SCHOOL OF HARD KNUCKS: MY THREE SONS AND BASEBALL’S WILDEST PITCH will be published by Post Hill Press and distributed by Simon & Schuster on Tuesday, Sept. 29. It's a father-and-sons baseball memoir about a decade-long quest to master the knuckleball. Along the way, Brian, a self-described helicopter parent, learns how to be a better baseball dad.

Brian reached out to me after becoming a subscriber and regular reader, noting the overlap in our work. I saw it too, especially when he wondered in a recent piece he wrote for the Wall Street Journal whether the baseball dream had become more his than his son’s. It’s a question a lot of us wrestle with, and one of the internal conflicts I write about.

Brian’s youngest son, Ben, is one of the few knuckleballers in the college ranks. He’s a sophomore at Westmont College in Santa Barbara, and the knuck is his primary pitch. My son Alex, a pitcher who recently turned 13, throws a knuckleball. But he’s tossed it in only one game, a handful of times, with his coach’s blessing. One of those pitches drew a huge swing and a miss, and even fooled the Perfect Game scorekeeper behind the backstop. “Was that a knuckleball?” the scorekeeper said to no one in particular. “That floated in there at 38.”

I hope you enjoy Brian’s story as much as I did. Good luck at the fields! —Tony

P.S. Huge thanks to Rawlings for sending me a custom Baseball Dad & PR Guy glove last week.

by Brian Gaffney

During the Covid lockdown of 2020 my sons got an extraordinary opportunity: personal coaching from the legendary pitching guru Tom House. House had just launched his Mustard app and was running Zoom sessions. When he learned we were a family of knuckleballers, he asked to feature them.

House was not a knuckleballer himself, but he had played with Hoyt Wilhelm and Phil and Joe Niekro on the Braves and coached Charlie Hough in Texas. I managed to connect all three of my sons to Phil Niekro, Hough, and other former big leaguers, who worked with them to master the knuckleball.

House told the Zoom group that a knuckleball was an undervalued skill.

“It’s the hardest pitch to hit in baseball because batters don’t see enough of them and it never moves the same way twice,” House said. “If you have a good knuckleball and you can throw it for a strike, you can pitch forever.”

He really liked my youngest son Ben’s knuckleball and gave him this advice:

“You’ll run into coaches who don’t like the knuckleball. But sometimes you have to try things that make you perform a little worse in the short run to get better in the long run. So if your coach has a problem with your knuckleball, tell him it’s a changeup.”

The tip came in handy when the lockdowns ended and Ben’s travel team resumed.

“Whatcha throwing?” Ben’s slightly annoyed coach asked him at the first practice.

“Knuckleballs,” said Ben, who was 14 years old back then.

“Don’t mess with that garbage,” his coach replied.

Before I’d signed up I told the guy running the program that Ben was a knuckleballer, worked on it for years, and was going to try to throw it in high school. The director watched Ben’s knuck before he took my money. So I called him after the coach shut Ben down.

“Hey, I don’t want to be ‘that dad,’” I said, “but if Ben’s coach doesn’t want him throwing knuckleballs, let me know and we’ll go elsewhere. No hard feelings.”

“No, it’s fine,” the director said. “Ben’s all good. I’ll talk to my coach.”

I don’t know if he told the coach that Ben was diligently working on a knuckleball. Maybe he just said they couldn’t afford to turn away paying customers after a pandemic. Either way, Ben stayed, and he got the start in the first game back.

“You got the balls to chuck the knuck?” I asked him.

“I’m not scared to,” he said.

Still, he threw mostly fastballs the first inning, until he struck out one of the best hitters in town with a knuckleball. The second inning he threw twelve pitches — nine knuckleballs — for three easy ground outs. One batter whiffed on a knuckleball that hit him in the crotch.

Then Ben walked a couple batters. The coach had enough. He shouted loud enough for everyone to hear, “No more knuckleballs!”

Ben kept his composure and retired the next three hitters.

We grabbed a Slurpee after the game.

“Am I mistaken, or did you still mix in some knuckleballs after the coach told you to stop?” I asked.

“Yes, you’re mistaken,” Ben said. “Those were changeups.”

Brian Gaffney is vice president of documentary programming at Fox News Media. He is the author of a new book, SCHOOL OF HARD KNUCKS: MY THREE SONS AND BASEBALL’S WILDEST PITCH, that goes on sale Tuesday, Sept. 29.

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From Baseball Dad & PR Guy: My weekly newsletters have become the basis of a book I recently completed.

DO SOMETHING COOL, ALEX! is the story of a PR guy who’s gone toe-to-toe with the Chargers when they lobbied to leave San Diego and still got outmaneuvered by a Little League board. It’s a prescriptive memoir about Daddy Ball, the travel ball grind, the road to Cooperstown, and The Five Moments That Shape Young Ballplayers, written by someone who’s made most of the mistakes he now writes about.

The manuscript is finished, and I’m querying literary agents.

Go Deeper

I coach players and parents to help kids play loose, with confidence and joy. The game gets harder, and our relationships suffer, when we add pressure.

If you’ve gotten the car ride home wrong, caught yourself coaching from the stands, or gotten caught up in the comparison trap, you’re not alone. None of us want to get these moments wrong. The good news: it’s fixable, and it starts with two short guides you can use before your kid’s next game.

Grab your parent playbooks — $20

Already a paid annual subscriber? Playbooks are included with your subscription.

Want something more specific worked through — your kid, your situation? I do that too.

Email me your issue and I’ll get back to you within 24 hours — $50

Book a Tony Talk for you or your kid — $150/45 minutes

Lastly, every week I drop new reels on Instagram: @tonymanolatos. Some are related to my essays. Some aren’t. It’s a place for parents to connect with me and each other, to share stories that are funny or moving, dos and don’ts, and more.

About Baseball Dad & PR Guy

Baseball Dad & PR Guy is a weekly newsletter about youth sports culture and how parents and coaches shape the experience for young athletes.

Subscribers get my free Car Ride Home Playbook — what to say, and what to leave unsaid on the ride home.

My essays are built around the 5 Moments That Shape Young Ballplayers, from the nerves before a game to the car ride home.

From the stands, I write about those moments and what they mean for confidence, identity, and a kid’s love of the game.

Read more about the 5 Moments and why they matter.

⚾ A community for parents: Travel Baseball Moms & Dads (Facebook)

⚾ Follow along: Tony Manolatos – Baseball Dad & PR Guy (Facebook)

More at tonymanolatos.com

“Quick guys hide the condoms. Here comes coach!”

The defensive coordinator, a guy who looked like he’d played football, said that as the head coach of my high school football team walked toward us. There were five or six of us, all linebackers and defensive linemen, each of us on a knee huddled around the coach who ran the defense. He was using his index finger to draw in the dirt so we could see our gap responsibilities ahead of our next game the following day.

That was a few decades ago at Bishop Foley Catholic High School in suburban Detroit. I was 17 at the time, in my senior season at Foley.

Our defensive coach had broad shoulders, smoked Marlboros, cracked jokes, and let us have it if an opposing team ripped off a run up the gut for seven or eight yards. “That’s not good enough!” he’d shout from the sidelines. Back then, I had calcium deposits in my biceps from deep bruises that kept getting reinjured before they healed. Ah, football. So the head coach reversed a pair of thigh pads and taped them to my biceps before practices and games. That same defensive coordinator liked to say to anyone around, “Look at Manolatos, he’s getting his muscles taped up again!”

Our head coach was affable too but in a different way. He was clean cut, probably never smoked, usually wore a tie and sweater vest when he wasn’t coaching. He taught government at the high school, which was built in the shape of a cross with a chapel at its center. Before leading us onto the field on game day, he walked us to that chapel. We huddled around him in full pads, dressed in our black and yellow game uniforms, sunlight often filtering through the stained-glass windows. Our home games were played Saturday afternoons back then because our field didn’t have the lights it has now. He would lead us in prayer.

The defensive coordinator wanted the head coach to hear that joke, so he delivered it cleanly and clearly. There was no mistaking what he had said. Our head coach cracked a smile as he approached us, but I could tell he was not overly amused. The rest of us, including that coach drawing up plays in the dirt, could not stop laughing.

Coaches like those two are hard to find. They create a bond with their players held together with respect, love, and high expectations. It’s not much different than the relationships we have with the people we call family. The best coaches have a lot in common, and I’m not talking about their ability to draw up an effective game plan.

As baseball parents, it pains us to see coaches who don’t like our kids and how that affects them and their game. We want them to play for coaches who make them laugh, who push them, and hold them accountable. When you have that, you don’t want it to end, but it does eventually because baseball keeps moving from one chapter to the next.

My son Alex, who turned 13 in May, just completed one of those chapters and is now at the beginning of a new one. Last week his team moved from 12U to 13U, but this move up was different than those in the past because it arrived with a new set of coaches. That meant the time had come for the boys on his team to say goodbye to good coaches they enjoyed playing for. Alex told me twice this summer he was going to miss playing for his coaches, but that he was also excited for 13U.

Alex plays for CBA San Diego. Coach Anthony Soto runs the younger divisions, 9U to 12U, and Coach Matt Jervis directs the older group, 13U to 18U. Soto spent a lot of time in the 12U dugout this season, including leading CBA Victus on a memorable run in Cooperstown.

Coach Soto is a baseball coach. It’s what he does. It’s not a side hustle or something he takes on as a hobby. He’s a big reason why Alex joined CBA a year and a half ago.

He is the best in-game pitching coach Alex has ever had. He can reach him immediately, but not by raising his voice. Sometimes the coaching is stern, but it’s always supportive. What’s impressive is he never has a bad read on Alex’s mechanics or emotions. That might be because he took the time to get to know him. Very often on the way home from a tournament Alex would share something he and Coach Soto talked about that day, and it almost never had anything to do with baseball.

In the dugout during one game, Coach Soto told Alex about the banana sandwiches his dad used to make him before games, back when money was tight at home. Alex told me about it and said he wanted to try one. That afternoon he did, and he loved it. At the next tournament, Coach Soto and I were walking from the field to our trucks and I told him — Alex had tried it and loved it. He laughed and called out to him in that parking lot: “Don’t be afraid to slap some peanut butter in there.”

Once, when Alex was trying too hard to locate his pitches, Coach Soto called out to him from the dugout, “Don’t be so fine, Alex.”

Another time when Alex had fallen behind a batter and then worked the count to 3-2 before the hitter grounded out, I heard Coach Soto say, “Way to come back from a 3-0 count. Job well done.” Early on during their relationship, Alex got down on himself on the mound during the first inning. The score was only 1-0 but Alex’s body language said the score was more lopsided. “This game is not going to end one to nothing, Alex!” Coach Soto said. That was one of the last times I saw Alex struggle to control his emotions on the mound. Last October, at a top-tier Perfect Game tournament in Las Vegas, Coach Soto put his arm around Alex after he faced a Canes National team from Texas. Alex gave up one run and struck out four over three innings, throwing 27 of 41 pitches for strikes and clocking a new PR on his fastball. “You pitched a helluva game,” he told Alex. “You should be proud of yourself. I’m proud of you.”

At the plate, Alex is a line-drive gap hitter, but one evening at practice he turned on a pitch and connected for one of those deep fly balls down the left field line that sort of moved in slow motion against the night sky. “That’s not your game!” Soto called out.

Outside of Cooperstown, when Coach Soto led the team, Coach Eddie managed 12U this past season. Coach Soto’s father-in-law, Coach Fredo, also was in the dugout and at most practices with Coach Eddie. The plan was for Coach Eddie to play the heavy, the bad cop, to Coach Fredo’s good cop. But that’s not who Eddie is. He’s a young guy, a former pitcher. Big smile. Easy demeanor. I’ve never heard him yell. Even when he was upset, there was a stillness about him. He could bring the hammer when he needed to. It just never came down too heavy.

Not long ago, I wrote about the time when I slapped my knee and said, “C’mon!” after Alex walked a batter, who he had 0-2. It was his second or third walk that inning. He was called in to close out that game, but after getting two outs he couldn’t shut the door. What happened next crystallized why I trusted Coach Eddie. He calmly walked to the mound, said something supportive to Alex, and gently took the ball from him. A couple weeks later, at the next tournament, he had Alex back on the mound as the Game 1 starter. Such a savvy coaching move, and it worked. Alex pitched well.

Coach Fredo treated Alex like a grandson. “He loves Alex,” Coach Soto told me once. That wasn’t surprising to hear. Alex was fond of him, too. When I saw them together, I saw a coach helping a kid get better and two people who genuinely liked each other. “I threw some knuckleballs to him today and he had no idea how to handle ’em,” Coach Fredo told me in the parking lot recently after a practice. Alex was by my side. The two of them smiled through that joke. Another time, another parking lot: The team had just suffered a one-run loss after being up multiple runs most of the game. It was that slap-my-knee game. Afterward, as I loaded Alex’s bag into the bed of my truck, Coach Fredo spotted me. He walked over and said: “There wasn’t one thing or one kid who lost that game for us. Everyone contributed.”

Coach Jervis mostly knows Alex through Coach Soto. In addition to his roles with CBA, he is the head baseball coach at Maranatha Christian Schools, where Alex and his team practice twice a week. Jervis and Soto are in regular contact. He has seen Alex practice a handful of times, run an intra-squad scrimmage Alex played in, and asked him to guest play for other CBA teams a couple of times. The CBA Marucci national team he helps coach won back-to-back Perfect Game WWBA World Championships in 2024 and 2025 in Jupiter, Florida.

What makes Alex’s move to 13U easier is knowing the culture he has come to trust at CBA doesn’t stop with one group of coaches.

Travel baseball is big business. I wrote about that last week. The coaches leading the better organizations need to win, in part because coaching is their livelihood and the strength of the program matters. But parents don’t judge an organization on wins alone. When parents ask me about CBA at hitting facilities, tournaments, or USA Baseball tryouts, they usually already know something about the organization, and it’s positive. That’s a credit to the coaches. They want to win, but they’re also developing confidence and character, and you can see that in the way their players carry themselves on and off the field.

