I think that baseball has two viable paths into the big leagues. Start in the minor leagues or college and then minor leagues or possibly straight to the bigs.
Those are the paths to the majors from about age 17 and older, but what about from Little League to the minors/college? Does high school baseball play well with travel leagues (of which I understand there are many)?
It really depends on the region. In many areas, at top High Schools, there is a feeder club team that many of the players will come from. Others it’s a bit more nuanced, and some players might make their HS team from “lower-ranked” club teams.
But I do believe that the very best HS baseball players do in fact play for a high school team (either at a prep school or a public HS). As well as for various club teams, prospect teams, scout teams, etc. There is an entire racket built up around convincing parents to pay thousands of dollars for their kid to play for a “scout team” that will play tournaments where college scouts will be.
I know three families whose kids (two baseball sons, one soccer daughter) skipped playing for their high schools, so they could play on “elite” teams. I guess it worked out wel, because all three of them got athletic scholarships for college.
I think whether it is positive or negative depends on the individual. I didn’t play sports beyond Little League baseball, but I observed guys in my high school that did. Dan was the quarterback on the football team, star pitcher on the baseball team, and also played basketball but wasn’t that good possibly because he wasn’t that tall (I’m only 6’-1” and he was easily a couple inches shorter). He was a regular guy, often played poker with my buddies and I, none of whom were athletes. He worked on his studies, not sure where or if he went to college, and judging by his current zip code did pretty well for himself. Jeff was the best swimmer our school ever produced. At the time, his name covered about 3/4 of the school records posted at the school pool. He was a lazy student and avoided most of the college prep courses. He died a few years ago, having been in his sister’s care after what his sister termed “a lifetime of bad choices”. There was no obituary for him that I could find. The difference was that Jeff peaked in high school, Dan did not.
My opinion is that if you’re good enough to get on the team but not be the star, sports is probably good for you in learning to work with others for common goals. But if you’re a star high school athlete but not good enough for college or pro athletes, it can be a curse if you let it get to your head and think that life is a bowl of cherries and things will be handed to you.
I think a lot of these anecdotes back up what the only study I found (linked above) found.
High school sports can be a positive impact on students that have strong personal drive, good executive function, etc. They can amplify positive traits that students already have, and are often structured in such a way that kids that are already on the “right track” will be successful and have those positive traits reinforced.
But there isn’t much evidence that high school sports are any more effective at building positive traits in kids that don’t already have them than other activities like drama or band or robotics. Most of the data that shows that youth that participate in sports have better outcomes than those that don’t is just selection bias: kids that have positive work ethics, good physical genetics, etc are more likely to be successful in sports (and life). They are also more likely to have a stable family life (rides to games and practices, parents to register them) and more money (youth sports can be very expensive).
@Cheesesteak did post an article that claims to show a specific benefit to sports at ages 16-17. I’d like to see the actual study and see if they included other extracurriculars beyond just sports. But I could see why the physical component is particularly useful during that age range.
Sport, sport, masculine sport
equips a young man for Society
Yes, sport turns out a jolly good sort
It’s an odd boy who doesn’t like sport
- Bonzo Dog Band
One thing to keep in mind is that the benefits of an activity are dependent on the participant enjoying the activity. For instance, with those activities you mentioned, there isn’t a huge overlap in personality types in those activities. The drama kids want to be in drama, the robotics kids want to be in robotics, and the sports kids want to play sports. If the kids in those activities were shuffled to other activities, they wouldn’t necessarily have the same level of enjoyment and personal fulfillment. Whatever benefits they got from their desired activity might not be realized if they were put into other activities.
Yeah, my wife’s cousin is like that. Apparently he was a really good basketball player in high school (whatever that means for a 5’9" white kid at Podunk, PA High) but as long as I’ve known him he never seems to have his shit together. Always in and out of various jobs. He’s been divorced twice. Basically an absent dad to his one son. But knowing my wife’s family, they are a bunch of conflict-avoidant enablers so I don’t think anyone’s ever told him “get your fucking shit together dummy”.
Other school programs don’t encourage aggression, violence, praise for “strength”, rulebreaking to win, and attacking the “weak”. They were effectively bully training programs in my experience.
I’m sorry your school was so awful. They taught us to do the opposite of all that when I did sports.
I think this is a crucial point. It’s probably impossible to untangle an existing interest in competitive team sports from any alleged character-building that results.
