said all the kids played baseball all the time because they didn't have money to do much else.  By the time I was in middle school, we were lucky to get maybe 5 or 6 kids to go to the diamonds for a pickup game. 

Now, I just don't see it.  Even the pickup games seem to need to be orchestrated by grownups. 

There's no need to mourn reality.  Things have changed and maybe the old days weren't as good as people remember them. 

It just seems a shame that we have a whole generation of kids who probably look at the baseball team the way we used to look at golf team.  I wonder if future generations will view baseball as inaccessible to the masses.

Uggghhh...

The baseball marathon continues.  Last night was a little disappointing.  We won big:  16-2.  That's not what I'm unhappy about. 

Actually, it is what I'm unhappy about.  We knew going in to this game that this team wasn't that hard for us to beat.  Last year, this was all new to us and we really didn't know which teams would give us trouble and which teams would not.

So, we pretty much showed up loaded for bear for every game.  Strongest lineup.  Bringing the hardest pitching.  We experimented once or twice with going with a lighter lineup but we guessed wrong a couple of times and the team we faced was harder than we predicted.

This year, we know the teams a little better.  Also, the league has divided up into different divisions.  The tougher teams are in our division.  The easier teams are in the other.

We played teams from the other division twice so far this year.  The first time, we dabbled with letting some other players get exposure to infield and pitching.  The second time was awesome:  infield was ALL kids who hadn't played it much, previously and we gave a lot of kids the chance to pitch.  I think we literally pitched a different kid every inning.

Last night was a little disappointing.  I have tried putting a bug in the coach's ear that maybe we could flip the batting order against some of these easier teams.  It sucks being at the bottom of the order.  My son was there a lot this year.  Really, the kids who hit well tend to hit well week-in, week-out.  The kids who don't might have a good game or two, but for the most part, they are towards the bottom of the team, numbers-wise, every week.

I think it would be nice to take that kid who has been slogging it out in the 12 spot all year and let him lead off or bat somewhere in the top of the order when the outcome of the game is not in question.  Plus, you never know, baseball is so mental that maybe doing that every now and then will help the kid improve. 

It also seems like an issue of fairness to me.  We bat our best batters at the top for the vast majority of our games because that makes sense and it's what you do to win games.  However, every other player on the team works just as hard.  I feel like they deserve a little moment in the sun, too, once in a while.

It was also disappointing in that we didn't jumble up the infield as much as we could.  In fact, we pretty much kept our usual third baseman and shortstop the whole game.  Honestly, this hacks me off a little bit. 

At least with batting, everybody is going to get a turn to bat.  Again, my son batted 11th or 12th for quite a few weeks, but his batting order couldn't dictate how well he hit.  Despite a crappy spot in the batting order, he still got the same chance to hit the ball every at-bat that everybody else had.  No matter where he was on the lineup, if he crushed the ball, he crushed the ball.

Yeah, the guys at the bottom end up with a lot fewer ABs than the guys at the top.  By the end of the season, the guys at the bottom probably get as much as 30% fewer at-bats as the guys at the top.

Still, this is travel baseball, and you have to earn your way up. 

However, with infield positions, you really have to look for chances to let the kids play those.  My son got to play an inning at 2nd base and an inning pitching last night.  He wasn't the only one.  Two other kids who don't pitch much got to pitch an inning, too. 

In a game like this, where we're clearly not going to lose the thing, why would we not use it as a chance to develop these kids?

My biggest problem with the team is basically that it's turning into a team that exists for 5 players.  The other 7 are just there to do whatever the other 5 don't need to do. 

Now, I know that even the greatest coaches have their favorite players.  I think we have a great coach.  He's only human.  I also think he is as fair-minded as he can be.  He would never actively do anything to favor one kid over another.  He's making judgement calls on what he sees as merit.  For the most part, I think he makes good calls.

I don't think he's always right, but he's as right as a human being can be.  The 5 players?  Generally speaking, they are a cut above.  I think that sometimes they get the benefit of the doubt, where other players on the team might not, but that's just going to be the case in any team sport with any coach. 

You get a guy who destroys the ball at the plate, and the coach isn't as hard on him when he tanks a play in the infield as he would be on the kid who is batting .100 and tanks the same play. 

The team's best pitcher might get to work out his difficulties at the top of the order when he slumps.  Another kid slumps and he's down to the bottom of the order. 

These are the sorts of things that are just inevitable in team sports.  Life isn't always fair and the team doesn't exist to give the perfect experience to any one individual player.  You make tradeoffs and realize that hey, maybe for no good reason, another kid who is no better than yours got put in 1B one day and yours got put in LF, and the coach just never saw a reason to change things.

When you're not one of the chosen ones on the team, it can be frustrating.

However, games like last night are the chance to give some valuable experience to the guys on the team who aren't the chosen ones.  That, more than anything, is what's frustrating to me. 

Yeah, you have to make a call, and not everybody is going to be happy with the "A lineup".  Sorry, but the team's studs are going to get the critical positions and better spots in the batting order when it's going to be a tough, competitive game. 

For crying out loud, though, when you're facing an easy team, that's a chance to balance the scales a little bit.  You're still gonna win.  Do you really need to win by 14 runs?  How about winning by 3 runs and developing the other 7 troopers on the team?

So, I'm a little hacked off today.  The kid is killing the ball, hottest hitter on the team and still hitting seventh.  When we face a team where he could have gotten some good experience pitching and playing shortstop, he ends up doing 1 inning pitching, 1 inning 2B, and spends the rest of the game back in center field.

Now, I also don't mean to bag on Center Field like it's some sort of consolation prize.  Logan plays the hell out of it.  He's had some huge catches and gunned down some baserunners with plays that not many guys on the team can make.  I have no problem with him being a center fielder in the long run if he makes his High School team. 

My problem is that the kid is 9 years old.  At this point, nobody can really say for sure what he'll develop to be.  He should be getting well-rounded experience that's a mix of pitching, infield and outfield.  I think he's getting a token amount of time pitching and in the infield.  He's developing into an insanely good CF, but I don't like the idea of potentially pidgeonholing him when he's so young.

Also, I should emphasize, I'm not just saying this for him.  There are other guys who either play the whole game in the outfield, or they platoon here and there.  These easier games should be a chance for them to have fun. 

We didn't do a very good job of that last night.  I've made my opinion known to the coach.  At this point, I just have to respect his decision and watch the rest of the season play out.

Ultimately, is this enough to make me want Logan to play for a different team?  That's a really hard call.  The coach really is a good coach.  He runs a great practice.  The team is a great team.  It's a classic big fish, small pond question.  Is it better to be the starting CF on a team that wins, or would you rather start at SS on a team that's playing at a level a notch below? 

In the best of all worlds, you'd play on the better team, then earn your spot as starting SS.  Thing is, unlike batting, that's hard to do if you don't ever get the chance.