“How is Alex liking things?” Coach Soto asked me a month after Alex joined the club. It was about an hour before gametime and Alex and his teammates were warming up between two ballfields and just past one of those playgrounds where a lot of young brothers and sisters run around instead of watching baseball.

I remember thinking how refreshing that felt — for a coach to approach me with an open-ended question about my kid. Very different from Little League, I thought.

I told him Alex was happy and Elizabeth and I were pleased too, and then I asked him how Alex was doing.

“He’s a good ball player and he listens, but he’s not a ‘Yes Man’ and I like that,” he told me. “I think he’s more of a second baseman than a shortstop, but I want to work with him some more there. He’s a very good situational hitter, but his crown jewel is that arm of his.”

I nodded and thanked him for the time and for working with Alex.

“Thanks for the trust,” he said. “I have an open-door policy, reach out anytime.”

When you find coaches like that, let them do their job. Support them. Reinforce the lessons. I’m not telling you to blindly trust anyone with your kid, but get out of the way.

If you’re a parent wondering who your son should play for, spend some time watching practices and games. Talk to other parents and coaches. Watch how the boys on the field respond to tough moments.

I thought about all that a few days ago, Alex seated next to me in the backseat of an Uber, headed north on I-75 to my mom’s place in suburban Detroit. As we came up on my old high school, I spotted the football field’s lights above the trees and warehouses, and the memories came back. All good ones and all built around two coaches who liked me, who made me laugh, who I played hard for because I wanted to, not because I had to.

Find coaches who can make your kid laugh and still hold him accountable. That’s the coaching superpower that tops ’em all.

Subscribe now

Author’s note: These weekly newsletters have become the basis of a book I recently completed.

DO SOMETHING COOL, ALEX! is the story of a PR guy who’s gone toe-to-toe with the Chargers when they lobbied to leave San Diego and still got outmaneuvered by a Little League board. It’s a prescriptive memoir about Daddy Ball, the travel ball grind, the road to Cooperstown, and The Five Moments That Shape Young Ballplayers, written by someone who’s made most of the mistakes he now writes about.

The manuscript is finished, and I’m querying literary agents now.

Go Deeper

I coach players and parents to help kids play loose, with confidence and joy. The game gets harder, and our relationships suffer, when we add pressure.

If you’ve gotten the car ride home wrong, caught yourself coaching from the stands, or gotten caught up in the comparison trap, you’re not alone. None of us want to get these moments wrong. The good news: it’s fixable, and it starts with two short guides you can use before your kid’s next game.

Grab your parent playbooks — $20

Already a paid annual subscriber? Playbooks are included with your subscription.

Want something more specific worked through — your kid, your situation? I do that too.

Email me your issue and I’ll get back to you within 24 hours — $50

Book a Tony Talk for you or your kid — $150/45 minutes

Lastly, every week I drop new reels on Instagram: @tonymanolatos. Some are related to my essays. Some aren’t. It’s a place for parents to connect with me and each other, to share stories that are funny or moving, dos and don’ts, and more.

About Baseball Dad & PR Guy

Baseball Dad & PR Guy is a weekly newsletter about youth sports culture and how parents and coaches shape the experience for young athletes.

Subscribers get my free Car Ride Home Playbook — what to say, and what to leave unsaid on the ride home.

My essays are built around the 5 Moments That Shape Young Ballplayers, from the nerves before a game to the car ride home.

From the stands, I write about those moments and what they mean for confidence, identity, and a kid’s love of the game.

Read more about the 5 Moments and why they matter.

⚾ A community for parents: Travel Baseball Moms & Dads (Facebook)

⚾ Follow along: Tony Manolatos – Baseball Dad & PR Guy (Facebook)

More at tonymanolatos.com

‘DO SOMETHING COOL, ALEX!’ is the story of a PR guy who’s gone toe-to-toe with the Chargers when they lobbied to leave San Diego — and still got outmaneuvered by a Little League board. It’s a prescriptive memoir that explores Daddy Ball, the Travel Ball grind, the road to Cooperstown, and what I call The Five Moments that Shape Young Ballplayers, written by someone who’s made most of the mistakes he now writes about.

The manuscript’s finished, and I’ve started querying literary agents.

More soon. Thank you for reading.

My friend told me he was going to say something he knew I wouldn’t like hearing.

Then he told me Alex shouldn’t pitch ten months out of the year.

Maybe I surprised him, but I agreed. Why wouldn’t I? I was talking to Brian Sackinsky, a guy who pitched in the College World Series and the big leagues, and who now coaches at a high school where his son was named Freshman Pitcher of the Year last season.

His kid is twice Alex’s size, and he only pitches four months out of twelve. This past summer, while his dad was coaching a travel team, Brian’s son focused entirely on friends, getting stronger, and getting ready for the start of the JV football season.

I met Brian earlier this year in a virtual session for baseball parents I hosted, one GameChanger had promoted on social media. Brian saw it, signed up, and messaged me on LinkedIn to say he loved what I was doing.

I used a slide deck and some handouts to guide us that evening, and the discussion couldn’t have gone better. We all quickly realized we’re dealing with the same issues, and so are our kids. As a former professional pitcher for eight seasons and a dad to five athletes, Brian brought a rare perspective to the session. At times, I sat back and simply tried to take in all of what he was saying, and I caught myself doing the same thing on the phone with him the other day.

Brian had called me to check in on Alex and the shoulder injury he sustained while pitching in Cooperstown. What he told me wasn’t something I was hearing for the first time. My wife, Elizabeth, has been saying the same thing for a while, as do a lot of baseball minds I trust: a lot of kids are playing too much baseball.

The Warm-Weather Trap & the Conflicts the System Creates for Parents, Players, and Coaches

The modern youth sports ecosystem is designed to push players and squeeze their parents. There’s always another private lesson, another mandatory practice, another $300 tournament weekend. This is especially true here in sunny Southern California, the undisputed national epicenter for travel baseball. In SoCal, baseball isn’t a pastime; it’s a year-round, multi-million-dollar business that serves as the primary financial engine for the booming youth athletics market.

The upside of this pressure cooker shows up on Division 1 rosters, at the Little League World Series, and on the pristine fields of Dreams Park and All Star Village every summer in upstate New York. This past summer, my son’s travel team made an extraordinary run in Cooperstown, finishing 5th out of 104 teams at Dreams Park. It was an unforgettable milestone, but the geographic breakdown of the top five says everything about where the power lies: Arizona, Hawaii, Florida, Texas, and us here in San Diego.

The Sun Belt system produces elite results, but the structural costs are eye-opening. What used to be a community-run volunteer tradition has morphed into a massive $40 billion commercial machine, according to data from Stax consulting and U.S. Congressional hearings on the industry held this summer that specifically examined private equity's growing role in driving up costs for families. A nationwide study by the Aspen Institute’s Project Play initiative revealed that parent spending on youth athletics has soared 46% since 2019, with the average family now paying $1,016 annually per child. As a travel baseball parent, I can only look at that figure and wish that was all it cost my family.

I’ve written before about the upsides, and there are many. I believe this game is beautiful, magical at times, and you cannot measure the depth of the life lessons it teaches. But the costs can’t be ignored.

And the real toll isn’t just a drain on bank accounts and family time. The machine pushes young athletes toward early specialization, triggering an epidemic of burnout and overuse injuries. It sets up a simmering running tension between parents, players, and coaches. The system is fundamentally designed to penalize the very thing our own parents preached to us: everything in moderation. Not in travel baseball. Excellent coaches — men you trust, men who are genuinely developing your kid — will drop him or her the second you decide to give your kid a healthy, necessary off-season and stop paying your monthly club dues. It leaves us parents trapped in a dilemma: How do we do right by our kid’s health and adolescence, while also doing what all parents are hardwired to do: lean in, sacrifice, and fiercely support them when they find something they love?

My friend Brian didn’t argue when his son picked football over travel ball. He knew the break would bring him back to the diamond hungry instead of dreading it.

He does add a caveat: he’s not saying young ballplayers should stop swinging a bat for long stretches. Hitting is about timing and rhythm, and it doesn’t cause the violent repetitive stress on the body that pitching does.

Some veteran coaches see value in long breaks. Manny Gagliano, Alex’s former travel coach, would send parents and coaches an email every December telling us to shut our kids down for at least two months, especially young pitchers. This summer he told his own son not to pick up a bat or a ball for a while. His son was the starting third baseman at Patrick Henry High School, which had just won the prestigious 2026 CIF San Diego Section Open Division championship. When that long championship season ended in late May, Manny told his son to take a break for a few months before junior college ball begins.

Redefining ‘The Grind’

When Alex comes in from ground ball or tee work in our backyard, or from working out in our garage, he likes to say to anyone listening: “The grind never stops.”

The kid puts in the work. It’s been a rough summer for him, dealing with a Little League Shoulder diagnosis, but when he’s healthy he practices with his team twice a week. He takes a competitive group hitting session weekly with his hitting coach. He throws bullpens with his pitching coach or me every few weeks. He lifts weights in our garage a couple times a week. He fires up my laptop or his iPad at the breakfast bar in out kitchen to study videos of major league pitchers and hitters he likes — guys like Jacob Misiorowski, Mike Trout, and Fernando Tatis — to pick up their tendencies. He does all of that on top of band work, playing catch with me, hitting buckets of balls off his tee into a net in our backyard, and fielding ground balls I roll, bounce, and hit to him. When I’m not around to do that, he throws those same balls against the side of our house to get his glove work in.

I love that drive. But I’ve also come to realize that the healthiest routines, the ones that lead to long-term success, include real, structured downtime.

I’m reminded of this every morning when the wearable on my wrist signals my phone to tell me that if I could just get a little more sleep, I would recover more completely. That tracking data is for my eyes only — it shows me the capacity I need to lift heavy kettlebells four times a week in my garage.

But for our kids, a lot of data isn’t private. Nearly everything young ballplayers do nowadays is measured, tracked, ranked, and blasted on social media. Veteran coaches are rightly worried about the data deluge. It used to be just radar guns. Today, technology measures spray charts, arm path, hip-shoulder separation, and much more. The result is a culture where kids constantly feel judged, evaluated, and unable to turn it off. It’s not just when they see the lineup card or are sent to the outfield every time they attend practice. Those moments are among many that can create doubt and a fear of failure, the very emotions coaches and parents do not want kids to carry into games.

Stepping off the rubber, Brian told me, rests the mind as much as the body.

53 Weeks Away

Jason Botts, a former big-leaguer who writes the Substack Have Bat Will Travel, has seen the power of stepping away firsthand.

In August 2026, Jason wrote about his fourteen-year-old son, Lenox, who went 53 weeks without playing in a single game. At thirteen, Lenox mostly played corner outfield when he wasn’t pitching. He made enough mistakes out there that he stopped believing he could play a premium position. In Jason’s words, he “didn’t think of himself as an infielder.”

But Jason noticed his son’s natural athleticism. Lenox is long and lean, more bounce than anchor. Jason believed he had the tools to play shortstop. He didn’t set out to give his son a full year off, but a family move to San Diego meant most travel teams were already full.

So, father and son trained almost daily for a year — cages, defensive reps, and the weight room. Lenox logged long stretches at shortstop with nobody watching besides his dad, and — more importantly — nobody evaluating the results. Zero feedback from coaches, teammates, and umpires.

Lenox grew five inches during that stretch. Away from the pressure, he built an internal confidence that his dad felt would show up when the workouts turned into weekend tournaments.

When he finally joined a San Diego travel team, Lenox played shortstop every single inning he wasn’t on the mound during his first tournament with his new team. Outside of an inning or two when he was younger, he had never played shortstop before in a game.

He held it down.

“He has now caught up to his peers, and performed defensively that weekend in a beautifully present, consistent, and occasionally flashy manner,” Jason wrote.

A few weeks ago, Lenox played in his second tournament with his new team and did so well that Jason said he felt he needed to try and manage his son’s newfound expectations after 5 games of the best baseball he’d seen him play. So the father told his son how proud he was, told him the hard work was clearly paying off, and then he told him, “Just remember, you’re not really this good.”

Development Over Exposure

Isn’t that the ultimate goal? To help kids earn those big moments because they put in the work? When you hear baseball purists say “development over exposure,” this is what they mean.

Development often happens when no one is watching. Exposure includes the expensive showcases hosted by big industry brands that some parents feel obligated to chase whether their kid is ready or not.

Theoretically, the idea is simple: fewer games and more development builds better ballplayers. Sounds easy, right? Easy in a vacuum, but not in the competitive travel baseball environment where patience never seems to have a spot in the lineup.

Bad coaches prioritize winning over development and disguise it as competitiveness. Good coaches develop talent that sticks around. They also use sports to teach life lessons, and the best ones help parents navigate the unknowns. I’ve often called Alex’s coaches to ask if we should accept an invite to a showcase or related event. “In 8th grade he needs to start doing some of that stuff,” his travel coach told me last season when Alex was in 7th grade.

The travel ball community will lift you up and push you as fast as you’ll let it. It’s easy for families to get caught up in chasing what the kid down the street is doing, or for a young player to look at his Perfect Game profile and feel defeated.

When that happens, step back. Get away from the game. Young ballplayers benefit too when they connect with the game without the performance anxiety. This includes helping a trainer, coaching younger kids, or working as a scorekeeper or umpire. That work advances a kid’s baseball IQ, and it builds character. It also gives them a break, and sometimes that’s all any of us need.

Even elite athletes build in rest, because recovery doesn’t just restore what’s been lost. It prepares you for what’s next.

The grind is easier with rest. Without rest, the grind turns into burnout.

Go Deeper

I coach players and parents to help kids play loose, with confidence and joy. The game gets harder, and our relationships suffer, when we add pressure.

If you’ve gotten the car ride home wrong, caught yourself coaching from the stands, or gotten caught up in the comparison trap, you’re not alone. None of us want to get these moments wrong. The good news: it’s fixable, and it starts with two short guides you can use before your kid’s next game.

