Yes. That is exactly what happens when all the good kids leave little league so there are no longer any kids left to pitch at the higher levels. The games turn into tedious walkathons and the remaining kids go to play games like soccer where you don’t need some minimum level of ability to enjoy the game as long as you are playing with kids of similar level.
Perhaps you misread my post to mean that these kids shouldn’t play baseball and should go there instead of playing baseball. I’m not. I haven’t even made a proposal yet. If I did I would propose that starting at the kid pitch level you go from an “everyone plays every inning and 2 of those innings must be in the infield” to “everyone plays every inning and they can all be in the outfield AND if you don’t show up to practices you can be benched”
Winning and competition is certainly part of it but if everyone is playing by the same rules it doesn’t give any one manager an advantage in winning games over another. I’m not proposing that we just implement this rule for MY team and force every other team to keep playing their unskilled players in the infield.
I think you are focusing on the unskilled players to the detriment of the other players. I think most managers would rather have a more positive experience for most of the kids than have a mediocre experience for most of the kids so that a couple of unskilled players can feel good about themselves. If they aren’t good enough then they aren’t good enough. Are we still in “everyone gets a trophy” mode in 4th grade, or even the 3rd grade? Some kids fail and they can either try to get better or they can move on to other things. We separate the “gifted” kids from the “mainstream” and “remedial” kids in schools as early as 2nd grade. Why is it such a travesty to give treat kids of different ability and skill differently?
Soccer is also an organized sport. One that is MUCH more forgiving of unskilled players than a sport where at least one player on each team has to throw a ball over a 17" plate 46 feet away.
80-90% of the GOOD kids in little league will never play in high school around here. this isn’t about getting kids into the MLB or college or even onto high school teams. Its about playing games that are competitive and fun and not an exercise in coddling kids that can’t play.
It sounds like you’re lucky. Getting volunteers is always a problem, if travel teams start spreading in your league, they will start with poaching the coach’s kids because at the lower levels they are all volunteer coached and they need the coaches.
it used to be kids played different sports , now a lot only play 1 if they are very good at that sport.
And one result of that is kid pitchers are blowing out their arms before they even get to college. That never used to happen but now it does with kids playing baseball year round in some areas with warm climates.
also as mentioned above for soccer the main thing now is club teams ,not high school teams. We had a local tourney last week with 500 club teams. College recruiters love that since it makes it very easy to see a lot of kids with 1 trip.
Aren’t good enough for… what, exactly? What is it that’s so important to win in Little League?
Of course I have.
Any kid who is not literally physically disabled can have his or her baseball skills improved. Throwing a ball is not a natural skill; it must be taught and learned, and even relatively unathletic kids can be correctly taught how to throw a ball. They won’t all be the same, but they can be made passably good enough to not ruin the Little League experience. It requires a lot of patience, but it can be done.
I would never suggest you hit the batter with the ball, but can’t you get there with catcher interference by having the catcher tap the batter with the glove?
…which is exactly what happened when the batting team realized the pitcher was intentionally walking everybody. There was no “automatic intentional walk” rule.
And don’t forget that different states - and, in some states, different parts of the state - play high school soccer at different times of the year. Case in point: in California, there are separate fall, winter, and spring sectional championships. Most of the state plays in the winter, but that’s out of the question in the snow areas, or along the coast from San Francisco north where, if it’s not a drought year, it rains far too much at that time of year.
Keep something else in mind; especially for girls, being good at a sport may be the only way the parents can afford to send the child to college, through an athletic scholarship.
One of my nieces went through something similar - she was good at volleyball and softball, but pretty much game the high school softball team a pass because that’s when her club volleyball team played in tournaments (it plays in the spring because you can’t be on an outside team during high school volleyball reason if you’re also playing for the high school). It’s also not just “trying to become a professional”; even she knows that she’s not good enough for a Division I scholarship (to be fair, this is because, in part, that Division I schools can’t really give out partial women’s volleyball scholarships), much less any sort of pro career.
I am absolutely talking about the larger phenomenon.
I think the focus on travel is the result of a confluence of factors. The recreational leagues have gotten steadily less competitive, culminating in a “everybody gets a trophy” culture. There are many ways to learn the life lessons that team sports imparts on kids. It doesn’t have to be a sport where you need at least a couple of kids on each team to be able to throw a ball over 17" plate from 46’ away.
Most travel teams are not that expensive. They are run by dad coaches and the fees just cover the cost of running the team. You can expect to pay $500-$1000/year for these “neighborhood” travel teams. Little League generally costs a little under $500/year for 2 seasons. Its not a huge resource barrier to pay a couple hundred more for much higher level of play.
Another big problem I see is sports specialization at an increasingly young age. So kids specialize in baseball by the time they are in 3rd grade (3rd fucking grade) and they want better play so they move to travel ball and this slowly kills little leagues as all the good coaches and their kids leave.
The problem is that once you kill the little league in your area, there is no pool of players from which to draw your travel teams. Baseball slowly dies in your area.
I’m talking about a rule that applies to every team. Noone is getting a competitive advantage from a universal rule. Everyone still has about the same chance to win. Its not about winning. I’m sorry you feel like you have to characterize my position that way in order to make your point but this is NOT about winning or losing. Its about not having the sort of little league experience that leads better players to leave the league for travel teams (and take their dads that coach the teams with them).
