The Baseball Resume

It’s a difficult thing to ask a parent to be objective, so I don’t even try. Parent myopia is one thing we all tolerate. It’s easy to find fault in other players while excusing the faults of our own, so expecting a parent to remain completely objective is not realistic. On the other hand, there are behaviors parents should avoid which go way beyond typical parental fanaticism. Some of these actions are stupid and many may be certifiably crazy.

A year or so ago, I interviewed a father who was looking for a team. I needed a player for an 11U team and he believed that his 10-year-old would fit well. We talked for quite a while as I tried to get a feel for the father’s personality – nothing will poison the chemistry of the team and the parents faster or more effectively than a crazy parent. This father assured me that his son was the best third baseman in southern California and had been recruited by teams 40 miles away. One statement left me speechless: This father was laying the groundwork for his 10-year-old son’s college baseball scholarship.

Four years ago, I watched my older son play a Little League game in his first year of Majors and chatted with a mother of another player. Both of our boys were 11 at the time. She was clearly upset that the manager of the team let her son pitch as often as she thought he should. In her opinion, her player was one of the more gifted pitchers on the team and she believed he would excel if he had more chances to perform. This mother confided in me that they would leave Little League at the end of the season because her boy needed to build his baseball resume. They were preparing him for high school. Apparently, without that baseball resume he wouldn’t make the high school team. I’ve run into that mother from time to time over the past few years and have asked how the resume was coming along.

Over the past couple of years I’ve talked with many parents about their sons and whether they were interested in playing on one of my teams. Choosing players is easy. Understanding their parents is far more difficult. The selection criteria parents sometimes use when deciding on a team for their child is interesting. Aggressive physical conditioning regimens, connections to professional or collegiate programs, and rigorous practice and game schedules are valuable to many parents of players between 8 and 12.

None of us know if our children will play organized baseball past 12 or 14 or 16 or 18. Each of those age levels have their own interests, distractions and priorities. We all want our players to stay with the game and love the game, but only great passion for the game will trump all the other things that a teenager can find interesting. So let’s not worry about how far our 10-year-old child will go in baseball. Let’s make it a great time of his life. We can worry about the teenage years when they arrive which will happen soon enough.