Grab your parent playbooks — $20

Want something more specific worked through — your kid, your situation? I do that too.

Email me your issue and I’ll get back to you within 24 hours — $50

Book a coaching session aka Tony Talks, for you or your kid — $150/45 minutes

Lastly, every week I drop new reels on Instagram: @tonymanolatos. Some are related to my essays. Some aren’t. It’s a place for parents to connect with me and each other, to share stories that are funny or moving, do’s and don’ts, and more.

About Baseball Dad & PR Guy

Baseball Dad & PR Guy is a weekly newsletter about youth sports culture and how parents and coaches shape the experience for young athletes.

Subscribers also get what I use after games — the Car Ride Home Playbook — what to say, and what to leave unsaid on the ride home.

My essays are built around the 5 Moments That Shape Young Ballplayers, from the nerves before a game to the car ride home.

From the stands, I write about those moments and what they mean for confidence, identity, and a kid’s love of the game.

Read more about the 5 Moments and why they matter.

⚾ A community for parents: Travel Baseball Moms & Dads (Facebook)

⚾ Follow along: Tony Manolatos – Baseball Dad & PR Guy (Facebook)

More at tonymanolatos.com

He asked me about somebody else’s parents.

There’s a kid on his team who wants his position. That kid’s parents, he told me, talk to the coach a lot. He’s smart and self-aware, easy to talk to, and he’d clearly turned this over in his head more than once before I heard about it: if he boots a ground ball, is that the thing that gets the other kid in? He wasn’t asking me to fix it. He wanted to know if he should just block it out of his mind, or just accept that it’s out of his hands.

This was an hour I spent on Zoom a few weeks ago with a client’s son. Not the client herself, who I’d worked with before, but her thirteen-year-old, at her request. She’d been in one of my live parent sessions months earlier, we’d stayed in touch since, and she reached out and said her son could use what she called a ‘Tony Talk’ — a confidence booster to help him stop being so hard on himself. I’ve been fortunate to work with a number of parents at this point, helping them help their kids play loose, with confidence, with joy. I hadn’t done it with a kid directly. I was a little nervous going in. An hour is a long time to hold a thirteen-year-old’s attention — I’m a dad to 13-year-old twin boys — and I didn’t know what he actually needed until he started telling me.

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What he told me, over that hour, wasn’t difficult to understand. So much of it is common among young ballplayers. This kid works hard. He cares, maybe more than he lets on. He’s smart about the game in a way that isn’t common at his age. He’s the starting shortstop on his travel team and bats second or third in the lineup, counted on to deliver. He told me he gets really nervous in big moments, holds onto an error longer than he should, and is hard on himself in the same way perfectionists are hard on themselves, where good isn’t good enough because it wasn’t perfect.

I’ve written about the dad who stands at the backstop every game, sweating, meaning well but making the game harder for his son. This was a different shape of the same problem. This kid wasn’t being pressured by his own parents. He was absorbing pressure that belonged to somebody else's family. A fight over a starting spot was playing out in conversations he wasn't part of. He felt all of it anyway, and carried the weight of it into practices and games.

We talk a lot about what parent pressure does. We don’t talk much about what it does to the other kids on the roster who have nothing to do with it and absorb it anyway.

I've attended a lot of games over 8 years and I’ve seen and heard a lot, including dads barking at other people's kids in a big moment, mine included. I've also received unsolicited advice from parents, and I’ve watched similar exchanges between other parents, about a kid struggling at the plate or on the mound. This is different than two dads whose kids pitch, for example, talking about what they’re seeing on the mound that inning. I love those chats, but offering up advice or yelling at another parent’s kid can create problems.

I asked the young man I was talking to what he could actually control out there. He got there almost immediately, on his own: effort, hustle, attitude. He couldn’t control whether that parent talked to the coach. He couldn’t control what the coach did with it, or another kid’s desire to play his position.

“Do you think there’s a team anywhere out there at any level where only one person wants to play short?” I asked. “It’s a premium position. A lot of kids want to play there, right?” He nodded. “Also, there’s even a chance that those parents are annoying that coach by talking to him so much, right? You can’t control that either.” He laughed.

What he could control, I told him, was putting in the work, showing up locked in, being the kind of teammate and ballplayer that made the coach’s decision easy, and letting go of the rest. He already knew the answer. He just needed someone to tell him it was allowed.

We zoomed in on a few other things he wanted to talk through. He told me, for example, that car rides to a game are very difficult because he’s constantly going back and forth between what could go right and what could go wrong. He also wanted to know how to let go of a bad at-bat and an error in the field.

Like a lot of kids, he’s focused on results and outcomes, not the process. But it didn’t take him long to get back to what he can control and what he can’t, that the game is humbling, and that he’s not any good to himself or his teammates and coaches if he’s not present. “Be where your feet are,” I told him. “We never want to burn our house down, right?” I walked him through what to do before a game and during a game to ramp down the pressure and stay present. He seemed to like that. We also talked about what I meant when I told him, “Pressure is a privilege and nerves are normal.”

I went into that call not entirely sure what it would look like with a young client instead of an adult client. I came out of it feeling good. He sounded lighter at the end than he did at the start.

His mom emailed me a few days later: “He seriously keeps telling me, ‘Mom Tony liked me, he believed in me and I won’t be burning my own house down!’ What you shared did not fall on deaf ears!”

I loved hearing that, but I don’t know yet how much of it he will carry into his next tournament. I do know that for an hour, a good kid who works hard and cares too much was able to put down something that was never his to carry in the first place.

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Go Deeper

I coach players and parents to help kids play loose, with confidence and joy. The game gets harder, and our relationships suffer, when we add pressure.

If you’ve gotten the car ride home wrong, caught yourself coaching from the stands, or gotten caught up in the comparison trap, you’re not alone. None of us want to get these moments wrong. The good news: it’s fixable, and it starts with two short guides you can use before your kid’s next game.

Grab your parent playbooks — $20

Want something more specific worked through — your kid, your situation? I do that too.

Email me your issue and I’ll get back to you within 24 hours — $50

Book a coaching session aka Tony Talks, for you or your kid — $150/45 minutes

Lastly, every week I drop new reels on Instagram: @tonymanolatos. Some are related to my essays. Some aren’t. It’s a place for parents to connect with me and each other, to share stories that are funny or moving, do’s and don’ts, and more.

About Baseball Dad & PR Guy

Baseball Dad & PR Guy is a weekly newsletter about youth sports culture and how parents and coaches shape the experience for young athletes.

Subscribers also get what I use after games — the Car Ride Home Playbook — what to say, and what to leave unsaid on the ride home.

My essays are built around the 5 Moments That Shape Young Ballplayers, from the nerves before a game to the car ride home.

From the stands, I write about those moments and what they mean for confidence, identity, and a kid’s love of the game.

Read more about the 5 Moments and why they matter.

⚾ A community for parents: Travel Baseball Moms & Dads (Facebook)

⚾ Follow along: Tony Manolatos – Baseball Dad & PR Guy (Facebook)

More at tonymanolatos.com

After the little boy hit the ball off the tee he took off — for third base.

Elizabeth was my bench coach back then and she had a tougher job than me. I managed our twins’ t-ball team and that meant I was at the plate when our team was batting. I laid down a Wiffle bat in the batter’s box to help the boys align their feet. I adjusted their hands. I reminded them to keep their eyes on the ball.

When I looked into the dugout, I’d spot Elizabeth, arms stretched out like a safety patrol officer at a crosswalk holding kids back from walking onto the field. She did that while scanning the bench to find the next batter to get him ready to send my way.

We both let out big belly laughs when that kiddo took off for third.

“No, this way! First base is this way!” we said over the laughter.

We introduced our twin boys to organized baseball when they were 5 because baseball is a fun, beautiful game. It’s a kid’s game. Go to any field near you and you will see why it’s America’s pastime. The smiles tell the story, and when there are no parents around — at backyard Wiffle ball games, for example — the laughter comes from the gut.

The game has other sides too. It’s not always fun. It’s not an easy game to play well, and I write a lot about how adults sometimes hurt the game and the kids who play it.

I've heard mindset coaches ask struggling ballplayers a simple question: Why did you start playing?

The answer's always the same. Because it was fun. Go back there, they tell them. Remember that. Find your joy. Build on it.

I think about that a lot now. How much of the last eight years has been Elizabeth and me finding our way back to that same simple answer, especially on the days when it’s easier to forget it.

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We never walked away because the game has given us too many reasons to stay. It had the same effect on our parents.

My dad was my football and baseball coach. He also coached my younger brother, Mychal.

My brother was one of those gifted athletes. I was not. I attended a good co-ed Catholic high school, Bishop Foley, in suburban Detroit. Mychal attended Birmingham Brother Rice, all boys and one of the top high schools in the state. He was a two-sport athlete, baseball and football.

My brother’s high school baseball team won the state championship when he was a junior. He pitched in that game. Fastball in the high 80s. Middle infielder who threw lasers across the diamond. He quit playing baseball before his senior season. Hated his coach. A year later, he walked on at Western Michigan University as a freshman along with about three dozen other kids, all of them cut by the last day of tryouts except for Mychal and another kid. When it was over, Mychal would be the last kid cut. The coaches at Western loved his arm. “But I didn’t hit at all,” he says now. “If I had hit even a little, I probably make the team.” He lives in Chicago now with his family, and he runs a successful business. Everyone in our house calls him Uncle Mike. Proud of him.

My dad passed away three years ago, but he’s still with me, and so are the stories he told about playing baseball and football as a kid near his home in southeast Detroit, not far from Tiger Stadium and the automotive factories that built the city. Football was his best sport. He was good enough to earn a full-ride scholarship to play at Ball State, in Indiana. His parents, Greek immigrants who ran a neighborhood diner open around the clock, told him he had to turn that scholarship down. They needed him close to home, working the restaurant. So instead of leaving for Indiana, he enrolled at Wayne State and became an X-ray technician.

Becoming a certified X-ray tech may have saved his life. When he was drafted for Vietnam, the Army saw he was trained in radiology and stationed him at a military hospital in El Paso instead of sending him into combat. He spent two years there, taking X-rays. He was still in Texas when Detroit erupted in riots in the summer of 1967. For more than a week, the Red Cross tried and failed to reach his parents — the phone lines in their part of the city had burned along with most everything else. When they finally got through, his mom and dad were fine. So was the restaurant.

I loved those stories, but not as much as I loved watching him play softball on Friday nights with some other dads from our neighborhood and younger guys he worked with. All of us would attend those games — my mom, my sister, my brother.

Football was the only sport I was ever good at, and football was a big deal in our home, located 45 minutes north of the city. I was raised Catholic, but Bo Schembechler, the legendary Michigan football coach, was revered more than the Pope in our house.

It was baseball, though, that brought us together more often. Maybe because the season ran longer, was played over warm weather months in the Midwest, and the tickets were affordable, especially if you sat in the outfield bleachers. Whatever the reason, part of the game’s magic is its ability to bring people together.

I remember sitting at our kitchen table, green carpet under my feet because it was the 1970s, and listening as my mom called Tiger Stadium to confirm that Mark Fidrych was pitching. We had tickets to the game that night and by then The Bird (Fidrych’s nickname) was a national sensation.

“The Bird is pitching! The Bird is pitching!” my mom shouted as she hung up.

Nowadays she uses GameChanger to watch Alex’s games and bridge the gap between her home in Michigan and ours in San Diego.

Elizabeth was on the Crew Team at the University of Wisconsin. The smallest on her team, she had to fight to earn her spot and the trust of her coaches. It probably helped that she was a standout swimmer in high school, an excellent student, and a tough kid who grew up with working parents in Milwaukee, in a neighborhood that reminds me of the one where my dad grew up in Detroit. A lifelong Brewers fan, she has a soft spot for guys like Rollie Fingers and Bob Uecker. Her mom and stepdad are longtime Brewers season ticket holders and we often meet them in Arizona for spring training.

In San Diego, baseball plays an outsized role in our home, but only one of our kids plays. We have three kids: twin boys, Alex and Nicky, who recently turned 13 and started eighth grade; and Natalie, who is 22 and recently graduated from Arizona State University.

The twins played baseball together for four years — really three because they lost a season to COVID — starting when they were 5. I managed their first two teams, including the one that disbanded when everyone went indoors. I wouldn’t manage again until Alex’s last season of Little League, and only because he kept asking me to.

Their Rookies team, the season after lockdown, won the championship. I’ll never forget the smiles from that day. The boys talked about that win all summer.

Nicky quit playing baseball a year later, after his first season of Minors. He was tired of getting hit by the ball. He complained that the pitchers threw too fast and had no idea what they were doing or where the ball was going. He told me he would only play again if he could just pitch and play second base.

Nicky is athletic, but he never warmed to the pressure of organized sports. He wasn’t interested in being an athlete, preferring to invest his time and energy in creating art. You can see his natural athleticism at the park when he picks up a football and effortlessly tosses beautiful spirals to his brother, and the only ones watching are Elizabeth, me, and our dogs.

Back on that t-ball field, I had no idea Nicky would walk away from the game at such a young age. We supported his decision. Baseball had given him what he needed, and it was time for him to move on.

Alex swung the opposite direction. Baseball, like a lot of things in life, came easy to him. I don’t think he’s ever thought about not playing. He loves the game and the game seems to love him back.

There are moments when your kids are little when you realize they’re good at something. One of those moments occurred when we were at the Wiffle ball field the San Diego Padres maintained behind their field at Petco Park. Alex had just turned 6. The reaction from strangers looking on when Alex crushed a ball, and then watched it soar through the air, was priceless.

Nicky used to say, “I’m a good stancer,” because I used to tell him he had the best batting stance on the team. Alex, super competitive, didn’t like that.

Alex is one of those athletic kids, smaller than a lot of other boys on the field, but starting to catch up. Arm strength has never been an issue for him. “Dang,” I thought when he was 3 and threw me a ball in our backyard, immediately reminding me of my brother. “This kid has an arm.”

