If you’re 30 or older, let me ask you a question: when you were younger, how often did you play ball just for fun, to pass the day? Pretty often, I’d bet. No coaches, no uniforms, just a bunch of you down at the park, or playing wiffleball in the backyard. Me too, and I want to write today about losing that – how we’ve lost it, why we’ve lost it, and what we should do about it. This applies to other sports as well, but I want to concentrate on youth baseball today.
Let’s face it, kids have more to do today, and they sure are BUSY! My own 15 year old son plays on the golf team, is in a shooting club, raises a calf for the 4-H fair auction, works for his granddad, but would tell you if he asked that playing computer games trumps all of that. My younger kids go through rotations of soccer, baseball, football, softball, dance – the seasons never seem to end. I’m all for active kids, don’t get me wrong, but the way we RUN these kids around to these structured leagues and events – I can’t help but sense we’re losing something. Kids don’t have to be as creative or as social, the practice times are set, they don’t have to call friends to get a game together or pick teams or set rules. Burnout is a common result – after 2 months of farm league baseball, two of my sons were totally uninterested in playing catch with me or each other – they had too much baseball. They had great coaches, that wasn’t a problem, but they just wanted time off from the sport. Football has already started and soccer will soon – it just seems like the seasons get bigger and busier and kids have less downtime to just play.
10-15 years ago there was but one all-star team per youth league. You made it or you didn’t, and the leagues were built around the regular season schedule and playoffs. Most players who weren’t all-stars still got a chance to experience the intensity of an elimination playoff game, and I think that has a lot of value. Today, there are multiple all-star teams per league, even as the total number of players and teams in each league has trended steadily down. This myriad of all-star travel teams now drive the schedule – there are no playoffs anymore because they interfere with all-stars, and I’ve seen regular seasons interrupted for weeks because of an all-star run. The players who don’t make those teams can be left disillusioned with the sport, feeling like their performance doesn’t matter to the coaches. Too often I see coaches regularly play their less talented players exactly the minimum required – 2 defensive innings and 1 at-bat, all in the name of winning. So, players who do NOT make the all-star teams are hurt by less playing time due to smaller schedules, no playoffs, and coaching styles that emphasize winning over player development. No wonder so many kids quit baseball in Little League!
OK, so we’ve talked about the rest of the kids, let’s focus on the all-star players themselves. These kids are identified early on as standouts generally, and get extra coaching attention. That can be good – up to a point. Again, burnout can set in as year after year of all-star practices and travel take their toll. Make no mistake, some kids love it – the ones who love baseball above all else – but others can lose interest. I’ve seen many a talented teen either quit the game or play with disinterest because they simply were burned out – be it from the schedule, parental pressure, or other factors. The pressure on the parents is crazy too – they have to make the time and money to send these kids to practice and on these travel games, and the more talented the kids, the more costly it seems to get. We have it easy when it comes to little league travel, Williamsport is a short drive away. Imagine the costs involved for parents and kids in Arizona or Oregon to attend the Little League World Series.
The last factor I’d like to look at is the atmosphere at little league games. Kids learn by example, and I’ve found the example isn’t always so great at that level. Parents and coaches, who in all other venues are the nicest people in the world, become raving lunatics at little league games, screaming at players, coaches, and (especially) umpires. In 18 years of umpiring I’ve had more fan and coach problems at the little league level than I had at all other levels combined. Parents and coaches take the games, particularly the outcomes, WAY too seriously. The kids see that, and believe me, they feel pressure. Put yourself in their shoes – your coach and/or mom is screaming about a ball/strike call; you might say to yourself ‘wow, if they’re that upset about 1 call, what will happen if I make an error or strike out’? To make matters worse, the umpires employed generally are untrained kids looking to make a few bucks. They are never given a rulebook, not given any formal training, then fed to the lions. Kids cannot go get their own rulebook for free – Little League has seen fit to copyright their rules, you must purchase the book from them. They’ve taken legal action against websites that post the rules and shut them down. I’ll never understand this policy – allowing free access to the rules would help parents, coaches, players, and the umps to better understand what they’re seeing. I was very fortunate to have a mentor when I started umpiring; he gave us rulebooks and helped us through those first few years. I intend to fill that role someday, after my kids are grown, but really the league has a responsibility to help as well.
There’s a lot of good that comes from youth baseball – kids learn to play as a team, accept structured coaching, get a taste of competition, and improve their skills. I just think the experience would be heightened with two changes, one easy and one not: 1.) Go to 1 all-star team per league, make it only for the oldest group of players, and if possible reinstate league playoffs. This gives more games to the majority of kids and relieves some of the travel for the top kids, while still having an all-star team. 2.) Institute an umpire development system, acquire enough rulebooks to accommodate all umps, and work to establish an atmosphere where the fun and progress of the kids are the focus, not the outcome of the game and the calls of the umpires. I know it’s an uphill battle, and I’m not saying wins and losses don’t matter – they do. But that should be secondary to 9-12 year old kids learning the game, getting fair chances to play, and above all having fun.
Remember, as Willie Stargell once said the umpire always says ‘play ball’ not ‘work ball’. Let’s do what we can to make youth baseball fun for the kids.