Not every kid has to play little league past T Ball. Not every kid’s time is well spent on that field.
And if it isn’t done, its because the coaches are inept, amirite? The volunteer coaches are at fault if the kid doesn’t become a decent player? Or its because his teammates have shitty attitudes? The OTHER kids on the team are all being selfish for wanting their games not to be bad.
This isn’t about winning at little league. This is about the viability of little league in the face of a wave of travel teams sweeping across the country leaving recreational leagues with no pitchers (and increasingly catchers) or coaches at the upper levels. As soon as someone can organize all the travel teams better than USSSA has so far, they will wipe little league off the map. Baseball isn’t like soccer, it cannot survive without a critical mass of good players the way soccer can. Then there will be NOTHING for the kids who LOVE the game and want to play even if it means riding the bench a bit.
Every experienced little league coach has had a kids that were not good but they loved coaching because they tried so hard and they’ve all had a good player that they hated coaching because of their attitude. I’m not talking about that. Ability should not be the benchmark for whether or not a kid should play, but perhaps it should be the benchmark for where in the field the kid should play.
Eventually, every league reverts to the minimal play rules set out by Little league international (2 defensive innings and one at bat) by the Majors level. Restrictive minimum play requiurements didn’t used to be a problem because travel teams didn’t start until 16 (which really only pushed into Big League, when high school teams were already scooping up the talent), then 13 (when the majors is already over), then 10ish (competing directly with majors). Now travel teams are reaching down into the minors and they are finding it very easy to pick up the better players because the minimum play rules are much more restrictive and all it takes is a couple of practices as a guest player with a travel team for the parents to see the difference.
IIRC almost every state in the union has a public college that can be funded almost entirely without parental contribution. Certainly less than a decades worth of travel team fees.
Because I am saying that once the good players disappear, the bad players feel like it would be better to go play soccer than play baseball in a league with no pitchers. A league cannot survive because after the good players leave, so will the bad players.
I could have written that more clearly. The last sentence is referring to the sentence immediately before it, not the sentence at the beginning of the paragraph.
Neither. Dads are saying, “I don’t want my kid to have to play with those incompetent kids because I’m planning on my kid getting to the majors.”
I once had a guy ask me whether his son should play on the local Little League team, or on a much better team that consistently won games and was in contention for a championship. I asked him what his son wanted. He told me that the son wanted to stay on the Little League team with all his friends, where he was having fun. I expressed some surprise that this was even a question in his mind.
I think the specialization early on is part of the problem- when I was a kid, we all more or less played everything as young kids, and then only specialized, to a degree when we got into high school. I mean, before middle school I played on baseball teams, basketball teams and swum competitively. Then in middle school I switched to football and track(shotput & discus) on school teams, and continued to swim in the summers. In high school I kept on with football and track, eventually ending up with track after I injured my knee twice playing football. Most of my high school friends who played baseball had pretty much played only Little League until high school began- there weren’t any traveling teams before that.
Part of that was because sports were seasonal- Little League was a spring/summer thing, and so were the YMCA baseball leagues. Swimming was strictly summer, unless you were on the equivalent of the travel team (or in high school, where it was winter), and football was only fall, soccer was fall/winter, and basketball was too. There was no concept of spring basketball or fall baseball for kids’ sports.
Now my son can play year-round YMCA basketball if we so choose, and that’s hardly a competitive set of leagues. I can’t help but think that does a couple of things- one, it makes some kids better earlier, and two, increases the parental investment (so to speak) in the sport earlier. So you get the good kids jumping to the travel teams early because there’s this weird idea that it’s *important * to be a good player on a good team, instead of being the best player or so on a Little League team.
in the 90s when my kids played soccer I noticed some of the better kids left soccer behind for baseball, hoops, etc. They seemed to think soccer was OK when they were ages 5-9 but after that they switched to other sports.
Maybe with that dad but the vast majority of dads putting their kids on a travel team (especially a neighborhood travel team that doesn’t actually travel more than one or two zip codes over), their kids want to play with their friends who are good.
I don’t know about every other little league but most little leagues use some sort of draft so you don’t know who is going to be on your team. You do with a neighborhood travel team.
You are more likely to be playing with the same team year after year on a travel team than in little league.
Its not that its important to be a good player on a good team versus a great player on a bad team. Its that you want everyone on your team to be at least decent and you want everyone on the other team to be at least decent. It is frustrating when you make a great play and a great throw and the guy at 3rd can’t catch the ball. It is equally frustrating when an easy play is thrown away because the guy who fields the easy grounder can’t throw the 10 yards. The “everyone plays” mentality worked fine until the travel clubs started encroaching on the little league minors ages. Now there is an alternative and its driving people away.
Not anymore. There are some GOOD athletes playing soccer but the thing about soccer is that if you get 10 great kids playing 10 great kids, they have fun. If you get 10 unathletic kids playing 10 unathletic kids, they ALSO have fun. As long as the teams are relatively evenly matched everyone has fun.
In baseball, if the pitchers can’t get the ball across the plate, the game sucks. Most of the pitchers are good all around players and if you lose them, you can’t have game. If you lose the dad coaches, you can’t have a league.
The problem with a really bad baseball player is that you won’t enjoy it at all. YOu won’t hit and won’t get to catch any balls.
Soccer is more forgiving like that. You can be really bad and still run, chase the ball, kick it once in a while without really hurting your team