We love watching him play, especially when he’s on the mound or up to bat in a clutch spot. You could see when he was younger how he used pressure as fuel and how other kids hated those moments. Sometimes I watch him practice, less now that he’s older. When I do, I enjoy seeing how effortlessly he fields, how smooth he looks throwing a bullpen, how sweet his swings look when he’s locked in, and how he tosses the ball from anywhere on the field with strength and precision.

The last year he played Little League, my assistant coaches would ask me to catch Alex more because he was our best catcher — even though catcher was not his primary position. Early in the season, I gave in, but of course when I did, batter after batter would hit hard ground balls to shortstop, where he normally played.

The game has given Alex a lot of opportunities and taught him a lot about himself. There’s more baseball ahead of him, but nothing in that game is guaranteed. He plays travel ball year-round on a top team in San Diego, where some of the best youth baseball on the planet is played. He’s competed against some very good teams locally, and in places like Houston, Phoenix, Las Vegas, and Cooperstown.

The bigger stages sometimes bring bigger nerves. When that happens, Elizabeth has a way of taking Alex back to those early days. She stops him before he walks out the door, meets his eyes, and says: “Remember why you play this game, Alex. You play because you’re good at it and because it makes you happy. Baseball brings you joy. Find your joy. Try your best and have fun out there today. Mama loves you!”

I don’t coach anymore, and Elizabeth only coached that one season, but she’s the best coach I ever had. She was steady and supportive. She grounded me, too. Her smile and easy demeanor reminded me why we were out there.

“Managing t-ball is a lot like taking on a big, new client. A lot of work but the rewards are sweet. Couldn’t do it without my assistant coaches, starting w/Coach Elizabeth,” I wrote in a 2019 Facebook post sharing pictures from one of our practices. “If you look closely, you will see her in one of these photos in her cool straw hat. I told her she looked like an Alabama football coach with that hat on.”

We still have a good laugh sometimes about that little kid who ran to third base. He was just running, and smiling.

Subscribe now

Go Deeper

As a parent coach, I help you help your kid play loose, with confidence and joy. The game gets harder, and our relationships suffer, when we add pressure.

If you’ve gotten the car ride home wrong, caught yourself coaching from the stands, or gotten caught up in the comparison trap, you’re not alone. None of us want to get these moments wrong. The good news: it’s fixable, and it starts with two short guides you can use before your kid’s next game.

Grab your parent playbooks — $20

Want something more specific worked through — your kid, your situation? I do that too.

Email me your issue and I’ll get back to you within 24 hours — $50

Book a coaching session — $150/45 minutes

Lastly, every week I drop new reels on Instagram: @tonymanolatos. Some are related to my essays. Some aren’t. It’s a place for parents to connect with me and each other, to share stories that are funny or moving, do’s and don’ts, and more.

About Baseball Dad & PR Guy

Baseball Dad & PR Guy is a weekly newsletter about youth sports culture and how parents and coaches shape the experience for young athletes.

Subscribers also get what I use after games — the Car Ride Home Playbook — what to say, and what to leave unsaid on the ride home.

My essays are built around the 5 Moments That Shape Young Ballplayers, from the nerves before a game to the car ride home.

From the stands, I write about those moments and what they mean for confidence, identity, and a kid’s love of the game.

Read more about the 5 Moments and why they matter.

⚾ Join the conversation: Travel Baseball Moms & Dads (Facebook)

⚾ Follow along: Tony Manolatos – Baseball Dad & PR Guy(Facebook)

More at tonymanolatos.com

I should point out that his injury could have been worse. He didn’t fracture his shoulder but his growth plate is angry, stressed, inflamed, and the sports doctor he was referred to this summer shut him down for 90 days. But no one expected this — not his doctor, physical therapist, coaches, or Elizabeth and me.

While this isn’t an easy story to tell, it’s an important one to share to help families navigate similar situations. Alex was injured doing something he loves. Elizabeth and I have tried to figure out what we could have done differently — and what wouldn’t have mattered at all. There’s no villain in this story. Just a growing boy, and parents learning where the line is between protecting a kid and letting him be who he is.

If you haven’t read Part 1 of this story and would like to here it is:

Alex’s x-rays were negative and his exams following his injury went well. After some rest, he was throwing again pain free. So the MRI the sports doctor ordered was supposed to come back clean. It didn’t.

To understand his injury, picture the growth plate near his shoulder joint as a soft 'construction zone' — cartilage where the body manufactures new bone, weaker than the solid bone around it.

Alex, who recently turned 13, will continue growing for several years, and until he’s done, that growth plate will stay soft, tender, and susceptible to injury. When a young pitcher repeatedly throws with high velocity, their developing muscles pull hard against this fragile zone. In an adult, that stress might cause a muscle strain. In a growing boy, it causes the growth plate to widen, irritate, or shift. Worst case, the pressure rips or fractures the growth plate. In Alex’s case, his muscles simply have not grown as fast as his bones, his medical team said.

Alex grew two inches in 5 weeks this summer, including the week he was in Cooperstown, where the injury occurred. His 12u team, CBA San Diego, had one of those memorable runs kids remember. I’ve shared the details so I’m not going to rehash, but Alex started two games out there. He pitched in the middle of a growth spurt nobody was aware of. He loved all of it. His team finished 5th out of 104 clubs.

Back in San Diego, Alex took a couple weeks off to rest his sore shoulder. Even though his X-rays were negative an MRI was ordered so his sports doctor could have “a clear look” and “rule out” Little League Shoulder. When the pain went away Alex was cleared to start throwing again. He was cleared to practice and participate in a USA Baseball tryout, and with MRI results pending, he was cleared to pitch in a one-day tournament on July 19. He played that day but he didn’t pitch because his coaches and Elizabeth and I didn’t feel he was ready. The day after that tournament, the text from his doctor arrived saying the MRI results were in and they did show “a stress reaction across the growth plate of the humeral head, consistent with little leaguer’s shoulder.”

He went on to say Alex should not throw a baseball or swing a bat for 90 days. I called his office to make sure I understood everything and I mentioned that not swinging a bat for three months would be tough because so much of hitting is about timing and rhythm.

I was told if Alex rested and stuck with his PT the doctor would likely lift some or all of the restrictions in 45 days. I also was told Alex’s injury is fairly common among young pitchers and minor compared to some of what’s out there with hurlers who are still growing.

PT put Alex on an every-other-day band routine. If he skips those, doesn't rest, or comes back too soon, he risks a severe injury that could require surgery and sideline him for a year or more, the doc told us.

Alex was playing MLB the Show in his bedroom when Elizabeth and I shared the news. He was sad he would miss an upcoming tournament. He was sad he was going to miss the Perfect Game All-State Games he qualified for as a pitcher. He was sad he wouldn’t “get to play for Coach Eddie and Coach Soto anymore” because they’re his 12u coaches and 13u starts on Labor Day.

When I tucked him that night he told me he was scared. He was worried he might break his shoulder and wouldn’t be able to do the thing he loves almost as much as barreling a baseball: pitch.

After sitting with the news for a day I reached out to Alex’s coaches and to some baseball friends, including Alex’s former travel ball coach, Manny Gagliano. He knows Alex well, played baseball in college, and has coached for decades. He taught Alex how to throw a football curve during warmups before a game, and he was coaching third when Alex hit his first over-the-fence home run. I asked him how often he’s seen similar injuries and what recovery looked like.

“I never had a kid with Little League Shoulder,” Manny told me. But he had a kid whose elbow was hurting after a heavy Little League season, and he made a simple call: “You know what, we’re not going to pitch you this year during travel ball.”

His advice for every parent with a young ballplayer: “High school and college coaches want athletes. The single most important thing you can do now is strength training. And give them a break from baseball. Two or three months.”

I appreciate that Alex’s medical team let me off the hook. They told me the likely cause was throwing while growing. But the bigger picture weighs on me.

Because he’s good at it and because he enjoys it, Alex has always carried a heavy load as a pitcher, not unlike other young hurlers. You manage it, and so do his coaches, but when there’s an injury there’s second-guessing.

When I coached Alex in Little League, I was careful with him and all my pitchers during the regular season — 50 pitches or so max. Alex’s pitch count has only ever climbed into the 80s once, in his last Little League game — 83 pitches, 10 strikeouts, 3 hits allowed, over 6 innings. It wasn’t enough. We lost that playoff game 2-1 on a walk-off home run.

Other coaches, other tournaments, I tracked pitches but not innings. Sometimes he pitched on short rest. I usually gave consent for him to do so, but sometimes I wasn't asked. I've realized I need to be more involved if he's asked to pitch on short rest.

Pitch counts add up across a season, across Little League and travel ball. Nobody’s ever tracking all of it. All those warmup throws and throws across the infield and from the outfield don’t show up on GameChanger.

I wonder if I should have done more.

We say yes to about two tournaments a month, but Alex doesn’t pitch in December or January. He plays flag football and a little basketball.

Elizabeth has always felt the pull of travel baseball more than me, but I also agree it is a lot. If it were up to Alex, he would play every weekend. When he does play he usually pitches, usually starts, and usually throws between 55 and 75 pitches total across a two-day weekend tournament.

“He just has it,” one of Alex’s current coaches told me after a recent outing on the mound.

His pitching coach, Chad Starkey, told me Alex doesn’t need to pitch every tournament. “Alex has nothing to prove,” he said. “The goal now is to get stronger, stay healthy, and have some fun.”

The goal has always been for him to be a great pitcher when he’s a junior and senior in high school, not a great pitcher when he’s 13 or 14. That’s easy to lay out there and buy into, easy to understand that none of this matters much until he’s 16. It’s also easy to lose sight of during an elimination game in Arizona at a beautiful facility — when your son earns a start against a nationally ranked team and looks like he was made for the moment.

Alex is handling all this better than me, which is fitting. Last summer he handled the end to his Little League career better than me too.

Elizabeth and I like that he’s taking a break and taking better care of himself. He’s practicing with his team but not swinging or throwing. He hates that but plays by the rules. He’s focused on getting stronger, eating healthier, getting to bed on time, resting his shoulder, and he loves that he’s gotten pretty good at shooting a basketball with his left hand in our pool.

We of course want him to stay healthy once he’s back. His coach, Anthony Soto, told him this won’t be his last injury. He’s right, of course. But that’s not easy for a parent to see.

As I look forward, I see Elizabeth and me keeping an even closer eye on pitch counts, innings, rest days — at least until he stops growing, which is probably close to the same time performance really starts to matter. We also will continue to prioritize all the things that make a growing boy grow, including sleep, rest, and nutrition.

There will be some anxious moments as he resumes pitching, but we will find balance. Protecting him and letting him compete aren’t mutually exclusive.

As I look back, maybe we don’t let him pitch as much. The load on a young kid’s arm who plays baseball as much as Alex has is real. Maybe someone will develop an app for parents to see a young pitcher’s growth spurt in real time, so we can alert coaches and pump the breaks. I’m joking, but that’s actually not a bad idea.

All of us do the best we can with the information we have, and we try and surround our kids with people who care for them as much as we do.

“We want to protect his arm,” Coach Soto told me. “And we will.”

Subscribe now

Go Deeper

As a parent coach, I help you help your kid play loose, with confidence and joy. The game gets harder, and our relationships suffer, when we add pressure.

If you’ve gotten the car ride home wrong, caught yourself coaching from the stands, or gotten caught up in the comparison trap, you’re not alone. None of us want to get these moments wrong. The good news: it’s fixable, and it starts with two short guides you can use before your kid’s next game.

Grab your parent playbooks — $20

Want something more specific worked through — your kid, your situation? I do that too.

Email me your issue and I’ll get back to you within 24 hours — $50

Book a coaching session — $150/45 minutes

Lastly, every week I drop new reels on Instagram: @tonymanolatos. Some are related to my essays. Some aren’t. It’s a place for parents to connect with me and each other, to share stories that are funny or moving, do’s and don’ts, and more.

About Baseball Dad & PR Guy

Baseball Dad & PR Guy is a weekly newsletter about youth sports culture and how parents and coaches shape the experience for young athletes.

Subscribers receive the Car Ride Home Playbook — what to say, and what to leave unsaid, after a tough game.

My essays are built around the 5 Moments That Shape Young Ballplayers, from the nerves before a game to the car ride home.

From the stands, I write about those moments and what they mean for confidence, identity, and a kid’s love of the game.

Read more about the 5 Moments and why they matter.

⚾ Join the conversation: Travel Baseball Moms & Dads (Facebook)

⚾ Follow along: Tony Manolatos – Baseball Dad & PR Guy (Facebook)

More at tonymanolatos.com

Tuesday night, on the way to practice, Alex asked me what was going on with that Little League team from Tulsa that was disqualified. I’d seen the headlines, but I hadn’t actually read the stories. So I told him to Google it and read to me, because my hands were on the wheel.

He read. I drove. Neither of us had the whole story straight by the time we parked 20 minutes later. But we had the same reaction. Shocked. Not surprised. I wanted to know more. So did Alex.

I’ll get into what I’ve learned, but before I do it’s worth pointing out that the rapidly unfolding story tearing apart the youth baseball community in Tulsa, Oklahoma is the latest in a long line of stories about parents harming a kid’s game. This one does feel different because of all the wild details that are likely just the tip of the iceberg. I’m not sure yet what bothers me the most, but it’s probably along these lines:

1. The parents and coaches gaming the system

2. The administrators who were either duped, part of the crooked behavior, or looked the other way

3. The folks at the top of Little League International, and what their own words in court revealed

Tulsa National Little League governs softball and baseball leagues, and not one — but two — of its All-Star teams were disqualified this summer. Softball first, in July, over player eligibility rules and related allegations. Then baseball, this week, over a boy identified in court filings as O.G. Both All Star teams were yanked from competition during the Southwest Region Tournaments, the boy’s team a win away from advancing to play in the Little League World Series.

That’s why Alex and so many kids are invested in this story. A lot of them tune into the World Series. A lot of adults do, too. Alex enjoys it more so lately because sometimes he sees kids he’s played against. The games will go on, as they say, but there will be a cloud over all of it stretching west to Oklahoma.

