More travel baseball (since it's the insane tryout season)......

[coachnorm]

I don't think that's baseball year round making them less athletic, I think it's that less athletic players are more likely to be able and willing to play baseball year round, and that allows them to stay ahead of more athletic players and possibly pushes more athletic players to other sports. Our friends that have done travel ball for U8 coach pitch have two or three good athletes on the team, the rest are just there because they are affluent and have been worked with a lot, both by their dad's and by private coaches. Some of them are probably going to get pushed out each year as other players athleticism overcomes the advantages of more reps that the less athletic players have. But not all of them will and on average, they will be less athletic, if more skilled, than the equivalent teams when we were growing up.

I firmly believe that baseball year round does make players less athletic because baseball is not athletic by its nature. If the year round low calorie burner was to play 4 month of basketball or soccer, his quick twitch muscles would evolve to another level and that would translate into a better baseball player.

 

[johnson86-1]

I firmly believe that baseball year round does make players less athletic because baseball is not athletic by its nature. If the year round low calorie burner was to play 4 month of basketball or soccer, his quick twitch muscles would evolve to another level and that would translate into a better baseball player.

I don't disagree with that despite my first sentence. I'm sure any particular player would develop some more balance and agility if he was playing other sports also. I was just saying I think the bigger factor in teams being less athletic is that a bigger portion of the roster is filled with less athletic people that are there because they've been playing baseball 8 months a year since they were 7. When I was growing up, in soccer and baseball, you had a few players that were pretty much the best players at every sport because they were the best athletes, a few players that were good at soccer or baseball because they did it all the time, and then the rest of the team was basically filled out based on athleticism. Now it appears that basically you have a few really good athletes and the rest are just people that have started playing year round earlier. I assume as you get older you get more athletes over take the ones that have been playing year round.

Of course, if you were from a place like Atlanta or even Birmingham 20 -30 years ago, maybe it was already like that there and this is just smaller population areas finally catching up.

 

[Smoked Toag]

No, you complain about everything related to travel ball. Not just limited to pitching overuse (which can be a problem because so many coaches don't know what they're doing), but also to the volume of games and year-round commitment. Are you now saying we've never debated those things before? Whether you like it or not, if a kid is going to be successful in the sport, unless he's a prodigy, that level of commitment is going to be required. It's the cost of doing business now.

As for your second comment, you totally missed the point. But it shows that you think like a rec league coach.

I absolutely think like a rec league coach (a good one, anyway, as there are plenty of bad rec coaches), which means I value development more than winning. I'm proud of that. The long game is the way to go, that's how the pros think. That's how baseball was meant to be played, and that's how stats become more valuable.

The high school, travel/select and college circuit is win at all costs and it prohibits development. At least with high school and college there is a regular season to develop, with a tournament at the end. Travel/select is nothing but tournaments. So I choose the first 75% of tournaments to develop, with the winning mentality coming in the last few of the year. That's the correct way.