Also, anyone attending high school is going to be involved in some sports, even if it’s at a minimal level and not formally organized. I was never interested in joining a formal team, but I did play hockey and was pretty good at basketball.* I think those were just part of regular phys ed.
The reality is that some people just aren’t very interested in sports, but that doesn’t make them social misfits.
* To those who doubt that a dog can play basketball, I refer you to the 1997 documentary Air Bud. 
I don’t know how you were googling but 2 minutes on Google Scholar revealed the following to me:
Team sport participation was associated with decreased odds of smoking/tobacco use, alcohol/drug use, and depression/anxiety. Though few studies mentioned potential negative effects of team sport participation, the majority reported improved behavioral, psychological, and social health outcomes in youth athletes worldwide.
among those with adverse childhood experiences, team sports participation during adolescence was significantly associated with better adult mental health outcomes, especially for males, including lower likelihood of having ever received a diagnosis of depression or anxiety and having current depressive symptoms.
There is consistent evidence that participation in a team sport is associated with improved social and psychological health independent of the type of team sport, age, somatic, or mental health problems. The findings indicate that team sport could be more efficient in promoting health and ensuring exercise participation and continuation than individual sport. However, when utilising team sports for health purposes, precautions must be taken with regard to their inherent competitive nature.
All of them seem to pointing to established, large volumes of research already existing. Presumably anyone interested could dig into the literature review of each of these papers and find many more studies to cite.
Standard disclaimer though that most of the studies cited appear to be correlational studies and it’s possible at least some of the causation runs the other way (people less likely to smoke/be depressed etc. are more likely to sign up for team sports) but at least the causation seems to be almost consistently in the direction of more team sports = better health/life outcomes.
Exactly my earlier point. It’s virtually impossible here to disentangle correlation from causation. Not to mention that most social studies are intrinsically infested with a high percentage of statistically-derived bullshit.
With health issues like smoking I’d expect it to be lower just because it makes them worse at sports.
Although I wonder just how closely they looked for the use of “performance enhancing” drugs like steroids.
I think you contradict yourself, here. Some people just aren’t very interested in sports, and so those people are not going to be involved in sports in high school. Like me. I mean, I did what the gym teacher told us to in gym class, but I don’t count “struggling to survive through a class I hated” as “getting involved in sports”, even at a minimal level.
What’s the contradiction? I was never interested in joining organized sports, but I kinda enjoyed the hockey and basketball stuff that was part of phys ed. I saw the fun of it, but wasn’t fanatical about it, and never joined a formal team.
I still remember how amazed I was the one time I ran a whole mile in gym class. It seemed impossible, and was almost immediately followed by severe knee pain that resulted in two surgeries. It was like the universe was sending me a message. Who am I to resist fate?
They made me run a mile too. And swim a half-mile. All I could think of after was, “Thank God I’ll never have to do that again.”
Eep! I didn’t encounter that, thankfully.
I liked sports when I was in high school, but not team sports, which my high school emphasized. Football, rugby, hockey, basketball, volleyball, swim team, they were all there. But no tennis, archery, golf, or indeed anything that didn’t involve a team. There were some practical difficulties there (really, no school has its own golf course and few have a tennis court nearby), but those of us who liked participating in individual sports but not team sports that could be done at school, were regarded as just not participating in sports at all.
It’s interesting that you didn’t think of swimming and track in the same way as tennis, archery, and golf. They are all structurally the same, in that an individual is competing on their own and the scores of all the individual competitors are combined to determine which team wins.
My guess as to why you thought of them differently is that track and swimming are competitions based on maximum physical exertion. These sports are about how quickly you can get from point A to point B. If you can’t move your limbs quickly enough, you won’t excel in them. The other sports like tennis, archery, and golf are much less physical. You don’t win golf by finishing the round the quickest or hitting the ball the farthest. Winning in those other sports requires a variety attributes like dexterity, strategy, and mental concentration. There’s many ways to excel in those sports other than being the fastest or strongest. Also, there’s less of a feeling of letting your team down if you don’t have a good performance. In track and swimming, if you do poorly, it doesn’t affect the performance of your teammates. The team score won’t have as many points, but your teammates can still swim or run to the best of their ability. It’s too bad that schools don’t have more of these kinds of sports where people competed as individuals and the activity wasn’t based so much on peak physical performance. That would allow them to enjoy the competition aspect without so much focus on physical ability. It could even be non-traditional sports like darts, cornhole, and frisbee golf. There would still be competition and physical activity, but it would be a lot more inclusive for all abilities.