Tulsa’s All Star Softball Team

The allegations swirling around the softball team were beyond brazen. A Texas league whose team had just lost to Tulsa’s filed a protest claiming the softball program skipped its required player draft this season to bring in what was practically an intact travel ball roster for All Stars — a serious violation, if true. Little League’s actual disqualification didn’t confirm the draft or travel-team claims. It removed the softball team over undocumented residency and school-enrollment paperwork instead. But those accusations, that a local nonprofit quietly skipped a draft and imported a stacked roster in the light of day, were out there in writing weeks before anyone found paperwork with a wrong birth year next door.

Tulsa’s All Star Baseball Team

The All-Star teams chasing a trip to Williamsport are referred to as 12u teams in youth baseball circles because they’re built primarily with 12-year-olds playing their last season of Little League. The arrows pointing at the Tulsa team sharpened after opposing leagues filed protests going back to late July, over general eligibility and other questions that Little League International dismissed. It was a last-minute protest, filed the day before the regional championship, that sealed the team’s fate. It highlighted a new claim about one player.

O.G. lived outside Tulsa National’s boundaries. The local Little League has a provision for that: if a player’s younger sibling, age seven or under, plays a full season in the league’s Challenger Division — the adaptive program for kids with physical and intellectual disabilities — an older sibling can join that league too. It’s a good rule. It exists so a family with a kid who needs that special program can keep their children in the same league.

O.G.’s father, according to a Little League International court filing, recently acknowledged the sibling on the registration was actually 10 years old, three years past the cutoff, and had never set foot on a Challenger field. The birth year on the form was false. A rival league’s protest — signed by three separate Little Leagues, obtained by a reporter who’s been covering this story all summer — put it more bluntly: using a special-needs program to manufacture eligibility is “so egregious that anyone involved with this should be banned for life from Little League.” Little League’s disqualification didn’t go that far. It just said the player was ineligible, and under the rules, one ineligible player disqualifies the whole team.

The district administrator overseeing Tulsa’s league told Little League officials she relied on written guidance from the regional office when the player was first cleared to play, and that the wrong birth year listed for that player’s sibling wasn’t caught until after the state tournament — the final round of All Star play ahead of regionals — ended. She asked Little League’s national office to apply whatever rule was broken “with the same consistency and fairness that should have applied to every compliance issue at the state tournament.” Maybe that’s a real defense, or maybe the bad decisions in Tulsa weren’t limited to a handful of parents and coaches.

Little League International isn’t buying it. “When one team follows the rules and another team conceals material eligibility information until the last possible moment,” their lawyers wrote this week in the league’s emergency motion, “the Courts should not substitute its feelings of sympathy for the team that violated the rules.”

The protests filed by Tulsa’s regional competitors also said an unnamed “GameChanger admin” has been deleting and modifying Tulsa National’s season data on the app most travel and rec teams use to track stats and games, calling it an attempt “to deceive and/or hide the facts of how the season was played” in order to meet All Star eligibility requirements. Little League hasn’t confirmed that.

The Legal Drama

Tulsa's parents sued, but not to get O.G. back on the field. His family had already pulled him ahead of regionals once the heat was turned up. They sued to keep the other boys on the All Star team in the tournament, competing for a dream spot at the Little League World Series.

“Our 13 boys had no role in determining eligibility, approving waivers, certifying rosters, or administering Little League rules. Neither did their parents or coaches,” the parents said in a statement after Little League International disqualified the team this week. “We relied upon the administrators responsible for making those decisions.”

A judge in Waco, Texas, home to the Southwest Regional Tournament, granted the parents’ restraining order Monday night, essentially saying the Tulsa team shouldn’t be disqualified while the allegations are sorted out. Little League International responded yesterday morning (Tuesday, Aug. 11) and it did so in a big way: with a 330-page filing arguing it was too late to reverse course anyway — Boerne Little League, the team Little League had ruled would advance to the World Series instead of Tulsa, had already flown home, and ESPN had already packed its trucks. The judge agreed and dissolved his order that afternoon.

Boerne’s coach, Greg Yost, called the last 24 hours an emotional roller coaster, according to media reports. His players went from celebrating a championship, to fearing they’d lost it, to keeping it after all. “I’m just happy that it worked out, because our kids worked so hard and they deserve it,” he said.

Happy for the Boerne boys, but Alex and I keep coming back to Tulsa. What were these folks thinking and why did they think they could get away with any of this?

The parents of the Tulsa players for some reason felt the need to say in their statement that this was all due to an error on a form. Even if that's true, it skips right past Little League International's separate claim that the sibling never participated in a Challenger game at all — a detail that would matter regardless of the birth year.

The System That Created This

All of this feels like a risk-it-all strategy to win a 12u baseball tournament, but nobody involved is ever going to say that. You don’t need to know the motive to see how this could happen, because Little League told us, in its own words, before any of this ever reached a courtroom. Back in July, after the softball disqualification, Dan Velte, Little League International’s vice president of operations, told a reporter that protests get handled “case-by-case,” that there’s “no set timeline” and “no set process” for pulling a league’s charter. And this week, arguing in court that a Texas judge shouldn’t second-guess how it runs things, Little League International’s own lawyers invoked what they called, “Texas’s long-standing doctrine of judicial non-intervention with the affairs of a self-governing association.”

Self-governing. No set process. That’s not me characterizing the system. That’s the organization describing itself. Little League parents complaining about politics and a centralized power structure that answers to no one isn’t news, but rarely do you get such a clear understanding of why from the people in charge.

The Tulsa parents who sued said power brokers at every level are to blame: “Tulsa National Little League, Southwest Region administration, and Little League International failed these 13 boys.”

Little League isn’t on an island. A lot of youth sports organizations run on the same design: a small number of volunteers, minimal outside oversight, a system that bristles at scrutiny, and a culture where the parents and other volunteers checking the rules are often friends, fellow coaches, or board colleagues of the people breaking them. Most volunteers are who they appear to be — good parents with good kids who happily give up their weekends, and a lot of weeknights too, because they love their kids and the game. But a system with no real checks and balances is a system waiting for someone entitled, desperate, or both, to manipulate it.

Tulsa isn’t the first time that’s happened. Little League vacated an entire team’s tournament wins, banned a manager, and dissolved a district over an eligibility scheme in 2015.

So where do we go from here, as parents standing outside all this, watching it happen to a league we’ve never heard of in a state we don’t live in?

The system that let this happen in Tulsa is the same one running the league up the street from you. It’s not going to fix itself, and every incentive tells it to resist change. That only changes when the people showing up to those parking lots on Tuesday nights start asking harder questions before there’s a scandal that forces them to.

The system pits our best selves against our nervous selves. By that I mean our primary instinct as parents is to protect our kids, and we know we’re opening them up to blowback if we complain too loudly and annoy the wrong people. That’s a real concern and I don’t know how that gets solved. But it’s clear more parents need to look closer, ask who’s checking the checkers, and speak up when something doesn’t add up, even when it’s easier not to and you know that the board member running the snack shack is not going to smile back at you.

Alex is thirteen now, old enough to read a court filing from the passenger seat and ask questions about adults who thought they’d get away with something like this. I share his disbelief.

My guess is he suspects nothing will change beyond the fallout in Tulsa. If so, he’s probably right. Most parents will shake their heads, scroll to the next headline, and hope it doesn’t happen to their kid, or the one down the street on his toy truck who hasn’t played his first t-ball game yet. That kid is counting on the adults around him, all of us, to have learned something from this mess before it’s his turn.

Don’t we owe him that?

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About Baseball Dad & PR Guy

Baseball Dad & PR Guy is a weekly newsletter about youth sports culture and how parents and coaches shape the experience for young athletes.

Subscribers also get what I use after games — what to say, and what to leave unsaid on the ride home.

My essays are built around the 5 Moments That Shape Young Ballplayers, from the nerves before a game to the car ride home.

From the stands, I write about those moments and what they mean for confidence, identity, and a kid’s love of the game.

Read more about the 5 Moments and why they matter.

⚾ Join the conversation: Travel Baseball Moms & Dads (Facebook)

⚾ Follow along: Tony Manolatos – Baseball Dad & PR Guy(Facebook)

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A lot of us parents coach too often when all our kid really wants is his mom and dad. I was reminded of that last month when I ran into Alex in a restroom at a ballpark after he struck out against the fastest pitching he’d seen in a game. I wrote about that moment and discussed it in the same reel about the coach/dad question. What I said, and how I handled that moment, struck a chord with a lot of parents.

Since I shared this story previously I won’t get into much detail, but essentially what Alex got from me, after telling me how hard the pitcher was throwing, was his dad not a coach. The payoff arrived with his next at bat against the same pitcher — line drive single with the game on the line.

We all face these moments — in a restroom between innings, in the stands, or during the car ride home after a bad game. It’s one voice. It might sound different depending on the situation, but the message is the same: do better, be better, try harder, what’s wrong with you?

Before a game it sounds like advice. During a game it sounds like coaching. After a game it sounds like a critique of everything that went wrong. Some of these moments you can see coming, like the breakfast table before a game or the drive to the field, and you can decide what you’re going to say ahead of time. Others arrive with no warning, leaving you no time to plan. You’re reacting, running off of whatever foundation you’ve built.

The voice that shows up at the breakfast table, in the car, and behind the backstop doesn’t change until you understand what it’s doing to your kid, and to your relationship with him or her, and what would help instead. Once you have that clarity, the moments are easier. You won’t always master them, but you’ll get more of them right. Muscle memory builds, and you start showing up with support, love, and encouragement instead of coaching and criticism.

A dad I don’t know, whose daughter plays college volleyball, left this comment on my reel: “Wish I was better at this. Sometimes easier said than done. Still working on it with my daughter who plays college volleyball.”

I wrote back: “Don’t be hard on yourself. None of us are perfect. I don’t get all these moments right. My wife will tell you that. But I try to, just like you, and our kids see that. Keep showing up. And try to practice ‘show don’t tell.’ Sounds simple but isn’t always easy.”

Here’s what I didn’t say:

This past spring, mid-game, Alex was struggling on the mound. He’d pitched two days earlier in the same 3-day tournament and pitched well. That was a lot easier to watch than seeing him in this elimination game. I saw what he was doing wrong. Didn’t say anything initially, but eventually I did.

“Work down the escalator instead of down the elevator,” I said from my lawn chair between his team’s dugout and home plate. “Come over the top.” Later, I added, “You’re missing in the same spot. What’s the adjustment?” Next pitch was a strike and then another. The count was 0-2, he was way ahead and about to get out of this inning, but he would end up walking that batter. “C’mon,” I said as I slapped my knee. Hard. Loud. He probably didn’t hear it, but he might have seen it.

Elizabeth was sitting next to me. She didn’t say anything about my coaching. But the knee slap was too much.

“You gonna put that in your Substack?” she said.

Alex’s coach walked to the mound. If he was frustrated, he didn’t show it. He said something quiet and supportive, took the ball, and Alex walked to the dugout looking like he'd let his team down.

I let him down. Elizabeth was right. I messed up.

A lot of us struggle when our kids struggle, myself included. And that’s not the only time we add pressure and make the game harder. I get more of these moments right than I used to, but I’m not perfect. None of us are.

A dad with five kids, four of whom he’s coached himself, left a comment saying he still struggles with his youngest, who’s about to start high school. I told him what I’ve come to believe: none of this is easy. All of it is fixable. We never really graduate from working on it.

A former D1 athlete wrote, “That parent/coach balance is so important and like you said, can take a huge amount of pressure off these kids!”

A dad who spends his career around the game professionally, three kids of his own, told me on a call that my reel made him realize he needs to say less from the stands.

If reps solved this, all of us would have fixed it by now.

We haven’t because reps aren’t a substitute for self-awareness.

Months after the knee slap, Alex and I were driving to Los Angeles for the final round of USA Baseball tryouts, the kind of slow moving morning built for a dad to fill with coaching and reminders. I started in exactly that place, something about working through the ball, something else about keeping his head down at the plate. I heard myself and stopped.

“You know all this,” I said. “You’ve got this.”

“Yeah, Dad, I’m good,” he said.

He turned the music up and we listened to iTunes the rest of the way.

Perspective helps but it’s not always there for us. We forget sometimes that none of this really matters until they’re 16. When they’re younger the focus should be on development, getting stronger, staying healthy, studying the game, competing.

It helps too when we show them instead of telling them. I first heard “show don’t tell” from Brian Sackinsky, a former big-league pitcher and father of five, in a video interview we recorded for paid subscribers. Show him through what you do, instead of what you say, that you trust him.

That’s the job, most days. Saying yes when he asks you to throw BP instead of finding a reason not to. Standing at the fence instead of narrating from it. Leaving the music on in the car.

If you’re catching yourself in similar spots that’s not evidence you’re bad at this. It’s proof you’re paying attention. Keep paying attention. That awareness is where change lives.

Sometimes to a stranger I look like Alex’s coach. A kid working the snack bar at a recent tournament asked me the same question as that man in the grass. Alex sometimes asks me to coach him — he might ask after a game what I saw in his swing or in his delivery — but mostly he just wants me to be his dad. He has a lot of great coaches. My job is easier than theirs.

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Go Deeper

As a parent coach, I help you help your kid play loose, with confidence and joy. The game gets harder, and our relationships suffer, when we add pressure.

If you’ve gotten the car ride home wrong, caught yourself coaching from the stands, or gotten caught up in the comparison trap, you’re not alone. None of us want to get these moments wrong. The good news: it’s fixable, and it starts with two short guides you can use before your kid’s next game.

Grab your parent playbooks — $20

Want something more specific worked through, your kid, your situation? I do that too.

Email me your issue and I’ll get back to you within 24 hours — $50

Book a coaching session — $150/45 minutes

Lastly, every week I drop new reels on Instagram: @tonymanolatos. Some are related to my essays. Some aren’t. It’s a place for parents to connect with me and each other, to share stories that are funny or moving, do’s and don’ts, and more.

