A Problem With Youth Baseball

I was watching my little brother play baseball the other day, when I noticed something interesting, which also sounds racist. But it isn’t.  Let me explain.

            My brother is in 7^th grade, and plays in the local rec league.  He never wanted to do anything when he was younger, so he only started last year.  He’s not that good, has no aspirations to play in high school, but still loves playing anyway.

            The thing I noticed about watching his games was it was very easy to pick out the best players, just by looking at them.  They were always either black or latino.

            Now hear me out.  I’m not saying that these kids are inherently physically superior to their white counterparts, or that the good kids are never white.  There are plenty of talented white kids on the teams.  But most often, the kids with the best mechanics, talent, and understanding of the game are black or latino.  This is clear on my brother’s team, where Jose and Reuben start the lineup 1-2, switch off pitching, and run down kids on the bases who forgot there was two outs and that they didn’t have to tag up. 

            The reason for the dominance of these kids, I realized, is socio-economic.  Again, my brother is going into the seventh grade and playing in the rec league, a year or two past the point where the good players were separated from the bad, the talented ones going off into competitive leagues and travel teams, and the others staying the course in the bush leagues.  Except a group of players exists outside of this system of merit based play, the kids who can’t afford, or who don’t have parents dedicated enough, to play on the travel teams.  These kids, primarily minorities like Jose and Reuben, remain talented, but have little coaching or competition in the rec leagues to help them improve.  

And I don’t blame them.  For one thing, you don’t have to be poor to balk at the prices being charged nowadays.  Travel teams are expensive as shit.  I remember distinctly during middle school, when my friend had made the Hyper-Elite soccer travel team that Everyone was on.  Except his parents had just got divorced, were still sorting things out, and looked at the $2,000 league fee and just said no.

2K? For a twelve year old?  Its becoming increasingly common, with more organizations promising better competition and intense, involved coaching guaranteed to turn your Pokémon playing middle-schooler into a D1 athlete.  And sure, many of these teams do turn kids into damn good athletes.  There are tons of knowledgeable, talented instructors out there that charge a premium for kids to be on their teams.  But I also know, from friends that played on a local travel team, that all it really takes to start an ‘elite’ club that will ‘take your game to the next level’ is for a couple of dads to invest in some windbreakers, Oakleys and a fungo, then walk around like they’re fucking Mike Scioscia.

But I can riff forever about all the bullshit in youth sports.  I refer the reader to an SI-era Rick Reilly article about the subject, which encapsulates the mania much better than I can.

My favorite quote: “[We] started flying to all these stupid tournaments—Dallas and Baltimore and, my God, Ottawa! —And every one is billed as ‘the recruiting event of the year!’ And do you know who we see at these tournaments?  The same damn girls we used to play in our neighborhood league!”

            This quote ties well into my point, which is this:  All the travel teams promise elite, top-tier competition, but there is just as good competition available locally.  At least there could be, if players weren’t scattered across six leagues, and seven states for 25 different tournaments on the same weekend.   If there were just two damn leagues, the good league and the bad league, where everyone, I dunno, lived in the same county, the good league could be one hell of a league.  And then every kid could have access to competitive baseball, not just the kids with parents with an extra two grand and too much extra time to drive their kids to Des Moines on a weeks notice.

Which brings me back to Jose and Reuben.  Right now, youth baseball, and in a greater sense, youth sports, are creating a dangerous rift between the opportunities for poor children to play and excel at sports, and those of kids who are better off.  Sports have always been something that transcends class, and even provided an opportunity, however small, for upward societal mobility through college and professional sports.  But as youth sports become an industry, it now appears that some children have been left behind.  
          Yet there isn’t much to be done.  As long as there is money to be made, the current structure will remain in place.  America’s about free enterprise and all that shit.  But as I sit at my brother’s game and watch Jose mercilessly mow down a kid wearing sweatpants and soccer cleats, I know he deserves better.