By Kristen Carr and Daniel Schmidt
Auburn, Ala. — On almost any given Saturday, Jake Linden and his family can be found loading their Chevy Tahoe with tents and coolers full of drinks and sandwiches to prepare for a six-hour day at the ballpark. With a call time of 7 a.m., their day starts early.
Should Lucas, Linden’s nearly 12-year-old son, and his travel baseball team make it all the way through, their routine will begin again in preparation for the championship game on Sunday.
While not every tournament ends with a win, red dirt leaves a sign of a busy weekend on the floorboards.
Based on data compiled by Statista, there were 481,000 high school baseball players in the United States during the 2021-22 school year. Generally, less than 7.5% of them will make it to the next level.
The competition to get on the radar of collegiate scouts is fierce. Even if a player earns an offer, there is no guarantee even most of their cost of attendance will be covered.
According to Next College Student Athlete, there are more than 34,500 college baseball players in 1,650 programs across five divisions. In total, there are roughly 5,400 scholarships available.
On teams with 35 players on average, that amounts to 14 scholarships. Since baseball is an equivalency sport, athletic scholarships are typically divided, and full rides are rare as staffs seek to avoid leaving players out.
Many families invest so much into their children due to their desire to ensure their child earns a scholarship and plays at the next level, and it can often be exorbitant. Even for younger players, annual costs can still be thousands of dollars.
“You could have a budget up to $3,000, $4,000 or $5,000 [per child] if you're doing heavy traveling and staying in hotels and stuff for weekends,” Linden said.
According to Mark Fuller, a former minor league baseball player and co-owner of P360 Performance Sports, once players enter high school, those costs climb even higher.
“People will mortgage a house, flat out. They’ll dig in the couch to find enough money. It's expensive,” Fuller said.
According to Fuller, costs can range anywhere from $8-10,000 per summer, per player. That cost does not just cover coaches’ salaries and facilities, but also equipment, tournament fees and travel expenses.
With scholarships being relatively scarce at the collegiate level, some parents justify the price tag with that in mind. For Dr. John McCarthy, director of the Institute for Athletic Coach Education at Boston University, this approach is flawed.
“It's expensive to go to college, so I understand why parents, if their child could earn a scholarship, why they would want that,” McCarthy said. “But we have way too many people that are selling that dream and I don't even think the parents really know what's entailed.”
McCarthy added that he believes it’s problematic that children can be objectified to simply a return on investment.
“It’s not a stock, it’s a human being,” he said.
Because of that, players like Auburn High School’s Jace Norton, a senior Mississippi State commit and son of former MLB player Greg Norton, almost exclusively prioritize two things: baseball and academics.
“If it’s a Friday night and I need to work out, I’m gonna work out before I go out or hang out with my friends, so it’s just having my priorities straight. School [also] comes first for me, especially this year,” Norton said. “It’s just all about balance and really yourself, whatever you think is more important.”
However, that balance can be difficult to achieve.
Some players calculated that they spend between 20-30 hours per week on baseball-related activities, while others estimated that they devote upwards of 40 hours — the equivalent of a full-time job.
Norton’s teammate Patrick Davidson, a right-handed pitcher and Air Force commit who is expected to miss his senior season after recently undergoing Tommy John surgery, admitted that the constant access to other players’ lives through social media increases feelings of pressure and makes him feel that he needs to keep up.
“It plays a huge factor in athletes now. Like I know a lot of people, especially with the baseball recruiting world, it’s all you see, all of the social media of other players,” Davidson said. “Sometimes there’s a higher expectation, but I think a lot of high school players put a huge amount of pressure on themselves to be something that they’re not or try to be better than they are. I know for myself, I’ve dealt with that before.”
Many of the problems concerning pressure on young players come from both their own expectations and of their parents. Many parents, according to Auburn High School head baseball coach Matt Cimo, sign their children up for travel ball because they believe it’s the only way to keep them from falling behind.
“I think it's worth it because they have fun. But in terms of, ‘Is my kid going to sign a scholarship and get their education paid for and be a Major Leaguer?’ No,” Fuller said.
Mental health is now a growing concern for coaches like Fuller. Many children under his supervision have parents that are increasingly involved with their practices and games.
Sometimes too involved.
“They look over their shoulder. They can't function. Because they swing at a ball and miss and they look over to mom and dad,” Fuller said. “They're looking to see, ‘is dad mad at me? Is mom mad at me?’ They can't focus on the game, they can't concentrate.”
Additionally, the desire of players to “keep up” and earn a scholarship impacts their physical health. A current trend is to begin specializing in the sport at a young age, eliminating participation in other sports.
“The structure of the seasons, the early specialization, the commercialization of the push for scholarships, these are all things that are pushing the parents to believe they're doing something good for their kid when I think on balance, you can also see there's a lot of kids being harmed by it,” McCarthy said.
Cimo, Fuller and McCarthy each independently asserted that early specialization is a primary factor in overuse injuries such as growth plate fractures and ligament tears that require Tommy John surgery.
“I was fortunate I got to play nine years of minor league baseball and three years of college, and some of these kids already have thrown more than I have in my lifetime of playing baseball,” Cimo said.
A common problem that leads to these injuries is a lack of communication between coaches at schools and travel ball teams. McCarthy said that the high volume of training leads to a “balkanization” effect where repetitive sessions make these injuries more likely.
In a typical travel ball tournament, a star pitcher can take the mound up to four times in a weekend.
“That's abuse. Grown men don’t do that,” Fuller said of this practice.
However, there is much gray area. Davidson and Norton said they play for the legitimate love of the game and were quick to credit their families’ love and sacrifice for their success.
With that being said, Fuller had a message for well-meaning parents on the potential effects of putting too much pressure on their kids to perform.
“The problem is so much pressure and the pressure now, parents don’t get it,” Fuller said. “It’s ok to fail. And it’s ok mom and dad. You failed, let them fail, let them struggle."