About Baseball Dad & PR Guy

Baseball Dad & PR Guy is a weekly newsletter about youth sports culture and how parents and coaches shape the experience for young athletes.

Subscribers also get what I use after games, what to say, and what to leave unsaid on the ride home.

My essays are built around the 5 Moments That Shape Young Ballplayers, from the nerves before a game to the car ride home.

From the stands, I write about those moments and what they mean for confidence, identity, and a kid’s love of the game.

Read more about the 5 Moments and why they matter.

⚾ Join the conversation: Travel Baseball Moms & Dads (Facebook)

⚾ Follow along: Tony Manolatos – Baseball Dad & PR Guy (Facebook)

More at tonymanolatos.com

“I don’t want to do that,” Alex, who recently turned 13, told us this summer.

Alex and some of his buddies at school had already worked this out, before I ever brought it up. The upside of being bigger or stronger for a year or two didn't outweigh the ick factor, they had decided. There were academic reasons too.

Alex has a twin brother, Nicky, and watching him move on to high school while Alex repeats 8th grade is a non-starter. It would embarrass him. He said it doesn’t make sense academically either. He starts 8th grade this month. He reads at a 10th grade level.

“I’d be bored,” Alex said.

In the travel ball world, reclassification is a big decision for a lot of families, and it isn’t always a clean one. There’s crowd-sourcing other parents and coaches, awkward conversations with school administrators and counselors, second-guessing, and a pile of uncertainty. We skipped all of that because of Alex’s certainty. I was relieved.

Thirteen-year-olds don’t need a parent to explain when reclassing goes wrong. They can see it, and when they do the jokes come easy. If you’re a parent to a middle school ballplayer, you may have heard something along these lines during carpool: “Bro is literally an unc. He’s in 8th grade and has a mustache and drives to school.”

Last summer, a coach of Alex’s asked me, “Have you thought about reclassing?” I said, “Not really. I mean, I don’t know much about it but it’s probably a non-starter. Alex has a twin brother. We don’t want to split them up. We also don’t think baseball should trump academics, but I’ll look into it and talk it over with Alex and his Mom.”

Elizabeth was a hard no, though she agreed we should still discuss it with Alex. No rush, I thought back then. Plenty of time. Toward the end of 7th grade Alex brought it up. Before I could weigh in, Alex and his friends had already rendered their own verdict.

We could have held Alex and Nicky back a year when they were in daycare. They do have a late birthday compared to most of their friends at school, and they would have been born even later had they been born on time and not 7 weeks early. I remember when they were wrapping up daycare, a special place that served as the perfect head start for our boys and their sister before them. The question with the director came up, as it had with Natalie. Did we want to start the boys in kindergarten or wait another year?

“Oh, they’re ready for kindergarten,” Elizabeth said. “We love it here. But they’re so ready.”

They were happy, confident, outgoing, and smart back then. Big personalities with big smiles who seemed to rule the playground. They’re all those things and more today. It was the right decision.

The reclassification decision is one a lot of families of young athletes wrestle with, and I think it only makes sense for a small slice of them: kids born in June, July or August, the youngest in their grade which includes kids born between January 1 and August 31. Alex and Nicky were born at the end of May 2013. Had they been born on time, and not 7 weeks early, they’d have been July babies. Reclassification might have made more sense.

But I doubt Alex would want it anyway.

He is on the smaller side but he’s also more athletic than a lot of kids, and he has a strong arm. At a recent 13u tryout for USA Baseball, he was one of the youngest and the smallest, but he impressed enough to make the final round before he was cut. There were four or five kids smaller than him that day, out of a field of 50 or so, and he pointed that out to me in the truck afterward.

I said what I always do, “You’re gonna grow. You’re growing now—two inches over 5 weeks this summer. You have a cannon and you’re super athletic. No one is going to take those things from you. You’re going to keep getting stronger, and you’re still going to have all that athleticism.”

He listens, nods, and reflects. He hears me but he’s skeptical.

Here’s what I think a lot of parents get wrong about the trade. They believe their kid has real potential to make a D1 baseball roster, and who knows from there. Dreams are fine. I get it. But the numbers are brutal and they narrow at each stage: a sliver of high school players go D1, a sliver of those go pro, and a sliver of those ever see real money.

And what’s the lesson, really, in holding a kid back a year to dominate kids who are physically a year behind him? It’s the mustache joke made real. You’re not developing him. In some cases, you’re building the kid thirteen-year-olds make fun of at lunch.

There’s a lot that goes into recruiting, and yes, high school and travel coaches matter. But at the end of the day, what gets a kid recruited is him: the fire, the skills, the grades, the baseball IQ, whether he’s a good teammate who hustles. That’s the secret sauce. If he has it, someone will find him. And if he’s actually good enough for the pros, they’ll want him young. Youth is the asset up there, not something to manufacture with a redshirt year in middle school.

One more thing: hold him back and he gets hurt in a D1 program, and there's no cushion waiting for him anymore. In June, the NCAA's D1 cabinet voted to scrap the old redshirt and injury-waiver system for a straight age-based model — five years, no exceptions. The new rule takes effect in the fall of 2027 for anyone enrolling in college. Alex, and all the other 8th graders who don't reclass, will enter college in 2031.

Alex’s certainty doesn’t just show up at home. Most of his buddies at school are older and many of them played 13u travel ball this season while Alex stayed with his own 12u age group. They ribbed him sometimes about why he’s good enough to play for a top team at his age, instead of playing 13u like them. His answer: “Guys, I am 12.”

My advice: if you don’t want your kid to be the youngest in his grade and on the field, reclassification deserves consideration. Other than that, I don’t think it deserves much of your time compared to the other decisions we have to make as sports parents.

Regardless of how your kid stacks up, ask him what he wants. If he tells you he’d rather not be the guy with the mustache who looks like he drives himself to school, or the kid forced to make new friends while repeating courses he’s already mastered, follow his lead.

Go Deeper

As a parent coach, I help you help your kid play loose, with confidence and joy. The game gets harder, and our relationships suffer, when we add pressure.

If you’ve gotten the car ride home wrong, caught yourself coaching from the stands, or gotten caught up in the comparison trap, you’re not alone. None of us want to get these moments wrong. The good news: it’s fixable, and it starts with two short guides you can use before your kid’s next game.

Grab your parent playbooks — $20

Want something more specific worked through — your kid, your situation? I do that too.

Email me your issue and I’ll get back to you within 24 hours — $50

Book a coaching session — $150/45 minutes

Lastly, every week I drop new reels on Instagram: @tonymanolatos. Some are related to my essays. Some aren’t. It’s a place for parents to connect with me and each other, to share stories that are funny or moving, do’s and don’ts, and more.

About Baseball Dad & PR Guy

Baseball Dad & PR Guy is a weekly newsletter about youth sports culture and how parents and coaches shape the experience for young athletes.

Subscribers also get what I use after games—what to say, and what to leave unsaid on the ride home.

My essays are built around the 5 Moments That Shape Young Ballplayers, from the nerves before a game to the car ride home.

From the stands, I write about those moments and what they mean for confidence, identity, and a kid’s love of the game.

Read more about the 5 Moments and why they matter.

⚾ Join the conversation: Travel Baseball Moms & Dads (Facebook)

⚾ Follow along: Tony Manolatos – Baseball Dad & PR Guy (Facebook)

More at tonymanolatos.com

“Whatever it is you’re teaching him is working.”

That’s what a gentleman who appeared to be homeless said to me last Saturday. He was laying in the grass beyond the fence of a field where I was throwing my son BP.

“Thank you,” I said, helping Alex shag balls from the fence line and beyond it. “That’s kind of you.”

“I love how he uses the whole field,” the man said. “Are you his dad or his coach?”

That morning Alex asked if I would hit some grounders and fly balls and throw him BP. My first thought: I need to clean the garage and go to the market. But I’ve learned to say yes in these moments. That’s my job. I’m not his coach. I’m his dad.

I know enough about his swing to see when he’s locked in, or when he’s coming out of his base or pulling his head. I’ve gotten better at only sharing that info when he asks: “Dad, what did you see?”

Usually my job is easier: support him, encourage him, lean in when he wants to play catch or hit BP.

“I wish I could take credit for his swing, but I didn’t teach him to swing like that,” I said to the man in the grass. “I’m his dad.”

Next day, Sunday, Alex and his 12u team were facing a pitcher throwing mid-70s — first time they had seen that in a game. They were playing up in a 13u tournament and playing well, but this pitcher was on another level.

The first time Alex faced him he struck out. A few minutes later we ran into each other in the restroom.

“Dad, he’s throwing so fast,” he said.

“You’ve seen faster and crushed it,” I told him, leaving out that the only place that’s happened is off a machine, in a warehouse where he trains. “You’ve got this.”

My job wasn’t to coach him and give him something else to think about. It was simply to support him, remind him to trust his training, and get after it.

Next at-bat vs same pitcher: count is 2-1 and Alex crushes a low line drive into right field. Dad behind me, “He put some barrel on that.”

“Attaboy, Alex! Attaboy!” I said from the stands.

THIS WEEK’s ESSAY

I saw an exchange on Facebook recently that floored me because it's one of the sharpest examples I've seen of a parent and coach attacking each other, and losing sight of the 12-year-old caught in the middle. It reminded me why I write these essays, record reels, and coach parents: too many of us get these moments wrong — really wrong, sometimes — and kids pay for it.

Youth sports is supposed to be about the kids. You know, the ‘youth’ in youth sports. But some adults make it about themselves. Happens too often. When we change that, we change the experience for the kids and keep more of them in the game, which is what we all want.

The exchange I saw on Facebook started with a post from a mom whose son guest-played for a team in Cooperstown. The post was long. It was heartfelt and also tough to read. It shed light on a conflict that had been private but not fully resolved.

The coach saw the post and he did exactly what any crisis communications professional would advise his client not to do. He went off. He started by announcing he was going to quit, “fed up with parents and issues like this one,” he said. Then he attacked the parents. Then he criticized their son's game. Honestly, he did. And then, almost on cue, he defended himself.

I told you it was wild.

The kid who guest-played joined his new team in Cooperstown with an understanding that he would pitch and catch, the mom wrote. That mostly didn’t happen. During the tournament, the parents confronted the coach — not after a cooling-off period, not the next day, but right after a game — reportedly demanding to know the next day's lineup and threatening to pull their son from the team and fly home early after the coach said he didn't know yet who'd be playing.

The coach, by his own account, answered as best he could in the moment but also said he was annoyed. Among other things, he said it cost him the few minutes he had to visit with his wife before heading back to the bunkhouse with the boys.

There wasn’t much in the mom’s post about her son’s feelings. It was mostly about how her and her husband felt. Same goes for the coach. He mostly focused on himself.

It was like watching a fire spread, with no one doing any damage control.

Making things more awkward, it was clear these folks knew each other outside the Cooperstown bubble.

The coach built an unflattering public profile of her son. He shared the kid’s batting average, on-base percentage, passed balls, and stolen bases allowed — to explain why a 12-year-old boy did not earn more playing time in Cooperstown. He compared the kid’s mistakes to what other kids on his team did right, in the same paragraph where he lectured this mom and her husband for comparing their son to other players in a heated conversation the three of them had between games.

He told her demanding to know if their son would play the next day and threatening to take him home “isn’t the right thing to do.” Of course it’s not, but neither is attacking a parent and sharing stats about a 12-year-old on Facebook.

The comments were quickly deleted. The post wasn’t.

Nobody in this thread was protecting the kid. They were protecting themselves.

The parents skipped the 24-hour ‘cooling off’ rule — one of the oldest unwritten rules in youth sports, and they blew right through it mid-tournament, in the moment, at a place that’s supposed to be magical. Then mom took a private conflict and made it public in a passive-aggressive post I suspect she wanted the coach to see.

The coach took the bait. If he had taken the high road, this goes away. Instead, he answered pressure with pressure. He pointed to the kid’s stat line to argue the team deserved better options during bracket play. Win or go home, no room for sentiment.

This is what I mean when I say adults shape the experience for kids. This time: parents who couldn’t wait a day and a coach who couldn’t keep his cool. Both sides added pressure and made the game harder, on a stage that’s already difficult for some kids. And neither avoided the comparison trap — one of my 5 Moments That Shape Young Ballplayers.

Nobody here set out to hurt a kid. But angst, ego, and expectations turned a rough week of guest-playing into a public referendum on a 12-year-old’s batting average and on-base percentage. What kid wants that?

Bark loudly. Rant publicly. Defend at all costs. That’s all I saw when the only thing that might have fixed things was waiting a day or two and having a real conversation behind closed doors.

This game, even though it’s a kid’s game, can bring out the worst in adults, especially when you mix in long, hot days, and competing personalities. There’s drama on every team. Most of it isn’t a big deal. Some of it is.

It’s why I don’t think youth sports has a parent problem or a coach problem. It has an adult problem.

Nobody hands parents a manual for what to say when their kid is benched. Nobody hands coaches talking points covering what to say — and what not to say — when a parent corners them mid-tournament, exhausted, with phones, group chats, and social media all lurking in the background.

This coach eventually seemed to catch himself, urging parents not to coach from the stands, to let their kids struggle, to stop rescuing them from adversity, and to trust they'd come out better players and people for it.

True, but you can bet his message was lost on the parents of that 12-year-old boy. It didn’t have to be.

My wife likes to say, “You never regret taking the high road.” It’s good advice for parents and coaches.

Go Deeper

As a parent coach, I help you help your kid play loose, with confidence and joy. The game gets harder, and our relationships suffer, when we add pressure.

If you’ve gotten the car ride home wrong, caught yourself coaching from the stands, or gotten caught up in the comparison trap, you’re not alone. None of us want to get these moments wrong. The good news: it’s fixable, and it starts with two short guides you can use before your kid’s next game.

Grab your parent playbooks — $20

Want something more specific worked through — your kid, your situation? I do that too.

