Big Travel Ball

I started travel ball in 1998. I was thirteen.

The team was the Chili Diablos — most of the best players off our 12U majors team, plus a couple of guys we picked up. I also played for the Outlaws. Our coaches were dads. Tom and Paul were dads. So was Pete Crimando, who is one of the most important people in my baseball life.

Here is what happened to Pete. In 2001 he volunteered to help coach his son's summer team at Horizon High School, and the head coach offered him the freshman job on the spot. He had already coached his oldest son from t-ball all the way through high school. He is now in his twenty-fifth year running that freshman program.

Twenty-five years of fourteen-year-olds, at the level nobody writes about, because he liked doing it. By the vocabulary we use today, Pete Crimando is a daddy-ball coach. He is also the reason a lot of us kept playing.

Nobody called it daddy ball. Nobody called it anything, because there was nothing to call it. There was no reason to object to a dad coaching, because there was no money in the room to fight over. A few guys who loved baseball put together a good team so their kids could play good baseball. That was the whole thing.

That is the piece almost everybody gets backwards. People argue about whether a dad should coach as if it were a timeless question about fairness and playing time. It isn't. It's a symptom. When there is nothing at stake but baseball, a dad coaching is just a guy coaching. When there is a roster fee, a showcase circuit, a recruiting narrative and a rankings profile attached to every at-bat, suddenly who bats third is a financial and political question — and then you need a word for it.

Let me say the good part first, because it's true

I am not going to pretend the last twenty-five years made the game worse in every direction. They didn't.

The industrialization of youth baseball produced a more competitive landscape and, flatly, better players. The technical ceiling is higher than it has ever been. Velocity across the whole sport has climbed in a way that would have been hard to imagine when I was coming up — a high schooler sitting in the low nineties is no longer a local legend, he's a recruit — and the training that builds that arm now starts years earlier than it used to. The instruction is more sophisticated, the data is real, and a motivated fourteen-year-old today has access to knowledge I would have had to move across the country to get.

That is not nothing. If your kid wants to be great and you can afford the runway, this ecosystem can genuinely get them there faster than mine could have.

So this isn't a piece about how it was better in my day. It's a piece about what got attached to the thing along the way, and who pays for it.

What actually happened

An industry formed around a nine-year-old's Saturday.

Not a conspiracy. Nobody planned it. It's just that youth sports turned out to be a market with a few unusual properties: the customer is a parent, the product is their child's future, the price is whatever hope costs that week, and almost nobody buying has enough information to tell good from bad.

That last one is the whole problem, and baseball has it worse than any sport I have been around.

The expertise vacuum

Here is something I have never been able to explain. Baseball attracts more people who are certain they know everything about it, with less basis for that certainty, than any other sport I've been part of.

A guy played one year of college ball. A guy was good in high school in 1994. And in the room, to a parent who has never played, that man is the expert. He speaks with total confidence about swing planes and arm care and what your son needs to do to get seen, and there is no counterweight in the room, because who's going to argue?

If you never played, you are not in a position to evaluate any of it. So you do the reasonable human thing: you trust whoever sounds the most certain. And the person who sounds most certain is frequently the person selling you something.

That is not a knock on parents. It's the correct response to having no information. It's just also exactly the condition an industry needs in order to extract money.

The gear thing

Let me tell you what I see, and I've seen it hundreds of times.

A kid shows up with a $400 bat. Sometimes a $500 bat. Sometimes three of them in the same bag. There's a sliding mitt in his back pocket that costs fifty dollars, and he wears it because he saw a big leaguer wear one on TV. There's a pair of Bruce Bolt batting gloves in there too, another hundred.

And the kid can't do ten push-ups.

I want to be careful here, because these are not bad people. They are parents who love their kid and are doing the one thing available to them that feels like investing in him. You can't buy him a swing. You can buy him the bat the good players have. So you buy the bat.

But something breaks in a kid when the equipment arrives before the work does.

So my rule with parents was simple: if the kid is getting a $500 bat, that bat costs about a hundred push-ups per dollar. Not as a punishment. As a journey. There has to be a path to the bat.

Because when things are not earned, they are not valued. A bat that showed up in a box is equipment. A bat that took six months is a trophy, and a kid treats it differently, and — this is the part people miss — he treats himself differently.

I have never met anyone who reached the highest level of this game who did not understand that. Not one. Humility, politics, process, grind, earning things — every person who makes it to the big leagues has been ground through all of it, because it is too hard to get there any other way. No amount of money at twelve substitutes for it. The kids who get everything handed to them early are, in my direct experience, the least equipped for what the game does to you at sixteen.

What the machine sells you

The mechanics are worth naming plainly, because once you can see them you can't unsee them.

The showcase. You pay to have your kid perform in front of scouts who may or may not be there for your kid's age group, in an event whose economics work whether or not a single player gets recruited. Some are legitimate and valuable. Many are a gate fee dressed as an opportunity.

The rankings profile. A number next to your child's name, which you can improve by attending more events run by the organization that assigns the number. If you want the plain-English version of who sanctions what, we wrote a parent's guide to USSSA, Perfect Game and the rest.

The roster fee. Three hundred a month, sometimes more, frequently without a clear accounting of what it buys. Ask for the accounting. A good organization has one ready.

The camp calendar. Camps in the winter, camps over spring break, camps the week after the season ends. Some are excellent. Some exist because a facility has empty hours and a mailing list.

