I did not just say it sucks, pal; I said it is untrue bullshit. Select coaches who look down on dad neighborhood league coaches can go fuck themselves. Kid baseball should have only two purposes: learn to play the game and have fun. Select teams are high-pressure endeavors with winning the sole purpose. The crazy long seasons (75 games!) also require a family to devote all its time to one kid’s baseball or to split up and travel in separate directions if a sister also is playing sports or doing other activities.
If a select team took only the truly elite older kids, I would not have as much of a problem with it as I do. Austin Slam did this initially but eventually expanded. They do not target only the elite in almost cases.They take every kid of all ages whose parents are gullible or dumb enough to pay the large sum, and many of those so-called “select” players cannot play a lick. Consequently, in a select game, the best kids play, and the not so good kids watch from the dugout most of the time. That harms the kid emotionally and hinders his development greatly. Having kids 7 -12 years play on select travel teams is crazy and demonstrates the greed of those who operate select teams. Parents who do this are harming their kids in their effort to enjoy their expected vicarious success, Many of the travel team kids will burn out long before HS, especially if they are not getting to play much.
More and more MLB players are speaking out against year round travel baseball. I give each one a Standing O. I guess you can see how I do not feel very strongly about this topic.
Maybe Mark will chime in on this. He played on a HS team which had an elite season, and the roster included only two select kids.
That paraphrases a story I have heard about many former players, including about Bibb Falk.
Interviewer: “What do you think you would hit if you played today”
Former player from another era: “Probably .275 or 280.”
Interviewer (incredulously): “Is that all???”
Former player: “Hell, I am 75 years old.”
I’ve only run across about 4 of them, and it was all fun stuff.
Kids had fun.
I was jealous of their batting cages a bit ago, much better than the $2 for 20 swings off a robot arm I had at the arcade back in the day…pick your heat level
But not as cool as the double-wheel spinmaster, that thing got a little scary depending on that angle or the speed of the wheels.
I am thinking if I had told the kids who came out for the team: “Sorry, but if you did not play select, I do not want you. You are not good enough.” I would have had a two-player roster, and select had been around for 8-9 years by then.
ETA: the select team snobbery might work at places like Westlake where affluence is not unusual. At places like McCallum or most of the schools in AISD, parents simply cannot afford select travel teams. Lots of schools win with neighborhood league kids.
I’m glad I came up before all of this “Select” ball. I played at Westbury American Little League. I started in 1967, just one year after Westbury American won the Little League World Series.
There was “Pee Wee” for 8 & 9 year olds and Minor and Major Little Leagues. You really want to make the Majors because, among other things, you got to wear prestigious “real” uniforms modeled after actual big league teams instead of the generic minor league unis.
Later, they added “Senior” league, which was analogous to Pony leagues, except for it had a full-sized infield. The facility is still there, but they’ve never recaptured that '66 glory.
There’s a built in stratification of “selected” players in Little League. Basically the kids who predominantly comprise the all-star team for each age group after Spring ball play in “tournament” teams over the summer and fall, where they compete against similar teams, which allows them to hone their skills at a high level of competition. Then each spring they rejoin regular little league, are dispersed via the draft through their division, and then reassamble for the all-star tournaments following the spring season.
All of my neighborhood and school friends were the Westbury National Little League area. That park was on S. Willow Dr. Now that area is a lake and the newer ballparks are on Dryad Dr. I believe both leagues were a part of the same organization.
The facility on Dryad is “Westbury Little League.” They don’t have American and National divisions anymore, but several of the area leagues do, such as West U.
I was just thinking the other day how we’d crease our hats into a V shape rather than just pinch them into a curve like normal people and that I’d never get the crease anywhere all that near the middle of the bill.
Anyway, the personal experience described here with respect to high school baseball took place 25 years ago. It would not surprise me one bit if the world had gone mad with respect to kids’ baseball like it has everywhere else and that 70 game a year select teams are a prerequisite to competitive high school baseball. I have a cousin whose daughter was all-everything in softball at St Agnes and now plays for a fairly high profile division one college or however they categorize these things. As I understand it, her many years of travel team softball and the countless games were a necessary component of the process.
It’s been 40 years, but thinking back to when I moved to TX. Baseball tryouts were a week after I’d moved, and no one had ever seen me. All the other kids trying out were guys who’d played locally for years. Of course I made the team and most of them did not. I’d like to think it was because I was a pretty decent player, and thankful that the coach didn’t care who my daddy was or whether I was a local travel ball legend. I was simply better than those guys, no matter where we came from or where we’d played before.
No. You are never wrong, I know, but things have not changed like that. Only the affluent can play select travel baseball. You think HS baseball requires wealth now?
I’m old enough to where we got a bunch of knuckleheads together and played in the park. Of course, this was back when kids could go out and roam the mean streets of Willowbend unsupervised.
What we mainly did, though, is play tennis ball baseball, and we’d play in the street unless we were at the Little League park in which case we’d play on the tennis courts of the adjacent public park.