Why Did the Best Kid in Town Quit Baseball?

The Pay-To-Play Problem Emerges

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Our high school and college coaches losing potential talented baseball players because it costs too much.

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Baseball is changing, and green coaches are changing.

Show Intro And Sponsor Spotlight

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Welcome to Baseball Coaches of Welcome, hosted by 27-year high school baseball coach. Each episode takes you inside real conversations with high school travel college and professional baseball coaches on building winning programs, developing players, running better practices, navigating, recruiting, and creating culture to blow. New episodes every Wednesday that showcase the best baseball coaches from across the country.

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Today's episode of Baseball Coaches Unplugged. It's powered by the Netting Professionals, improving programs one facility at a time. Will Minor and his team at the Netting Professionals specialize in the design, fabrication, and installation of custom netting for baseball and softball. This includes backstops, batting cages, BP turtles, screens, ball carts, and more. They also designed and installed digital graphic wall padding, windscreen, turf, turf protectors, dugout benches, and cubbies. Netting Pros also work with football, soccer, lacrosse, golf courses, and even pickleball. Contact them today at 844-620-2707. That's 844-620-2707. And you can visit them online at www.nettingpros.com. Check out Netting Pros on X, Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn for all their latest products and projects. Hello and welcome to Baseball Coaches Unplugged. I'm your host, Coach Ken Carpenter. Thanks for joining me today. If you enjoyed today's show, please be sure and share it with a friend. Subscribe because we put out a new show every Wednesday. And if you have the time and you feel like it, leave us a review. It helps us to grow the show.

A 14-Year-Old’s Price Tag Reality

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Today we're going to be talking about the cost of baseball. And is it creating a situation where we are losing talented players at a young age because they can't afford to pay to be on expensive travel teams? Here's a scenario. 14-year-old, left-handed, loose arm, quick feet, the kind of hitter where you hear the ball come off the bat, different, and you look up from your clipboard, and he's got a single mom sitting in his stands, and she's thinking about one question. She doesn't ask about playing time or what position he'll play. She asks, how much is this going to cost by the end of the summer? So let's do the math out loud for her. Team fees, uniform package, a bat, seven tournaments. Four of them are out of town, hotel minimums, because yes, in 2026 we still charge parents 15 bucks ahead to watch their own child play a game already where you've already paid $3,000 just to enter it. Most parents try to find a way to make it happen, but for others, they can't afford it. Here's what I put out on the table today, and I want to be careful about how I say it because I'm not here to blame travel baseball. I've coached travel baseball, I've coached high school baseball, and I've played Legion baseball. But we have built an economy around youth baseball that quietly decides who gets to be good at it, not who is good at it, who gets to become good at it. And that's a different thing entirely. Talent has never been evenly distributed, but opportunity used to be a lot closer to even then than it is now. When development moves from the neighborhood field to a private facility with an hourly rental rate, you haven't just changed the venue, you've installed a turnstile in front of the sport. Let's name the stack because parents feel it, but coaches rarely add it up. Team dues are the sticker price, and the sticker price is the smallest issue in the whole operation. Then there's travel, gas, three nights in a hotel that the tournament operator has a block deal with, meals out for the family of four, then gear, a composite bat that costs more than a used transmission, a glove, cleats, turf shoes because a lot of games are played on turf fields, a bag, catcher's clear if you're really unlucky. Then an invisible line item nobody writes down is a parent who takes time off Friday afternoon from work to drive four hours. And here's the part that should make all of us uncomfortable. That family drives four hours, pays for three hotel nights, and the kid plays in maybe two or three of the five games. The business model isn't developing him, the business model is him being

Who Gets Pushed Out First

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there. So who gets squeezed out? Working class families and inner city communities first. Obviously. And the the participation research has been pointing at this for over a decade. Kids in the lowest income households play organized sports at somewhere around half the rate of kids in the highest. Baseball is one of the worst offenders because our development window is long and the equipment for the game is expensive. Don't miss the second group because they're the ones nobody talks about. The middle. The family with two working parents and three kids, where the the honest answer is we can afford this for one of you. That's a real conversation happening in and around dinner tables and baseball loses that coin flip constantly to a sport with a season instead of a calendar.