Email me your issue and I’ll get back to you within 24 hours — $50

Book a coaching session — $150/45 minutes

Lastly, every week I drop new reels on Instagram: @tonymanolatos. Some are related to my essays. Some aren’t. It’s a place for parents to connect with me and each other, to share stories that are funny or moving, do’s and don’ts, and more.

“Not 100 percent yet?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he said. “It doesn’t feel ready. Feels like the ball dies a little on me.”

“It dies a little because you’re not throwing full strength yet,” I said. “You worried about re-injuring it?”

“Yeah,” he said.

I couldn’t talk him out of being afraid. Didn’t want to. So instead of trying I asked another question.

“We can throw a bullpen in a day or two if you want to test it,” I said. “Get it nice and loose, let it go, see how it feels. Any time it hurts, we stop immediately. But let’s see how it feels at 100 percent. Whenever you’re ready. Sound good?”

He nodded. That was it. No pep talk, no pressure. Just a plan.

He’d hurt his shoulder five weeks earlier, in Cooperstown, last day of a long week, in an elimination game — the same tournament where his team finished 5th out of 104. Since then: ten days of complete rest, a slow throwing progression, a missed tournament, missed practices, a USA Baseball tryout pushed back two and a half weeks so his arm could catch up to the moment. He still wasn’t sure it had.

This was Alex’s first injury. Thirteen years old. He started two games in Cooperstown. First time he took the mound he’d given up one run in the first when the plate ump called catcher’s interference on a 1-2 pitch that should’ve ended the inning. The ump walked to the mound and explained to Alex why he was waving the batter to first. Next pitch, grand slam. Five to nothing. Alex stayed in, got through that inning and the next one. Not his best outing, and one of those games where he had to get five outs each inning. But his team went on to win that game thanks to bats that were hot all tournament.

Cooperstown is a marathon, especially if your team advances in bracket play as Alex’s team did. So he was on the mound again, on a day’s rest, in an elimination game. He loves spots like that. Always has. Loves the ball in his hand in big games, big moments. I saw him warming up.

“How’s he look?” I asked the coach catching him.

“He always looks good!” he replied.

But Alex would only get through an inning and a third. He had given up four runs in the first. In the second I thought he was settling in, and I was confident the boys would score some runs and play good defense. Some kids were sick and others injured by this point, but they’re a gritty bunch and they knew the stakes. They played well and the boys in the infield were rallying around Alex, who had just struck out a batter. But then a pick off attempt to first didn’t look sharp. Then Alex bounced a ball in the dirt a couple feet before the plate. Then he waved his coach to the mound. His shoulder hurt with every pitch, he said. He was done. His team would lose that game 9-8 with runners on first and third when it ended.

Of course we all wanted a better outcome, but my thoughts turned to Alex and his arm. He said the pain was in his shoulder joint. That’s a first, I thought. Normally if Alex feels any discomfort on the mound, it goes away after a pitch or two, he said. But this time it got worse with each of his final 3 or 4 pitches.

A lot of kids don’t pull themselves out of that spot. A lot of grown men don’t either. The sports doctor who examined Alex back in San Diego told him: “I know a lot of big league pitchers who would not have taken themselves out of that game. They would have kept pitching, and they would have turned a minor injury into a major one.”

He bent Alex’s arm 30 different ways and studied his shoulders. He liked what he saw and couldn’t say for sure if Alex’s throwing shoulder stung because of a lack of rest between games, because he’s pitched for several seasons, or because Alex grew two inches over 5 weeks this summer. Probably a combination of all three.

He pulled up the X-rays and showed Alex his growth plate, explained what it was, and that everything is loose because he’s still growing. No fracture. Ligaments likely strained, not torn, but the doctor said he couldn’t be certain without a better look so he ordered an MRI and physical therapy. He also put Alex on a limited throwing program — ten days of nothing, then a slow build back.

We pulled him from a tournament. He missed several practices. I rescheduled his final USA Baseball tryout, the one he’d earned by outperforming hundreds of kids in a field that started with 2,000 kids and was down to 200, most of them older and bigger than Alex. Pushed it back two and a half weeks so his arm could catch up to the moment. Even then, he wasn’t 100 percent. Round 2 came and went. The arm held up enough to compete, not enough to feel normal.

Last week Alex started physical therapy — not just for the shoulder, but for his core and lower half too. A lot of what protects a young arm has nothing to do with the arm.

His physical therapist found a tender rotator cuff and explained that it’s the muscle that gets stretched the most when a pitcher rotates his arm up and back just prior to firing the baseball. She gave him a series of exercises to do every other day and said overall he’s in good shape.

She cleared him to pitch, but told him he needs extra warmup work ahead of time, and if he feels any discomfort at all, he needs to stop. His pitching coach and his coaches with CBA San Diego both said he’s not ready yet, which Elizabeth and I sure appreciated. They each said the same thing: they want to build Alex back up slowly — so he’s throwing confidently and without any pain. So no innings for him this weekend and maybe some light duty next weekend depending on how he’s feeling.

If your son is a pitcher, track his pitch counts, his innings, and don’t overlook all the other throws he makes including warm-ups. Make sure he’s getting enough rest between games, is warming up properly, staying hydrated, and recovering with protein.

All Star season is playing out right now, and some of these coaches chasing Little League glory treat the pitch count rulebook like a math puzzle instead of a medical guideline. They lean on two or three arms — kids no older than 12 — to carry a heavy load across multiple weeks. I understand the stakes. Been there. But the stakes on the other side are a fractured growth plate, a torn ligament, a surgery at 13. Those are the ones that matter the most.

Two days before Alex started physical therapy — and the day after our conversation in my truck — Alex threw a short bullpen and let it go for the first time since Cooperstown. I told his physical therapist and his coaches about it.

Brief sessions like that are the correct path, they told me, to build back confidence and see how everything feels.

Alex had been anxious since arriving home from New York, not wanting to find out the hard way his shoulder wasn’t ready. He tested it the way we talked about. Bands. Warm up throws. Then he got on the portable mound on the side of our house and slowly worked up to game speed. Nothing felt off so he kept pushing until he was at 85/90 percent. He threw from 54 feet too instead of the 50 feet kids pitch from in 12u, because his team has been playing up in 13u tournaments to get ready for the switch on Labor Day.

He said his arm felt great. I could see it. I felt it, too. My hand stung.

Five weeks earlier, and the day after we arrived home from Cooperstown, Alex and I tried playing catch. He stopped us after three throws. Shoulder hurt with every toss.

That’s when Elizabeth and I reached out to his doctor and to his coaches. Coach Jay, Alex’s hitting coach for three years, said something I wasn’t expecting: “I think it’s time we developed a structured plan for Alex, to help him recover and reach his goals.”

Not just a rehab plan. A real one. Weekly structure, strength work, nutrition, film study, hitting, fielding, pitching — the whole picture of what a kid needs to get better at this game, built around the fact that his arm needed rest.

Before I wrote a word of it, I sat down with Alex and asked him three questions. What do you want to be better at by the time 13u starts? What do you think you need to work on most? How many days a week are you willing to commit?

Alex didn’t say he wanted to play shortstop more, pitch more, or bat leadoff. He instead zeroed in the work that gets him there. First thing he said he wanted to do: strengthen his shoulder. Then: be more consistent at the plate and more efficient on the mound. First pitch strikes, make adjustments earlier. Mature answers for a kid who’d just turned 13.

His coaches got involved too. His pitching coach weighed in on what a return-to-throwing plan should look like. His travel coach reviewed everything and added his own guidance, including what to focus on and what to avoid.

I told Alex the work is on him, that I wasn’t going to ask him, encourage him, or follow up. Then I watched him do things nobody reminded him to do. More band work. More time in the garage on his core and lower half, not just the shoulder. Eating more protein and carbs without being told. Getting to bed early and on time every night. Somewhere during this recovery process, Alex connected the dots between what he eats, how he trains, the rest he gets or doesn’t get, and how his body performs.

You can’t force a 13-year-old to do any of this for longer than a week or two. It has to click on its own, come from within.

Alex isn’t perfect. What kid is?

Is he going to see this through, continue to improve, and turn weaknesses into strengths? Probably, but it might not be a linear process.

I admire the goals he’s set, how he goes about trying to reach them, and how he has started connecting what the game demands to the player he’s working toward becoming.

As for the actual plan, Coach Jay and I ended up with a document that does much more than focus on Alex’s pitching arm. It gives him language he understands — “CARBS—half the plate” — for what he is working toward. It also gives his coaches, Elizabeth, and me a shared understanding of how to help him get there without all of us pulling in different directions.

Coach Jay thought other parents could use something like it — not Alex’s plan specifically, that’s his, but the shape of it. So we built a free template, stripped of anything personal, that any parent can fill out for their own kid, covering the same ground: weekly structure, film study, nutrition, strength training, pitching, hitting, fielding. It’s free to use on your own. If you’d rather I build the whole thing with you, tailored to your kid, that’s something I do too.

“I truly believe we need to set your kids up for success, and one of the best ways to do that is to give them a plan that helps them reach their goals,” Coach Jay said in an email to the parents in his network, sharing the template with them. “The work is on them, but it's on us to show them what's possible if they're willing to work for what baseball demands of them.”

DOWNLOAD THE TEMPLATE.

If you find yourself in the car with your kid and he tells you something doesn't feel ready yet — says it out loud, the way Alex did — rather than reacting, ask a question or two.

And if he’s into it, create a plan together.

Every word of this essay was published with Alex’s consent. I asked him if there was anything he wanted changed. “No. I like it,” is all he said. Then he turned his attention to his favorite morning pastime, watching the MLB recap.

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My essays are built around the 5 Moments That Shape Young Ballplayers, from the nerves before a game to the car ride home.

From the stands, I write about those moments and what they mean for confidence, identity, and a kid’s love of the game.

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"wow I've never seen him that happy bf (before), dang, love u guys, miss u alex." —Nicky, 12, texting his family about his twin brother at Dreams Park in Cooperstown.

People have strong opinions about Cooperstown. That includes my wife, our son, his coaches, teammates, and me.

I crowdsourced for this essay, posting questions in a few Cooperstown Facebook groups. The posts caught fire immediately, but most were taken down. The arguments among parents and coaches were heated, and the admins had seen enough.

That probably tells you something.

One parent, responding to the outrage over how Dreams Park handled a 14-hour rain delay during Week 4—when only the top 32 teams out of 104 were permitted to compete for the championship—put it this way: “It’s obvious which of you care more about the plastic trophy than your kid’s health.” The parents he was arguing with felt terrible for their kids, many of whom fundraised for months and were left stranded in rain chanting, “Let us play!” in the middle of the night outside their bunkhouses.

The debate about Cooperstown — is it magical or a money grab home run derby? — isn’t really about Cooperstown. The place is special, one of those places that time sort of skipped. Beautiful, too. The green hills surrounding the fields at Dreams Park look airbrushed onto the horizon, and the big, beautiful Otsego Lake sits just beyond it all — a place where the Anheuser-Busch family established a massive lakefront hop farm more than a century ago. In June, when we were there with my son’s team, the weather was perfect and so was the lakefront cabin we rented just beyond the Busch property, still owned by the family and marked by a wrought iron gate that reads, “Aug. A. Busch.” Oh, and Cooperstown is home to the Baseball Hall of Fame.

The beauty and the history don’t mean everyone walks away happy or even wants to visit in the first place. That stems less from the experience and more from your expectations.

The parents and coaches who think the place isn’t worth visiting, because it’s too expensive and not real baseball, miss the entire point of the experience. Those who come but leave disappointed expected the best baseball tournament on the planet. The ones who leave emotional — or don’t want to leave — showed up to watch their kid finish something with his teammates, grow up a little, and smile as wide as he ever has on a baseball field. There are moments he will treasure forever. You will too if you get out of your way and let go of all the stuff too many parents bring to tournaments: the expectations, the hand-wringing, the extra pressure, the disappointment.

The Fences

The main debate about Cooperstown centers on the short fences at both parks: Dreams Park and All Star Village. Dreams is the OG, built 30 years ago, grass fields, old-school uniforms — and where my son and his team finished 5th out of 104 teams during Week 2 this summer.

Alex and some of his teammates wanted to play at All Star Village because it’s newer. They like the turf fields there, the modern uniforms, and flat-side hats. Everything at Dreams is a little different, including the knickers, pull-on jerseys, and curved hats. The rules at Dreams are old-school, too. No crocs while in uniform. No hats on backwards. “Where’s your hat?” I overheard a maintenance worker on a golf cart ask a player. “You better find it and put it on. I don’t want you to get in trouble.” Alex’s coach, Anthony Soto, has been taking teams to Dreams for years, including San Diego Stars teams and more recently with CBA San Diego. A team he coached a decade ago advanced to the Little League World Series in Williamsport, Pennsylvania. Coach Soto leans old-school, so Dreams fits the team’s culture.

The fences on all 22 fields at Dreams are 200 feet, but they’re also 8 feet tall. That height means more earned home runs but it is a hitter-friendly facility, especially with juiced travel ball bats. A tough place for pitchers. That’s intentional and mostly replicated further up the road at All Star Village (ASV).

There are 12 fields at ASV, which opened its gates 22 years ago, and the fences ringing most of the fields have similar dimensions to those at Dreams. There also are two “Green Monster” replica fields at ASV. On those two fields, the fence line is pulled in to 180 feet — shorter than most Little League fields — but the wall is raised to 20 feet thanks to chain-link fence extensions.

Our son Alex hit two dingers at Dreams, both over the centerfield fence. His hardest-hit ball of the week was a single — a line drive that crashed into the wall with a loud thud. His teammates jokingly shouted, “weight room,” and he thought the ball had died until I explained it was a laser.

Alex is in the athletic, not giant, camp. Prior to Cooperstown, he had only cleared the fence once. So when he hit his first one in Cooperstown, his mom teared up. His teammates celebrated like they had just won a tournament. His coaches slapped his hand as he touched all the bases.

