Do These Kids Have a Life?

I’m as big of a sports nut as there is. I always joke that I don’t watch TV unless there’s some sort of ball involved. I was pretty obsessed even when I was a kid. I played baseball for nine years, even though I was the worst player not only on my own team, but in the entire league every season I played (note: I’m not making that up. I was really that bad).

Still, even the good players did other things. Many were three-sport athletes, which seems to be a dying breed. These days, kids specialize, and they do so at a young age. The Chicago Tribune published an article Tuesday which talked about how some parents pay up to $10,000 per year to put their 12-year-old sons on national traveling baseball teams. These kids pretty much play baseball and do nothing else.

Some of these teams attract some big sponsorship dollars to help facilitate this activity.

To me, this is a complete loss of perspective. These kids have had no childhood. They’re pros now at age 12, and to get to this level, they’ve had to pretty much devote their short lives to nothing but baseball. These kids talk about how they are chasing their dreams of the major leagues (which, even for kids this good, is a longshot at best), but when you consider how early they had to start chasing it, you wonder if it was their dream originally, or if they are actually living out their parents’ dreams.

The kids in this story are from California, where they can play baseball year round, but there’s some of that lack of perspective around here too.

I have three boys, ages 8, 6 and 1.5. The older two, like most boys their ages, are involved in sports. They have played soccer and baseball, more soccer than baseball. In fact, last spring was the first time they had played baseball. We signed them up for T-Ball in the Dyer Little League.

Dyer’s Little League 12-year-old team made the Little League World Series in 1997, so we figured they would be pretty organized and know what they were doing. What we found out was that when it comes to the all-star and travel teams, they did know what they were doing. That was because everything the league did was built around those teams.

The regular season schedule ended a little early, so that the travel teams wouldn’t have conflicts. That applied to T-Ball as well, which as far as I know, didn’t have a travel team. That day is coming, I’m sure.

Also, teams were “stacked,” by which I mean that the best kids were placed on one or two of the teams, so that the potential travel team kids played together. That led to some really ugly games. I was a base umpire for an age 11-12 game that ended 35-0. Do not adjust your monitor – you read that score correctly. In that game, the stacked team hit eight home runs, and had a stretch where they just missed hitting five in a row (the third kid in that stretch hit the top of the center field fence, but the ball bounced back into the field). How much fun do you think it was to be on the losing team for that game? What is the motivation for those kids? Even for the team that won, it couldn’t have been much fun.

That wasn’t the worst of it, though. There were even stacked T-Ball teams. We played against two teams that had nearly all older kids (6 and 7, though there weren’t a lot of 7-year-olds in T-Ball), and I would say that 90% of the best players in our league were on those two teams. We had one kid as good as any on either of those teams. The sandlot scouts must have missed him.

The league picnic/award ceremony (every kid gets a trophy) was two months after the regular season ended to accommodate the schedules of the travel team kids. The whole awards ceremony was built around those teams, although we regular folks did get our brief moment in the sun. We knew it was bad when the league president got weepy with joy and pride when she discussed how the 9-year-old team finished second in the state tournament. I was thinking, “they have a state tournament for 9-year-olds?”

So, since my kids are not likely to ever be travel-team caliber, my wife and I moved them over to Schererville Baseball this year in the hope that this league devotes as much attention to the fair-to-middlin’ kids as they do to the travel teams.

Things are so far, so good on that front. Our team has only one kid who appears to have the pressure of his father living vicariously through him. At batting practice one day, while I was working with him, his dad kept giving him pointers too. That wasn’t so bad since we were both saying relatively helpful things. At the end of his session though, I told him he had a nice swing (which he does, even though he doesn’t make much contact), and his dad said something like, “he should; he’s had hundreds of dollars in lessons.”

No pressure there, kid.

I wanted to tell him to save his money and just let the kid play, but I didn’t, of course. Of all the kids on our team, though, this one seems to be having the least fun. I can help him work on his swing, but I don’t know what to do for this kid so that the game is fun for him. I’m not sure, but I would guess there are a lot more kids like this one than the ones written about in that Tribune article, and that’s the real shame.