How Cost Warps Recruiting And Joy

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Now here's why this is our problem. Not just a fairness problem. High school coaches, your talent pool hasn't been pre-sorted before the kid ever puts on a uniform. Your freshman class, a lot of times, isn't the best 14-year-olds in your attendance zone. It's the best 14-year-olds whose families could finance the runway. You're not evaluating talent. You're inheriting a purchasing decision. College coaches, you're recruiting off a map that has holes in it. If your evaluation pipeline runs exclusively through the showcase circuit, you are structurally incapable of finding the late bloomer, the kid who grew four inches at 17, the two-sport athlete who was playing point guard in November, and with roster spots tighter than they used to be, missing on late developing talent isn't a minor inefficiency. It's a difference between the middle of your conference and the top of it. Then there's attrition, which is the quietest killer of all when it comes to baseball. The year-round grind wears kids out physically, and we see that in how young UCL injuries are showing up now. But also mentally, kids don't usually quit because they get cut, they quit because it stopped being fun and started being a job they didn't apply for. That's not a talent loss, that's a joy loss. And joy is the actual product we're selling.

Four Practical Fixes Coaches Can Try

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All right, before we get out of here, I want to pull all this into one place because I don't want you turning this off with a list of grievances. I want you turning it off with a list of potential moves. Everything that I've talked about comes down to one sentence. In youth baseball, the people who set the cost are not the people who pay it. Fix that gap, and most of the problem starts closing on its own. So here's the whole thing. You could put it into four buckets. Bucket one is obviously transparency. One all-in number published before tryouts. Dues, gear, travel, gate fees. Families can plan around an expensive season. They can't plan around a season that keeps growing. This one is free and it's the highest leveraged thing in the sport. Let's look at bucket number two. It's redistribution. This is going to be a reach, but the money is already in the system. It's sitting in the gate revenue and event fees. Route a fixed percentage of it back into the sliding scale dues and needs-based scholarships administered locally so actually reaches the family in your zip code. Pair that with MLB and parks funding on urban academies and RBI because those are the only programs where the entry price is generally zero. Clearly asking tournament directors and showcases in all likelihood, this will probably not happen. Let's try bucket three. Geography. Nothing beyond a three-hour drive before high school. That single rule kills the hotel line item, kills the unpaid Friday, and buys the kid more reps than any showcase ever gave him. Regional play isn't a downgrade in development. It's a downgrade in travel. Which was never the part that made him better. The fourth bucket. College coaches. Possibly you could control this one. A free or at cost regional ID day. Real attention paid to video. Have a player recommendation letter signed by high school coaches and let them attend your event. This lets college coaches know a player is a potential JUCO, D3, D2, 1 or Division I player. And that has to be in their high school coaches' eyes. The high school coach needs to sign off on that. Now here's the honest part. Every one of those four costs somebody something. Transparency costs enrollment. Redistribution costs margin. Regional play costs event revenue. Free evaluation costs somebody a weekend. That's exactly why none of it has happened yet. But look around at this industry. There is no commissioner of youth or travel baseball coming to fix this. There's coaches, directors, operators, athletic directors. The same people who built this thing are the only people who can adjust it. So pick one. Not four. One. Publish your real number this week. Weigh one family's dues this season. Cut two out-of-state weekends off the next summer's schedule. Because the talent hasn't left the game. It's sitting in a living room, somewhere, doing math it shouldn't have to do. Our job is to make the math work and find ways to keep as many players playing for as long as possible.

One Change To Start This Week

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Baseball Coaches Unplugged Podcast is proud to be partnered with the Netting Professionals Improvement Programs, one facility at a time. Contact them today at eight four four six two zero two seven zero seven or visit them online at www.neticprose.com. As always, I'm your host, Coach Kevin Carpenter. Thanks for listening to Baseball Coaches Unplugged.