The Scourge of Travel Ball

In the interest of full disclosure…

I played travel baseball from ages 12 to 15, first as a member of the Merchantville Bankers, an all-star team that played other all-star teams throughout South Jersey in the early 1970s. To put it bluntly, we were awful (what did you expect from a town of just 3,500 people that was competing against other towns with ten times the population to draw from?) In any case, our ragtag team finished 2-18… and since Bob Vasta and I were the only two pitchers to record a win, he won the pitching award, and I was named MVP. In case you’re wondering, Dave Petitte won the batting trophy.

The next three years, I played for the Merchantville Merchants. Some infield, some outfield, and some pitching. No overnight trips and we never traveled more than 15 or 20 miles from our one-square-mile hometown.

Fast-pitch church softball leagues came next, where I was a slick-fielding shortstop who often batted leadoff because of my speed and relatively high on-base percentage.

After that came a 35-year prison ministry career that took me to more than 400 different correctional institutions across North America and Africa. Mostly I played softball – second base, to be specific – but we never played more than 80 games in a calendar year.

Fast forward to today and the scourge of travel ball is performing at least four massive disservices to budding athletes across America’s fruited plain. The first – and perhaps most egregious – disservice is robbing them of their childhood.

When I was a kid, my youth was spent playing wiffleball in the backyard, kickball in the street, or pick-up games of every sport imaginable at the local community center. No set teams, no set schedules, no umpires, referees, or uniforms. Oh yeah, and no interfering adults trying to “organize” us into something we didn’t want to be or do.
We simply played sports (and games) for the love of playing them, period.

Little League was OK, but pick-up games were a lot more fun… and we sure didn’t need any helicopter moms providing healthy snacks at halftime. Grabbing a soda pop at the corner store or chasing down the ice cream truck worked just fine.

You see, one of the beauties of childhood is stress-free and unstructured fun, which is also where a kid hones his or her creative and organizational skills… or at least I did. Sadly, nowadays there is very little unstructured time in a child’s life as he is shuttled from daycare to school to piano lessons to football practice to… well, you get the idea.

The bottom line is that childhood should be as carefree as possible, because once the real world starts to kick in, Shangri La is over.

A second disservice created by travel ball is the fallacy that budding athletes are… budding athletes. Do you know what percentage of kids participating in youth sports go on to pro careers? Try .0296%. Yep, despite what you think, your little Johnny isn’t going to be the next Michael Jordan or Kobe Bryant… and your little Suzie will never be another Serena Willaims or Caitlin Clark.

It’s time for a reality check, parents!

I told our kids when they were young that unless God directly intervened, they probably weren’t going to play professional sports. Why? Because they had inherited my slightly above-average athletic genes and my wife’s non-existent athletic ones. And so, try your best and maximize your potential, but don’t have false expectations.

Not like Paul and Ty. Paul is a young man who was in my junior high youth group about 40 years ago. One day, I asked everyone in the group what they wanted to do when they became an adult. Their responses varied from profession to profession, but Paul was adamant that he was going to play Major League Baseball. The only problem with Paul’s aspirations was that at age 15, he had yet to play a single inning of organized baseball in his entire life and so, his goal simply wasn’t realistic.

The same goes for Ty, a young man who attends a weekly basketball program I conduct for at-risk youth. When I asked Ty, who was about 17 at the time, what he planned to do once he graduated from high school, he replied, “I’m going to play a few years in the Euro League and then come back and play in the NBA.” Once again, the problem with Ty’s dream was that he wasn’t on the high school team, had no offers to play basketball in college, and of the 30 players in our gym each week at least 25 of them were better than him. Simply put, his goals were unrealistic and so, I encouraged him to come up with a “Plan B”, just in case the Euro League scenario didn’t pan out.

The truth of the matter is that it is a question of when, not if, the pro plans of these young athletes come crashing down (or should I say the plans of their well-meaning but self-deceived parents?) And when that happens, the young person feels like a complete failure, a L-O-S-E-R with no back-up plan… and I blame the parents, some fawning coaches, and some unscrupulous (and money-hungry) personal trainers for bursting a bubble that never should have been inflated.

A third disservice caused by travel sports is overwork and overuse. Back in the day, kids played baseball in the spring and summer, football in the fall, and basketball in the winter. In other words, they didn’t specialize in any one sport and therefore, they didn’t burn out… nor did they strain any one set of muscle groups.

Today, some kids that play travel ball will play overlapping seasons that total 150 games in a calendar year. That’s crazy! With that kind of schedule, something has to give – the player’s health, his schoolwork, or his psyche.

Did you know that in 2023, more professional pitchers had Tommy John (ligament replacement) surgery than in the entire decade of the 1990s? In fact, in 2023 alone, more than 1/3 of all pitchers on Major League rosters have undergone Tommy John surgery at some point in their careers. Even worse, the fastest-growing age group for needing Tommy John surgery is teenagers aged 15-19.

That’s sick… and nearly 100% preventable. Just stop having kids throw as hard as they can, especially at an early age, and emphasize things like proper mechanics, leg-drive, location and control more than velocity.

When I played (and pitched), you were not allowed to throw a curve ball in Little League. No exceptions. Your arm simply isn’t developed enough to handle the stress and strain. Nowadays, coaches are teaching kids to throw curveballs, sliders, screwballs, forkballs, and split-fingered fastballs at younger and younger ages, emphasizing spin-rate every step of the way. Meanwhile, pitchers’ arms are being destroyed to fuel the egos of these mad scientists.

A fourth – but certainly not final – disservice caused by travel ball is the establishment of wrong priorities… and the dismantling of the right ones. Let me give you a prime and very personal example.

I had a friend years ago who told me in confidence (and with deep shame in his voice) that, “I am raising good athletes but mediocre Christians.” Did you hear that? This man, a dear brother-in-Christ, was acknowledging that he was prioritizing his children’s athletic development over their spiritual development. And yet, he wasn’t alone. Our kids, all of whom were very talented athletes in their own right, spent their childhoods in church on Sunday morning watching their friends arrive in their baseball or soccer uniforms, only to leave halfway through the service.

What kind of message were their parents – who ironically, were leaders in our church – communicating to their kids? Yep, that sports were more important than church and that excelling as an athlete was more important than excelling as a Christian.

Better to please the coach than to please God, right?

I saw a meme on Facebook the other day that cited that .0296% chance of your child becoming a professional athlete. But, the meme added, there is a 100% chance that your child will one day stand before Jesus as their judge.

Choose your priorities well, parents.