Youth baseball: Develop or profit? Toxicity from innocence

When you mix billions of dollars with the hearts of parents, you are brewing a toxic concoction that can explode at any moment buried deep within the youth sports culture.

I took on this project with a bias to the blatant harm the toxic culture that surrounds youth baseball, and youth sports as a whole, but ended coming out of it with a heightened sense of awareness to the passive-aggressive harm we can inflict on our children.

As I laid out this story, I was ready to blast the bullhorn blaring, top-of-the-lungs screaming abusive parent. However, I ended up with introspection.

The angle that was approached with this project was from a father and a coach. I have dealt with “that parent” and I have had to be cognizant of not being “that parent.” All parents of young athletes have to toe the line of supportive and smothering. It’s amplified when you are coaching that athlete, especially in a sport you played and loved.

Two names came to mind as the best options to start this conversation with. The first was Jason Hirsh, the ex-Colorado Rockies pitcher and current founder of FAST Baseball Development and Arm Care, but most importantly father of an athlete. The other was Andy Lindahl, a long-time coach and lacrosse player, and currently one half of Kreckman and Lindahl on Altitude 92.5 in Denver, also an athlete’s father.

Anyone that has supported a child, nephew, niece, grandchild, etc. has been there and admonished the parent that lives vicariously through their child. These are the ones that have changed the Youth Sports landscape from a fun way to exercise and grow into adulthood with a plethora of good habits.

Into a $15 billion a year behemoth that has parents getting a second or third job to get their kids into competition for the sport of choice. This atmosphere and financial commitment are what has spurned this toxic culture we all have to wade through.

When I spoke with former Colorado Rockies pitcher and current Rockies broadcaster Jason Hirsh about this topic, I got a nuanced response:

“The toxicity is based around the parents, the coaches, and the money,” said the former Rockies pitcher. “Those three things are a terrible combination because you have expectations, because there’s a lot of money in play, you have play time expectations.” He added, “[i]f I’m going to pay $5,000 a year for my kid to play in this league, they better play $5,000 worth of games.”

He went on to expand on the toxic coaching contribution. He stated that even though, “there are great coaches out there. Grossly misinformed, or ill-informed coaches” can be a detriment to the player.

He expanded on how with a story about a player who hid an injury because of the fear he had of disappointing his father. He then reached out to his coach because of the pain in his elbow, and was promptly and erroneously told to “throw through it”. As Hirsh noted, this was the wrong answer.

This falls right in line with what Andy Lindahl responded within a separate interview to the same question. He contends that it all runs back to what we will call “The Unhappy Trilogy.”

• Over-the-top invested parents
• Mis-/ill-informed coaching
• Money

They both agreed that the quickest way was removing the money, but how do you knock this deep-rooted structure over when there are so many wallets invested? There is no easy answer. As was stated, this is a $15 billion a year business, meaning the stakes are unfathomably high so the most impactful will be changing the other two.

Lindahl also expanded on how this culture can be destructive even when we don’t mean it to be. He told the story of the reason he chose lacrosse over baseball.

Baseball was his father’s favorite sport, and when he started playing, his father became so overbearing he burned out and went the way of 70% of all youths in today’s game and dropped out of baseball. It broke his father’s heart when Andy told him that he was not going to play baseball and give lacrosse a go.

But the lesson of this story is the way his father reacted, he didn’t explode and try to force young Andy to play a sport he lost his love for no matter how badly he wanted to share the love of the game with his son. Mr. Lindahl went out and bought Andy his first lacrosse stick and made sure to show up to every game he could and support him in every way he could throughout the rest of his athletic career which expanded into college at Metro State of Denver.

This brings up the six most important words we as parents can tell our young athletes: “I love to watch you play.” That’s all it takes to make your child’s day and keep stoking their fire for the game.