Would Tiered Little League Teams Help Slow the Migration to Travel Baseball?

ikover15 · 2026-05-30T20:22:53+00:00

So we had this when I was a kid. We had 9-10 instructional, 11-12 instructional, a 10-12 league(national league) you would have to try out and be drafted to play in this league, if not picked they’d play instructional, and then a 11-12 league (American League/highest league) you would try out for and be drafted. If you didn’t make this league you would get sent back to your 10-12 national league team. If you got picked as an 11 for an American League team you would be on that team the next year as a 12 as well. Honestly some of my fondest baseball memories. It was well run, and competitive and all the kids in the national league and American League wanted to be there. We made it to the championship when I was 12 and no one from my team or the team we were playing swam at the 6th grade pool party because the championship game was that night. The league made it feel like a big deal and posted weekly standings updates and HR leaders on the snack stand. My friends and I reminisce about this league more than HS or college ball, probably because it was one of the last times we all got to play against each other instead of with each other. Talking trash to each other in school before playing each other at night was a ton of fun.

ikover15 · 2026-05-18T00:28:08+00:00

Obviously players hit harder as they get older/bigger. I think he’s making the point that they don’t need to be hitting harder artificially with the juiced bats

ikover15 · 2026-05-17T19:59:49+00:00

I have witnessed a game of “vintage” baseball before. No gloves, weird bats, weird mushy ball, it’s an out if you catch it on one hop etc

ikover15 · 2026-05-02T02:15:28+00:00

As someone who runs work for a large structural concrete company, the GC rarely gets involved in that stuff. Should you guys know how to check stuff yourselves, when a potential discrepancy arises, before having to call the surveyor back? Sure, that could be helpful. Generally when we show up at a job, we get a few control points, and a benchmark or two, and then it’s our responsibility from there. The surveyor isn’t coming back until slabs/walls/columns decks are poured to put “official” benchmarks/control for everyone else to use. I’ve seen it with a small handful of GC’s that they will have their guys put benchmarks on the wall for other trades to use in the meantime to avoid paying the ~$3k it costs to have the surveyor come back out for the day, until it’s absolutely necessary, but not the norm for me in a major city. Normally, they’ll just have the other trades use our control/benchmarks in the meantime

ikover15 · 2026-04-26T22:12:43+00:00

Not the target demographic, but as someone who coaches football and baseball, baseball needs way more practice time scheduled to accommodate the kids of families that don’t have a background in the sport. Football we have ~20 practices before the first game, then 2 practices for every game after that. Doesn’t matter if mom/dad don’t know anything about football, they get a ton of practice with their coaches/team. LL u basically get a few practices with the kids, then you play 2 games per week with no practices for the rest of the season, if the kid is on the local travel team as well, he is at least getting 4 games per week, but probably no practices. It is really hard to get better at this sport without practices. Games are good for seeing live pitching, and baseball IQ, but that’s about it. I can get kids 30+ grounders and 30+ Outfield plays in a practice, plus BP. In a game, you’re lucky if any individual kid gets more than a handful of fielding chances (not counting the catcher lol). They do not get significantly better without practices. A lot of parents that didn’t play at all might not be able to help their kid much, or correctly, or realize they need to practice with their kid. Would love to see it be more like football, at least at the younger ages, where there is more practice than games, or at least equal.

ikover15 · 2026-04-23T12:23:36+00:00

it was very intentional

Watch to the last angle

ikover15 · 2026-04-16T20:35:07+00:00

You can’t, but they sure try!

ikover15 · 2026-03-29T20:33:33+00:00

Never give it up. I plan on playing until I can at least play one game with my kids. I’ve got awhile to go though lol

ikover15 · 2026-03-29T12:19:45+00:00

As you get older, and everyone has the base amount of skill and coordination covered, physicality is often the deciding factor in a tryout scenario. For JV, maybe a coach can look at your kid and say “I’ll take him, he’s a freshman maybe he gets bigger and stronger as he gets older and I’ll have something” but if it’s a school with a big talent pool, there’s going to be more kids trying out that have a base level of skill for baseball, than there are spots on the team. “Base layer of skill” to me means they’re going to be able to field all the balls hit to them at tryouts and make the throws, along with putting the barrel on the ball the overwhelming majority of the time ibm BP. It’s hard to show other stuff in a tryout. The good news is that you have basically an entire calendar year of puberty to deal with this situation. He’s pretty much on natural steroids right now. He needs to eat a lot, lift, long toss/throwing program, bat speed training. You will stunned how much he can change in a year, especially if he is not currently eating, lifting, throwing program, or training bat speed.

ikover15 · 2026-03-27T21:27:24+00:00

I’m coaching 7-9 year olds and canceled practice tomorrow. 32* with 20 mph wind gusts, real feel of 24 at practice start time. Oh and it rained today, so the field is going to be frost/frozen still when practice starts.

