My son just had his first season of baseball, not T ball. 6-8 year olds, little league, player pitch coach pitches 3 after a walk. Brutal baseball to watch sometimes, but occasionally it was actually pretty good, it was great watching him really progress through the year and start to really see him enjoying the sport of baseball. This seems like a great future father-son thing we could bond over.
Of course, at least half of the fun really was that his friends played in the league, so today we get to play Friend 1's team, oh look Friend 2's team is at the top of the standings, we had a big hit against Friend 3's team to spark a comeback, etc.
Back when I played, there was rec league for our suburb, and a town travel team which took only the best of the best. Like 1 person I knew played travel, the ~25 others of us all played rec. Point is that rec league, league play was FUN, and reasonably competitive because pretty much everyone who played, played rec.
My best memories of baseball, despite my career peak being rec league "all star", are things like striking out friends, trash talking at school, finding out what team everyone was on, seeing who was all talk, playing them in the playoffs, etc that was a blast. And since rec league was all local, you never know who might drop by a game, boy does it feel good to smack a bases loaded double in front of someone you don't like... (and when you're older, maybe even girls?!?)
So I'm excited for that for him.
But I check it out, and his little league, in a larger suburb, doesn't even exist after 10u. Despite being pretty healthy at his current level. The league I played in used to have 20 teams, now they're down to FOUR. What?
That's how I found this place, doing research and it seems like travel has taken over baseball. News to me.
I'm not going to just assume that travel can't be fun, but it sure seems it's all tournaments and all practice and all, well.. travel, which doesn't sound anywhere near as fun as league play what I described above. Especially when you're a "standard deviation" player like I was, and most kids are.
Anyone see their kids genuinely enjoying tournament play? especially at the middle school level. Seems like that's a part of childhood that's really lost here. Or is it just like product reviews where the people having fun playing travel baseball aren't posting here... because they're out having fun.