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.
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