Written with Coach Randel Hanson
With the advent of Opening Day across Major League Baseball, many of us look toward the professional players that compete at the highest levels of the sport. Young players are also stepping up to the plate, as youth baseball gets underway across the southern and western US and soon across the northern states. But all plates are not the same.
Indeed, a sea-change in the world of youth sports has been underway over the past decade, in which a “professionalization” and “privatization” has transformed the experience of these activities for parents & players. The leaders in this process are California, Texas, Florida and Arizona, where the weather allows for year-round outdoor sports and businesses that thrive on such activities, but the effects are felt everywhere.
For youth baseball, this professionalization often means playing year-round on hyper-competitive and exclusive club teams for as many as 120-plus games annually, regularly traveling to interstate and even international tournaments, teaching kids to throw curve balls at ever younger ages, and demanding time commitments which rival that of Major League Baseball participants. This development reflects a broader trend of adults pushing an increasingly pressurized atmosphere on kids to get the jump on competing in an insecure world. As one observer acidly put it, “We fought and won the Cold War only to get the East German model of youth sports?”
The mid-1990s witnessed the ripening of the bitter physical fruits of this transformation, in the form of an explosion in serious injuries in youth baseball players. A variety of stress related injuries began to surface, with kids’ throwing arms the most frequent sites of ailment. In response to this rash of injuries, Little League Baseball, the bedrock of youth baseball, worked with Major League Baseball and medical researchers in tracing the roots of the problem. It quickly became clear that both types and numbers of pitches thrown by youth was the culprit, and to address the problem Little League Baseball this year instituted new pitch count regulations for all Little League chapters. (If you are interested in the extended presentation of these regulations, including an overview of teaching the fundamentals of pitching and protective steps after playing pitch in games, see http://www.littleleague.org/media/Pitch_Count_Resource_Page.asp) Yet beyond the physical problems of this professionalization, the harm to local communities is also taking shape.
The professionalization of youth baseball contrasts with the 70-plus-year history of the main organization of youth baseball, Little League. Started in the late 1930s, Little League is an inclusive organization that straddles the public-private sphere of culture. Over its existence Little League Baseball has evolved a book of rules designed to encourage parity of teams and fair play among coaches and kids, and for the most part the structure has worked fairly well in producing a space in which any kid, regardless of skill, athleticism, or experience, can participate. Although Little League itself has been transformed by the media dollar culture as well (particularly with the big bucks contract for televising the Little League World Series each August), the general experience of this structure remains in stark contrast to the exclusive and super intense atmosphere of club ball.
The writers of this article are in the middle of these shifting sands of youth baseball. Living in Arizona, our region is a leader in the professionalization of youth sports and its effects on Little League chapters. Indeed, the winner of our annual Little League district All Star Tournament often wins the state at all three levels of competition; and these teams often march their way through the Western Regional Tournament all the way to the Little League World Series. This success is no accident, for the two powerhouse leagues in our district – from two popular Phoenix suburbs – each have embraced the professional model of youth baseball. While these leagues remain public Little League chapters, participants have also quasi-privatized their leagues by creating interlinked club teams, and their players move seamlessly back and forth year-round between Little League and club ball.
In our local chapter, most parents and players reject attempts to be transformed into a factory for kid-professionals. We have acted upon our belief that youth baseball should teach good baseball skills yet also keep community, fun and social development at the center of our league. We acknowledge the broad consensus among sports physicians, psychologists and concerned parents that decry youth baseball hyper-professionalization as injurious to the physical and mental health of many of the kids involved. Further, we believe that the model of community implicit in this development is ultimately alienating, tracking lives into competitive boxes at ever younger ages. In short, although the professionalization of youth sports is in part resource-driven (taking place chiefly in middle- and upper-middle-class suburban communities), it is also a choice regarding the kind of world one wants to create.
This season, we had a discussion of how to keep the “commons” aspect of our league in play. We know that a balanced attention to skills development among coaches and players does not automatically leads to an undesirable, hyper-competitive atmosphere for the league. To be sure, a hostile and negatively competitive league atmosphere can be cultivated with overall low or high baseball skills. In our league, we think that how adults act and model behavior is the single most important determinant for the atmosphere of a league. So, while rejecting a “total commitment” to baseball characteristic of professionalized models, we took up the challenge to provide sound baseball skills for all our inner city kids with the modest resources that we have at our disposal.
To do this, we partnered with a local batting cage facility, whose proprietor understood what we were up to and joined our team. To pay for lessons for all kids on our Minors and Majors teams we undertook several community building initiatives. We created a league program, in which participants could have access to relevant information, including rosters, schedules, and short baseball articles. We also sold advertisements in this book to local businesses, thereby creating a link between commerce and community in our locality. We were able to sell these keepsake books for $1 each and still make money for the league.
We also turned our Opening Day celebration and hit-a-thon into a neighborhood festival. We invited our congressman to throw out the first pitch (it was a ball), and invited our fire and police departments. League volunteers created various booths for kid enjoyment, such as whiffle ball pitching, donut eating contests, and many others. We asked local businesses to step up and donate food, prizes, games, and other activities. (In all of these activities, we noticed that the big chain stores like Applebee’s, whose motto is “eating good in the neighborhood,” were the least likely to support our efforts.) Our local businesses pitched in, as did Trader Joe’s and others, and as a result, last Saturday was an enormous success for family fun and community building. We made four times the amount we had in previous years and are now able to raise the collective level of our league’s baseball skills while maintaining a proper balance between youth sports and other components of our individual and collective lives. In short, working together we raised the fun and the funds to keep community and youth baseball synonymous.
Little League baseball is a wonderful gift to our communities from past generations. All those lovely spring evenings with kids and parents hanging out at the local baseball diamond! You threw some dinner together and rushed out the door to get to the ballpark. But then you sat down for a few hours and talked to neighbors. You got to know the parents and even grandparents of your kids’ friends. You enjoyed the sport and saw your kids learning to go through the thrills and spills of facing a fast pitcher, striking out or smacking a line drive into left field, gathering craftiness for a steal, calculating how the next play might go, and hugging their team mate when she stole home or when he missed that pop-up.
Like many other forms of collective social organization today, youth sports face the threat of increased privatization, speeded-up lifestyles, hyper-intensification, and the consequent loss of community bonding through an inclusive raising of our kids. Kids who can’t pay the price are being excluded, while those who can are losing their childhood to a professionalized world of cut-throat competition, totalizing commitment, and over-discipline. And the cookie-cutter corporate takeover of commerce disconnects communities from commerce and its collective benefits.
It’s no accident that they yell, “PLAY BALL!” at the beginning of the games. It’s something to fight for, keeping Little League baseball both fun and developmental and making sure the fruits of community remain a vital part of our collective commons.