Youth Baseball Isn’t Broken — Our Perspective Is

If you spend enough time around youth baseball – whether it’s travel ball weekends, high-school tryouts, or the dust and noise of a crowded Little League park – you’ll eventually hear the same tired phrase delivered with an exhausted sigh: "The system is broken."

People say it in dugouts, in bleachers, in parking lots, on Facebook threads, in parent group chats, on the sidelines of 14U doubleheaders.
Too much money. Too much pressure. Too much travel. Too many tournaments. Too many “elite” teams. Too intense. Too early. Too specialized. Too political. Too everything.

But nearly always, the conclusion is the same:
Youth baseball is broken.

It isn’t.

What’s broken is the way we look at it.

What’s broken is the lens – narrow, outdated, skewed, usually emotional – that parents, coaches, and even some players use to measure success. The game itself isn’t dying. The ecosystem isn’t collapsing. The numbers don’t show decay. 

If anything, the economics and participation trends point toward something we should have the humility to acknowledge: Youth baseball in 2025 isn’t broken at all – it's growing, thriving, and evolving. It’s our perspective that needs surgery, not the sport.

The Data Proves Growth, Not Decline

For a moment, set aside the emotion. Set aside the anecdotes. Set aside the noise.

Look at the economics.

The Aspen Institute’s 2025 State of Play report showed that families now spend an average of $1,016 per child on their primary sport – an increase of 46% since 2019. That surge isn’t driven by desperation; it’s driven by demand. Families are willing to invest more because the market for youth sports has expanded. The U.S. youth-sports economy now sits at $40 billion a year, and the global projection stretches toward $154 billion by 2035.

Inside that massive ecosystem, baseball remains one of the healthiest sectors. Participation numbers are near historic highs, with SFIA reporting nearly 16.7 million baseball players in the U.S., the highest since they began measuring in 2008. Youth participation—in the ages where “the game is supposedly dying”—is not falling. In fact, among 6–12-year-olds, participation increased last year.

Zoom out further. At a global level, the youth baseball market—equipment, training, lessons, tournaments, academies, and programming—is valued at $2.01 billion in 2025 and projected to grow to $2.86 billion by 2033.

A broken system doesn’t grow.
A broken system doesn’t attract more players, more investment, more coaching, more infrastructure, or more innovation.

What we’re seeing is not collapse. It’s expansion.

What people are feeling is not a broken sport; it’s the tension of a sport that has outgrown outdated expectations.

The Real Issue Isn’t Baseball — It’s Our Definition of Success

The central problem in youth baseball isn’t the cost, or the tournaments, or the travel schedules, or the tryout culture.

Those are symptoms, not the condition.

The true issue sits deeper: We’ve created a suffocatingly narrow definition of success, and we judge everything against it.

Parents feel it when they compare their 14-year-old to someone else’s 14-year-old throwing 86. Coaches feel it when they measure their worth based on tournament wins and college commitments instead of athlete development. Players feel it when they start to believe they’re “behind” at 7, 10, 13, or 16 years old.

The culture has conditioned families to believe that there are only two outcomes:

Division I baseball or nothing.

Pro ball or failure.

But baseball has never worked that way, and it still doesn’t.

The sport has dozens of viable pathways—more than almost any sport in America—and yet we’ve conditioned ourselves to ignore them. College baseball is not one road; it’s a sprawling, diverse system with JUCO, NAIA, Division II, Division III, and club baseball all providing meaningful, developmental environments. Beyond that sit summer collegiate leagues, independent leagues, community semi-pro teams, and amateur leagues. Surrounding those are the expanding worlds of coaching, training, development, analytics, scouting, sports science, and baseball media.

A kid who loves baseball can meaningfully stay in the game at 10 different levels and 30 different roles.
But we don’t talk about those.
Instead, we fixate on the endpoints.

And when a culture defines the journey by the smallest and rarest outcomes, the journey will always feel broken.

The Rise of Baseball Infrastructure — Not a “Money Grab,” but a Sign of Health

A perfect example sits right in front of us: Prep Baseball Report.

To some parents, PBR represents the commercialization of youth baseball—events, metrics, rankings, recruiting showcases, media content, videos, exposure pipelines. But to anyone who has been inside the modern baseball world, PBR isn’t a money grab. It’s an infrastructure company.

They’ve built a national scouting network.
They’ve created a centralized database of player information.
They’ve democratized exposure.
They’ve provided coaches and players a standardized way to evaluate development.
They’ve expanded access to visibility for athletes who would have been overlooked a decade ago.