The upgrade offer. Your eleven-year-old gets told by a coach that he's really good and there's a spot on the 13U team. It's flattering, it's exciting, and it costs three hundred a month. This is not automatically bad — playing up is genuinely good for some kids. But notice that the compliment and the invoice arrived together.

None of these is inherently a scam. All of them are sold hardest to the parents least able to evaluate them.

Why half the families I talk to have a bad story

Ask around. Roughly half the travel-ball parents I meet have had a bad experience, and they'll tell you about it in detail, and it usually isn't what you'd guess. It's rarely that the coach didn't know baseball.

It's that nobody set expectations up front.

Nobody told the family how playing time would actually work. Nobody said what the season would really cost including tournament travel. Nobody explained what happens when a kid struggles for three weeks. Nobody said out loud whether this team is developmental or competitive, because saying it out loud might cost a signing.

So the family fills the gap with assumptions, the assumptions turn out to be wrong, and by June they're furious. Then they leave for another club, where the same thing happens, and now they're club hoppers and the coaches roll their eyes about them.

I've watched this from the coaching side for twenty years and I'll say the uncomfortable part: it is usually the organization's fault. Most coaches are excellent at baseball and terrible at running a business. They don't set expectations, they don't communicate, they don't do admin, they don't follow up. Not because they're bad people — because nobody ever taught them that the parent relationship is half the job.

The thing coaches need to hear

I ran private lessons in Los Angeles through MADE Baseball at $120 an hour and I was booked solid for four straight years. About eighty percent of my clients were between eight and thirteen.

I'm not saying that to brag. I'm saying it because of what it proves: the demand is enormous and there is no shortage of it.

Which means a coach does not have to run money grabs. You don't need to invent a camp to hit your number. You don't need to sell a family a showcase your kid doesn't need. There is more demand than you can personally serve, and the coaches who understand that end up with better businesses than the ones optimizing every transaction — because parents talk, and being the coach who told them not to spend money is worth more than the money.

Do the coaching well. Set expectations in writing. Answer texts. The rest takes care of itself. That's not idealism, it's just what happened to me. If you are thinking about running your own program, we put the operational side in how to start a travel team the right way.

Where I'm coming from, and what I can't tell you

I have been in this game since I was nine.

I was diagnosed with Legg-Calvé-Perthes disease in my hip at seven years old. At nineteen — two weeks before my twentieth birthday, in July of 2005 — I had a total left hip replacement. Every reasonable person understood that was the end of it.

I became the first minor-league pitcher to pitch after a total hip replacement, and only the second player in the history of the game to play professionally after one. The first was Bo Jackson.

I turned down a full academic scholarship to Arizona State to go play at South Mountain Community College, because I wanted to play baseball and my mom told me she trusted me. I had a solid year there and got recruited by the University of Arizona. I played professionally for seven years. I still play.

I tell you this not as a résumé but because it is the entire reason I'm suspicious of an industry built on optimizing children early. Nothing about my path was optimized. By the logic of the current system I was a bad investment at twelve — a kid with a degenerating hip who should have been steered somewhere else. What got me there was not a rankings profile. It was process, grind, an enormous amount of luck, and people like Pete who coached because they loved it.

Here is what I cannot tell you: I have never been a travel-ball parent. I have two young daughters. I coached T-ball for my oldest in St. Cloud for a couple of months last season and she didn't love it, so we stopped, and I am not going to pretend that a four-year-old in T-ball taught me what it's like to sit in the stands at 13U watching your son strike out three times.

I have been the player, the pro, the private coach, and the guy running the business. I have not been the dad in those stands. When I tell you what a coach is doing wrong, that's from twenty years inside it. When I tell you how it feels to be the parent, take it as observed, not lived.

So what do you actually do

Short version, and I'll write the long version of each of these separately.

Ask what it costs, all in. Roster fee, tournament entries, uniforms, travel, gate fees. A good organization answers in one email. A bad one gets vague. Here is what a travel season actually runs, line by line.

Ask how playing time works, before you commit. Not "does everybody play" — specifically, how it is decided, who decides it, and what happens in a slump. Write the answer down.

Ask what the team is for. Developmental or competitive. There is no wrong answer, only a wrong match.

Judge a coach on patience, not résumé. Pete Crimando did not play pro ball. He has spent twenty-five years being good at fourteen-year-olds, which is a rarer skill. Someone who played at a high level usually does coach better — they've seen the real thing and they know what actually matters. But not always. Some guys who reached Triple-A or the big leagues are poor coaches for a ten-year-old, because they never had to be patient with someone who isn't them. Watch a practice before you pay. You'll know in twenty minutes.

Buy the gear last. Strength, movement and reps first. Push-ups are free. Let the bat be earned.

Your kid does not need to be the best at twelve. He needs to get stronger, get better grades, and become someone people want in a dugout. I have never once seen the twelve-year-old rankings predict who was still playing at twenty-two.

The last thing

I love this game. It gave me everything I have, including a hip's worth of trouble and a career nobody thought I'd get. I'm building CageList because the infrastructure around baseball is scattered across a thousand places and nobody has ever put it in one, and because the family trying to figure this out deserves better than whoever sounds most confident in the parking lot.

Travel ball isn't the villain. What's grown around it is worth understanding before you write the check.

If you're at the point where you're thinking about a cage in the backyard — and a lot of you get there right after your kid tells you he never wants to strike out three times again — we've written down what that actually costs.

Isaac Hess is the founder of CageList. He pitched professionally for seven years after a total hip replacement at nineteen and spent two decades coaching private lessons, mostly to players between eight and thirteen.