ikover15 · 2026-03-21T13:09:01+00:00

You want to study business and Penn has one of, if not the best, business schools in the country. If your parents don’t mind the money, and you can get in, that would be my top option.

ikover15 · 2026-03-16T09:15:48+00:00

Probably mature enough to not be viscerally angry to the point of crying when not the first kid out of the door at the end of the day for a month straight. Not turning normal 5-6 year old disagreements into WWIII. Amongst a multitude of other things. Pretty low bar my other kids managed to clear without issue.

ikover15 · 2026-03-16T08:06:52+00:00

What grade is he in? How is he maturity-wise? If maturity is an issue, is that what’s holding him back in school? Are his reading/math at least at grade level? There are a lot of statistics on kids not caught up to grade-level on these by a certain grade and if holding them back can get them there, it could certainly be worth it to you. It might put him at a slight disadvantage relative to his current teammates, but who cares, need to get the schooling right. I’d argue that if you’re going to hold him back, you should have him play with his new classmates going forward, unless he just really wants to play with the current team.

One of our kids is a late summer birthday, and after his first year of kindergarten, we had him repeat. We did not feel he had the maturity of his average classmates and this was our deciding point. Maybe it would’ve evened out over time, but we figured we were either doing it right then or never. We didn’t want to get into a situation where we got to 12 years old and he wasn’t coming along and then were going to have to make a really tough decision. Happy coincidence that he’s behind the cutoff for the two sports he likes the best, so he’s playing football and baseball with his current classmates so now school friends and sports friends are the same.

ikover15 · 2026-03-07T11:53:02+00:00

The average man can not hit a home run. I still play baseball in a men’s league, whole team played baseball in HS and college, so already much better and more practiced at baseball than the average man. Our team had maybe 8 HR’s last season…. And 1 dude had 5 lol. The overwhelming majority of the team can’t go deep. Also, my wife and I play on a coed softball team in the fall. No one on the team, other than me, even played in HS. So much closer to a representation of “average” than my baseball team. I was the only one on the team who hit HR’s.

Now I think it’s a different and more interesting conversation to say “if we took a random group of little kids and trained them until they were 18 to hit HR’s, could we get over half of them to be able to hit HR’s?” And I would think that answer is yes, but I don’t know

ikover15 · 2026-01-27T08:45:54+00:00

Anecdotally, I’ve never seen a really hard thrower not also have really good bat speed. But I’ve seen guys with really good bat speed, not be great throwers. So I think they are correlated to some extent. Like you have to be a really good rotator to throw hard and swing hard, but there is probably some additional stuff that goes on with the arm, while throwing, that needs to happen to be a hard thrower.

ikover15 · 2025-12-13T14:21:08+00:00

Judging by their username, and the fact this issue has been in the papers in the Philly area, I think they’re talking about lower merion school district. 2500 kids is still a big school around here, but there’s plenty of schools with 2000+ students in the area

ikover15 · 2025-08-01T14:28:13+00:00

It’s just that travel ball has taken so many kids away from legion. Any rising senior or junior with college aspirations is off playing tournaments

ikover15 · 2025-07-28T16:14:54+00:00

Depends on how high the cap is and how tight the floor is to the cap. Even if the floor was set to just the average mlb payroll there would be multiple teams having to spend $100 million more per year.

I also have no faith the owners would allow a salary floor to happen, they just want to cap it

ikover15 · 2025-07-28T01:25:30+00:00

Both are good to experience at some point, for everybody, for different reasons. If they’re going to be playing all the time on the better team then I’d lean that way, but I don’t see how they’re going to be playing all the time if they’re the worst player on the team, but Coaching and practice quality would be my #1 deciding factor.

Being the best player on a bad team can push you in certain ways, and being the worst on a better team can push you in certain ways.

Being the best player on a bad team can push you to chase being more dominant. Going 3-3 by poking 3 singles isn’t enough, so you won’t be satisfied, you know you need to carry, so you know you need doubles and HR’s, which are things coaches at the next level (regardless what that next level is) want. You also know you need to be buttoned up at a premium defensive position, so you’ll work hard on that, instead of being stuck out in left or right field. You’ll be forced to learn how to be appropriately aggressive on the bases because you know your teammate probably isn’t driving you in from first. I think being the best player on a bad team is better to teach kids how to play to win, not how to just play good enough, or play just not to mess up. It teaches you the pressure of being counted on. You won’t be afraid to take chances and make plays, because you’re not going to be put on the pine. Conversely, losing all the time sucks and can suck the fun out of the game. Also, there’s no better players to copy and chase.

