Jake: Little League used to be orange slices, now it’s swag bags

Orange slices used to be enough. Now we’re spending $20,000 a year so a teenager can play Little League.

When I was a kid, our uniform was a three-quarter sleeve T-shirt with “Boys and Girls Club” stamped on the front. Team photos? I’m wearing jeans. Post-game snack? A big bowl of orange slices, and if we were really lucky, Capri Suns.

Those were simpler times.

Youth sports are now a $40 billion industry. Read that again. Forty. Billion. Dollars. And if you have a kid on a Little League team right now, you already know exactly how we got there.

When did Little League get so expensive?

It starts small. A glove here, cleats there. Then your wife comes home from a shopping trip, and your son is holding up a baseball necklace — a woven necklace, apparently worn exclusively while playing baseball — explaining that every kid on the team has one. Sure enough, you show up to the game that night, and every player is wearing one. I still don’t know how they coordinate this stuff so fast, but the marketing works.

Then comes the backpack. Not just any backpack — a baseball backpack, with bat sleeves on both sides. Because apparently your eight-year-old needs two bats ready to deploy at all times. And not just any bats. The bat. The specific $200 pencil-shaped bat with the right certification stamp, or they won’t even let your kid near the plate.

Uniforms are now professional-grade. Every kid’s got protective eyewear. And look — some of these kids can’t hit off a tee yet.

I want to be clear: my wife and I are guilty of plenty of this. I’m not the lone voice of reason in the stands. But I am standing on the sidelines watching parents spend money at a rate that feels increasingly disconnected from the actual point of the thing.

Going broke chasing the dream

The story that really got me: a family spending $20,000 a year on private coaching for their 16-year-old’s baseball dreams. The mom had taken on a second job to help cover it.

Here’s my honest take — if that kid truly has what it takes to go pro, $20,000 worth of private lessons isn’t what gets him there. And if he doesn’t have it, no amount of coaching closes that gap. Real talent has a way of rising to the top. What I worry about is the family going broke chasing their kid’s dream.

I’ve got a buddy whose nine-year-old plays on a travel basketball team. Weeknight practices. Full weekends at tournaments. Real money. Nine years old.

I don’t blame the kids. Of course, they want what their friends show up with. That’s childhood. But somewhere along the way, it became the parents’ job to say no — and a lot of us have quietly stopped doing that.

Youth sports should teach kids to compete, lose, work hard, and be part of a team. That used to cost a T-shirt and some orange slices.

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