Twenty years ago, the average high-school player couldn’t get verified metrics, professional video, or scouting data in front of a college coach unless they lived in a major baseball region or knew someone with a personal connection.

Now a player in rural Iowa, Northern Wisconsin, or small-town New Jersey can upload data, video, and reports that coaches all over the country can see within hours.

That’s not decay.
That’s opportunity.

Companies like PBR, Perfect Game, Five-Tool, Future Star Series, Baseball Factory, and dozens of other tournament, video, and analytics providers are responding to what the market is signaling: people care about baseball and are willing to invest in playing, developing, watching, and understanding it.

The existence of these companies—and their growth—doesn’t mean youth baseball is broken. It means the ecosystem is bigger than ever, and families want more from it.

Coaching Is the Variable That Must Catch Up

If there is a single area where the youth baseball world feels fractured, it isn’t in the economics or the opportunities—it’s in the coaching.

Not because coaches aren’t trying.
Not because coaches don’t care.

But because coaching, as an institution, has not been asked to grow at the same pace as the sport around it.

We’ve expanded:

• tournament structures
• data and analytics
• scouting platforms
• training facilities
• lesson businesses
• arm-care systems
• strength programs
• player development science
• technology
• media
• exposure pathways

But we haven’t expanded the quality control behind how youth coaches teach the game.

In 2025, baseball players have access to more information, more science, more developmental tools, and more infrastructure than ever before. And yet many youth programs still operate based on 1998 coaching logic, 1987 movement assumptions, and 1975 teaching patterns.

That doesn’t mean coaches are the problem.
It means coaches are the opportunity.

Parents talk about “broken baseball,” but much of what they’re experiencing is actually a coaching landscape that hasn’t caught up to the sport’s evolution.

What if coaching were treated more like a profession and less like a volunteer role?
What if there were a way to calibrate coaching quality—not in a punitive sense, but in a developmental sense? What if coaches had a shared language, shared standards, shared evidence-based foundations?
What if we asked not, “Is this coach winning?” but rather, “Is this coach teaching?”

This isn’t a product pitch and doesn’t need to be one.
This is simply the truth: If youth baseball wants to grow in a healthy direction, coaching must grow with it.

Not with more pressure or perfectionism.
But with more clarity, more consistency, and more modern knowledge.

The number one driver of a child staying in the game is the quality of their coach—not their velocity, not their stats, not their exposure, not their parents’ expectations.

Coaching is the hinge the entire youth baseball experience swings on, and right now that hinge finally has the attention it deserves.

Perspective Is the Real Issue — And the Real Opportunity

Parents feel anxiety because they’re measuring their child’s progress against the wrong indicators. Coaches feel pressure because they’re being evaluated based on outcomes they can’t control. Players feel stress because they’re being asked to produce markers that don’t define future success.

The fixation on velocity, exposure, recruiting, and outcomes at young ages has created an environment where everyone feels like they’re behind—even when they’re on a perfectly healthy developmental track.

But when you zoom out to the actual landscape of baseball, a different story unfolds:

The game is bigger than it has ever been.
The opportunities are broader.
The pathways are more diverse.
The infrastructure is more sophisticated.
The interest is stronger.
The participation is stable.
The money flowing into the sport is not exploitative—it’s reflective of demand.

There has never been a better time for a young person to fall in love with baseball, because the game has never provided more entry points, more developmental lanes, or more long-term opportunities.

The only thing that hasn’t grown at the same rate is the perception.

A New Lens for 2025 and Beyond

What if we began measuring youth baseball by connection instead of comparison?
What if we measured coaching by development instead of dominance?
What if we measured seasons by growth instead of outcomes?
What if we measured success by sustainability instead of scarcity?

The future of youth baseball doesn’t depend on shrinking the ecosystem.
It depends on expanding the definition of success within it.

If families, coaches, and communities can learn to see the sport through a wider, more grounded lens, the fear evaporates.
The pressure softens.
The noise quiets.
And what remains is the reason the game survived 150 years:

A kid falling in love with baseball.
A team becoming a family.
A season becoming a memory.
A sport becoming a lifelong home.

Youth baseball isn’t broken.
Far from it.
The system is growing. The opportunities are growing. The infrastructure is growing. The economy is growing. The participation is growing. The ecosystem is growing.

The only thing left to grow is our perspective.