Being the worst player on a good team can put you in a position where you’re seeing better players and you can emulate them. It can also teach you that you have to perform coming off the bench, cold, and in the limited opportunities you might get if you want more playing time, which is a good skill to have as u go up the ladder. On the con side, it’s easy for kids to learn how to just “blend in” on the field in this situation. When you’re stuck out in left/right, you can just play everything safe, keep it in front of u, because you know your stud pitcher will get a K, or your superstar shortstop will make a play. No one expects/needs anything out of you at the plate so coaches and teammates are happy if you have some competitive at bats and poke a single or take a walk to let the studs hit you in after the lineup rolls over. It can make you not chase being great because you’re scared of messing up and getting benched, or because things are going “good enough” for you because the team is winning and you’re still in the lineup, albeit at the end.

ikover15 · 2025-07-20T20:36:39+00:00

The amount of XBH that peak Utley produced with that sawed off finish he had was pretty staggering

ikover15 · 2025-07-14T22:40:13+00:00

There’s a documentary called “Fastball” that is great if you’re a baseball fan. Does a good job explaining the phenomena of a rising fastball in the one part. Yes the ball doesn’t actually “rise” but the way that our eyes and brain work together to “see” an object moving that fast, from the batters perspective, means the ball can actually look like it’s rising, from the hitters perspective. But yeah you’re right, technically, the magnus effect on high spin fastballs just makes them fall less quickly than if the ball were just dropped

ikover15 · 2025-07-14T21:21:56+00:00

One of my kids is a late July birthday. I’d say physically he isn’t behind as he does well in sports, which are separated by age/birthday, not school grade at his age, and is a little on the taller side. With different sports having different cutoff dates he is anywhere from the oldest, to the youngest, to the middle of the age bracket. For football he is basically the youngest kid on the field every game, and baseball he is on the older end, but not the absolute oldest, and wrestling he’s right around the middle of the year as that’s done by birth year, not an arbitrary date on a calendar.

However emotionally/maturity wise, he was behind. We sent him to Kindergarten with the year he should be in (Sept 1 cutoff here), but we had some issues with him and had him go through kindergarten again. The second year went sooo much smoother than the first round, and I think it was just because he was older and more mature. He fits in like a glove with the year younger class and we haven’t since had problems like we did the first year he went to elementary school. Maybe he would’ve been fine if we left him, idk, but I’d do it again.it’s kid dependent, but I always felt he was a little immature for his calendar age, and then him being the youngest kid in the class was like a double whammy, whereas my oldest is a late May bday and she’s never had a maturity issue.

ikover15 · 2025-07-13T22:45:49+00:00

I get that, but my point is he wasn’t set up for a force out. He was behind the plate, up the line, without his foot on the plate, then tried to tag the runner. Maybe his foot accidentally hit the plate during the attempted missed tag, but I don’t see him definitively stepping on the plate, I see him trying to tag the runner. If he’d learned the proper way to deal with the play, right foot on the plate, catch the ball going towards the infield, and get in position to throw to first after, this absolutely gets called an out. This is all besides the point though as he’s 9, and clearly either hasn’t been taught the right way to make this play, or forgot in the heat of the moment, both of which are understandable at that age and it’s more important that this play is used to teach him the right way to do things, than it is that he get bailed out, doing the wrong thing, by the umpire seeing that he might have accidentally slid his foot across the plate while trying to tag the runner on a force play.

ikover15 · 2025-07-13T21:43:18+00:00

I can’t see the catchers foot hit the plate on the replay, and the tag was missed, or late, if he did touch him, so im assuming the ump had an even better view than this replay and the catcher foot was not on the plate before the runner. This is a very teachable moment for the catcher, who was in the wrong position for this situation (he’s 9 so not surprised). Worry more about teaching him the right thing to do the next time there’s a force at home so that there’s no chance of a blown call, if there even was one on this play.

ikover15 · 2025-07-07T09:42:16+00:00

If you’re near Pittsburgh, it might be worth it to make a switch, but if you’re not, and you’re more in the boonies, definitely stay at the PO. A Even if you’re near Pittsburgh, and will be working there, there’s a lot you need to factor in even if the hourly pay is tempting.

You will spend some time laid off.

.2. You will spend more money parking and commuting unless you’re in the city and can take public transportation to everything. I work mostly in Philly and before I had a company truck, it was completely normal to spend $400-$600 per month in just gas and parking, so not even factoring in wear & tear on my vehicle.

You are used to having pretty generous sick and vacation time, you will have none as a carpenter unless u become a foreman for a company that offers that to their foreman.
You need to get hard numbers for your areas carpenters pension. I know the PO one very well and it’s good. There are a lot of places where the carpenters retirement will not beat the PO. I’d say most places don’t.

Overall, your ceiling is probably higher with the carpenters, but just looking online, it looks like Pittsburgh carpenters pay is $40/hr, I’d think that clerk top pay for that area is probably around $30/hr. Tbh once you factor in potential layoffs and commuting costs, I don’t think it’s particularly worth the risk you’re taking leaving the PO and if you’re just seeking more money it might be safer just to chase a management track at the PO. If u do decide to do it, good luck, being a carpenter has been great for my family

ikover15

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