Baseball mommies and daddies (I differentiate mommies and daddies from parents) can be very entertaining. Players, coaches and parents can all learn from baseball mommies and daddies. That’s why talking about them is a recurring theme here.

I ran into a baseball mommy the other day at a day camp held by the local university. She was torn between leaving and hovering. In the end, she decided to tell me how good her son could be at baseball if only he would buckle down and take it more seriously. I pointed out that her boy was just 8 years old.

Of course she hadn’t forgotten how old her son was. The problem she had was reconciling his chronological age with the fact that he had “played up” the previous season, as if playing up was a sign of maturity. Mommy logic dictated that her player was ready for “the next level” and he should behave as such.

I talk with a lot of mommies and daddies who are driven to find ways for their players to play up. In some cases, these kids are forced to play on teams two years older. I recall a daddy who wanted his 8-year-old to play on the same 11U team as his 10-year-old because the younger boy was the player with a “real future.” I suppose his older son was barely hanging on in a feeble attempt to play up just one year.

Playing up is a concept that has been around as long as there have been young athletes. Greg Maddux played up with his older brother Mike. Hockey, basketball and baseball prodigies have historically played on teams with older players at some point. In some cases, that is how prodigies stretch their abilities. Of course it doesn’t hurt that it makes for good media fodder.

The problem for mommies and daddies is that the vast majority of young players aren’t prodigies. These players can’t and shouldn’t play up. And virtually no player should play up on a regular basis before the onset of puberty.

The first goal for parents is to make sure children under 12 love the game. Unless kids develop a passion for their sport, they won’t play later on in life. It doesn’t matter how much potential they have or what kind of God-given physical ability they possess. Without passion, teenagers will drop their sport as soon as they are introduced to girls, beaches, hanging out, and the myriad of other distractions that come along with high school. I spoke with a mother the other day whose gifted son played football player and made varsity as a high school sophomore, but left the game and dropped out of school the next year because he had no passion for those things.

Nothing a young player achieves in baseball before puberty matters. The ability to pitch a complete game as a 12-year-old is worthless as a 15-year-old. The five homers a player hits in Little League do not translate to five homers in high school. The 30 stolen bases recorded at 11 mean nothing once a boy starts to get long and gangly.

Of course, all of this logic falls on the deaf ears of baseball mommies and daddies. After all, their child is one of the exceptions, one of the prodigies. All math and probability aside, their kid is The Natural. That is why their 8-year-old will play on an 11U team, practice three hours every day, and work out with private pitching and swing coaches.