“Are there things about it that make it less ‘baseballly’…yes, but so what,” said Chuck Sanders, whose son is 12 and has played once at Cooperstown and is returning to play again this summer. “Those 200-foot fences ensure a good number of kids hit home runs that they likely would never get to hit.”

Parent Bruce Wallace wrote: “Real baseball starts in high school. And the truth is that many of these kids will either not make a high school team or they may decide to stop playing soon. Let that sink in for a minute. Because that happens a lot.

“Honestly, I don’t think anyone who has decided to attend either park should expect it to be an actual regulated baseball tournament. I bet you that most of these kids will not remember a tournament from their home state, but I guarantee they will remember this week for the rest of their lives, regardless of their record in the end. Remember your money is buying family memories and the opportunity to catch a small moment in time that will be with you and them forever!”

The Facilities

I didn’t get over to ASV, which is farther from town than Dreams, but both places have their fans and their critics. Some of the old-timers I talked to at Dreams hammered ASV as only caring about the bottom line, installing turf that gets too hot and uneven sometimes.

Elizabeth and I were impressed by how well Dreams is maintained. The flower boxes and the red, white, and blue bunting give the place a Disney feel. The manicured grass fields are beautiful, and the massive wooden privacy fences that rim every field keep the kids in — and the parents out.

But there are issues. The food they serve players and coaches is mostly awful, and the snack bars and gift shop are unimpressive for a place that does so much right.

The boys play a ton of ball, too many games for 12u pitchers, especially if your team only has seven or eight arms. Not everyone sees it that way. Some parents think the games are the point — and there aren’t enough of them.

“There wasn’t enough baseball played,” one parent wrote on Facebook. “We traveled far and spent a lot of money to play baseball. Six games guaranteed over six days is sad. We get that in a two to three-day local weekend tournament. Those fields sat empty often. We went expecting a baseball-based experience. We got a horse and pony show with some baseball sprinkled in.”

Some see validity in that complaint. But it misses something Dreams Park understood when they built those green wooden privacy fences.

The kids and coaches live inside the bubble — assigned cabins, team meals, a schedule that is entirely theirs, gated entry, walled off from the rest of us. Parents get the foul line seats and not much else. No dugout access. No coaching from the fence lines. No views from behind the backstop. You sit in designated seating areas, you watch, and you cheer. For some parents, that’s the hardest part of the week. For others, it’s the best part.

“It’s time away from parents who put pressure on the kids to perform all season,” one parent wrote. “The less parental involvement the better. Sit in the stands and watch the kids play — that’s your whole job for the week. The question of whether it’s worth it should be posed to the kids, not the grown adults sitting in the stands micromanaging the teams.”

The separation is the product. The opening ceremony, the six games over four days with a chance to play more, the camp-like setting — all of it is designed to fill a week that belongs to 12-year-old boys, not their parents. The adults who leave disappointed are the ones who couldn’t get out of the way long enough to let the week be what it was supposed to be.

The ones who did — who sat in their foul line seats and let go — describe something closer to a release. One parent, watching from the stands during the week, heard another mom say something that perfectly sums up Cooperstown: “There are so many things in life that don’t live up to the hype, but this experience is everything everyone said it would be.”

A few weeks after we returned, I ran into a baseball dad at a grocery store who I hadn’t seen since Little League ended last year.

“You guys went to Cooperstown, right?” he asked.

“Yeah, it was awesome,” I said.

“It’s magical,” he said.

He was there last summer with his son. He’s not the mushy type.

‘I’ve never seen him that happy’

Yes, it costs a fortune. So much so that a lot of teams fundraise for a year. Our team did not raise any money, but it’s worth considering. The food is bad. “Mystery meat” is probably something you will hear while you’re there, and you might even get a text from a coach asking if you can bring take-out to the bunkhouse. The opening ceremony does run long. We enjoyed it and our son loved it.

We knew Alex was a match for Cooperstown our first day there, when we strolled along Main Street, stopping too often at gift shops and visiting Doubleday Field, what many call the birthplace of baseball. “He’s in heaven,” Elizabeth said to me inside Baseballism, shortly after she and Alex visited a nearby store where he tried on a 100-year-old glove. But it was the next day when the full picture emerged. We could see it and so could Alex’s twin, Nicky, who traveled with us along with our daughter Natalie.

When Elizabeth and I texted photos from the opening ceremony of Alex and his teammates to Natalie and Nicky, who were back at the cabin, Nicky texted back:

“wow I’ve never seen him that happy bf (before), dang, love u guys, miss u alex.”

When the criticisms bubble up, and they will, consider what Chuck Sanders said when he thought about his son — who played at Cooperstown once already and is going back again this summer.

“Some of these kids won’t play past 12 years old,” he wrote. “I can’t think of a better send-off for them.”

Neither can I.

This is my third Cooperstown essay. Here are the others:

Go Deeper

Some of you are dealing with issues that keep you up at night: Your kid can’t recover after an error. He doesn’t like his coach. He’s constantly checking GameChanger and comparing himself to his teammates. He wants to quit. Your relationship is suffering.

That’s what my one-on-one coaching sessions are for.

➡️ Click here to book a coaching session, email questions, order playbooks, or inquire about speaking.

In Episode 2 of our recent discussion, he shifts from parent to coach. What separates good coaches from bad ones? Brian doesn’t hesitate: the bad ones put winning ahead of development. The good ones teach life lessons thro…

Read more

“I pitched in front of 42,000 people on my Major League debut. Being a parent is a lot harder.”
— Brian Sackinsky

Read more

I’d never heard a story like it.

The dad is Brian Sackinsky — former big leaguer, and one of his son’s coaches, calling pitches from a bucket. The pitch that triggered it: 0-2, and his son grooved one to his buddy, who crushed it for a home run. Brian jumped up, hands in the air. His son glared back and threw his hands in the air. Neither backed down.

In the car, Brian gave him an earful. Then he saw what he was doing to his son — so he stopped. He apologized and asked his son if he had anything to say. The answer: “I don’t want you to come to the games anymore.”

How Brian handled that moment is as remarkable as the moment itself.

I had my own version of it. Same setup — me on a bucket, calling pitches, my son on the mound the entire game. Playoff elimination game. Tied 1-1. Bottom of the sixth. Alex had just struck out the leadoff hitter on his 82nd pitch, the most I’d ever let him throw.

My story ends differently. I’ll let the video explain why.

We shared these stories with each other for the first time on camera. It’s part of a longer interview I plan to release in two parts — but this piece was too good to sit on. It’s available to paid subscribers.

The book Brian references is The Double-Goal Coach by Jim Thompson. One of its core principles: on the car ride home, all you should say is, “I love watching you play.”

I first met Brian at an online session I hosted for baseball parents. He signed up, we connected, and eventually ended up on camera together. That’s how this started.

One more thing

Over the past 30 days, my essays, reels, and posts have been viewed more than 1.1 million times on Instagram and Facebook — all organic. Parents, coaches, umpires, and young ballplayers sharing what they’re reading and watching.

Just today, @cdp_dreamteam, arguably the coolest umpire crew on the planet, shared a reel I created promoting my most recent Cooperstown essay, “The Kids Who Stay.” Didn’t see that coming. Made my day, week, and month. 😎⚾️

Some of the comments from parents trying to get all of this right make me wish I could reach through the screen and hug people.

Thank you, all of you. More soon.

Go Deeper

Some of you are dealing with issues that keep you up at night: Your kid can’t recover after an error. He doesn’t like his coach. He’s constantly checking GameChanger and comparing himself to his teammates. He wants to quit. Your relationship is suffering.

That’s what my one-on-one coaching sessions are for.

➡️ Visit my Stan Store to book a coaching session, email questions, order playbooks, or inquire about speaking.

Book a Session

Read more

^{A quick Father’s Day note: My dad taught me to play baseball. Taught my brother too. I remember some of those days like they were yesterday — and I have great memories of us at Tigers games, and watching him play softball. A Tigers World Series game played at my parents’ wedding reception in 1968, long before TVs in restaurants and reception halls were a thing.}

^{My dad passed away a couple years ago. I think about him every day.}

^{Happy Father’s Day to him, and to all the baseball dads out there. Thank you for reading.}

^—Tony

Most kids stop playing baseball around 12 or 13.

Some leave because it stops being fun. Others leave because it gets harder — the talent around them improves, the game speeds up, and instead of grinding to keep up, they decide it’s not for them anymore.

At Cooperstown Dreams Park, where my son played this month with his 12u team, you could sometimes sense who had a longer runway. Watch how a kid warms up between innings. Watch how he jogs on and off the field. Watch how he walks back to the dugout after striking out. Some of them carry themselves a certain way — a quiet ownership, a presence. You don’t have to look hard. It’s like it’s written on their jersey. And when it’s not there, you can feel that too.

Don’t miss last week’s essay on Cooperstown ⬇

Cooperstown has become a rite of passage for a lot of 12u ballplayers. We flew across the country from San Diego to get there. The park, the history, the crowds, the six-game guarantee with the chance to play more — all of it on the biggest stage many of them have ever seen. For some, it won’t get brighter than this.

I shared a post last week on Instagram about the 10 things I took away from the experience that some parents seemed to like. One of them: enjoy the game while it’s pure and innocent, because it all changes soon.

Baseball keeps moving, especially at this stage. Fields get bigger at 13u. Bats get heavier. The talent gets better. In a lot of ways, Cooperstown is a line of demarcation. What comes next asks a different question of every kid: are you going to dig in, or are you going to walk away?

I see the same thing at the hitting facility where my son trains. You can almost tell who’s there because mom and dad want them there, and who’s there because they want to get better — because they love the grind. The ones who are locked in look locked in. Focused, intense, a little sweaty. The ones having doubts look different. Less focused, less confident. Like they can’t wait for the lesson to end.

At some point, every player runs into someone better. A lot of them run into a whole field of guys who are better. That’s when you find out who they really are.

I’ve been in that spot.

I was a star every year I played football growing up, right up until my junior year of high school just outside of Detroit. That’s when it changed. I barely saw the field that year. For the first time in my life, I wasn’t one of the guys.

I had a choice. Accept it, or do something about it.

So I talked to my coach. He didn’t sugarcoat anything. He told me exactly what I needed to do if I wanted a shot my senior year — show up every day, lift, run, watch film. Put the work in.

That summer, I did.

I was up before sunrise, driving myself to school — a Catholic high school about a half hour from my house, just around the corner from my dad’s X-ray business. There were only a handful of us there those early mornings, when it was still dark out and the grass was still damp. We’d jump rope, run laps, lift, then head out for the day. Afterward, I’d go to work in my dad’s warehouse — stocking shelves, moving boxes, delivering film, whatever needed doing. I’d come home smelling like fixer and developer, exhausted, grimy. Dinner, bed, and do it all over again the next morning.

By the time two-a-days started senior year, I was ready. I remember thinking during that first week that my hamstrings weren’t sore because I’d already done the work.

I earned a starting job. I had a good season — good enough that a handful of colleges recruited me. I didn't see that coming my junior year.

I remember how proud my dad was and how he loved watching me play that final season. I also understood something for the first time that summer heading into my senior year: if you really commit to something and put the work in, you can change outcomes. You can set goals and meet them. I was 17 back then, but those lessons have never left me.

A travel coach I know puts it plainly: the kids who stick with baseball after 12u have to start being selfish.

Not selfish like you think you’re better than everyone. Not selfish like you’re worried about who’s ahead of you on the depth chart. Selfish like you’ve decided to take ownership of your own development — and you’re going to do the work regardless of where you stand.

Because that’s when the game changes.

Before 13u, baseball is mostly about the team, the experience, playing with your buddies. The bigger, faster kids usually stand out. They make All-Stars and sit atop travel rosters. We look at that and think we’re seeing the future.

A lot of the time, we’re just seeing puberty.

Late bloomers catch up. Some kids who were dominant at 12 don’t play ball in high school. And a lot of kids who weren’t on anyone’s radar end up being the ones who stick with it the longest. They put in the work and see what it leads to.

My football coach told me that if I wanted it, I had to go get it. Take what’s mine, he said. If a starting job on a good team in a premier league in the shadows of major universities mattered to me, I couldn’t just show up. I had to earn it. Had to be selfish. Had to want it more than the next guy. Had to beat out other guys — even if some of them were good friends of mine. Nothing less would do.

That’s what being selfish really means.

It’s a different vibe than the one you feel at Cooperstown. But you can see who’s ready for it.

⚾️ The Gentlemen Who Keep Cooperstown Running

by Tony Manolatos

Talking to old-timers at Dreams Park was one of my favorite things to do in Cooperstown. The maintenance guys and umpire chiefs would roll up to games in loud golf carts. They all liked to chat.

I told several of them how impressed I was. How clean everything is. How well run. The red, white and blue bunting, the manicured flower boxes, the green hills surrounding the park, and of course the fields that look as cared for as any in the Major Leagues. You can’t help but think: this is how the game is supposed to be played.

“It looks like you opened this place 10 days ago, not 30 years ago,” I said to Dale, a tanned and scruffy maintenance worker who’d rolled up to one of our games because word had spread that our boys were crushing the ball. “It’s 20 to 1 now,” I heard someone say over Dale’s walkie talkie.

"Thank you," he said. He told me the park's late founder had acted on a vision his own father had for a place where kids could chase their baseball dreams. "We take a lot of pride in this place. I've been here 14 years, two more to go until I retire. There's nowhere I'd rather be."

Later, an opposing manager got animated with the umps over a call involving my son on the base paths. Play stopped. Both teams went to their dugouts. The umpire chief was called in, made his way to the field, huddled with the umps, and ruled in our favor.

I thanked him as he left.

“I’m going to stick around,” he said. “That manager is a bit of a hot head.”

“I’m sure you’ve seen it all,” I said.

“You have no idea,” he replied.

On the last day there weren’t many families left, so a lot of the gentlemen on golf carts were offering rides to and from the parking lot. I wanted to walk. Alex’s team was just eliminated in a tight game after making it to the Elite Eight. “You sure? It’s all uphill,” the tanned man said. We jumped in and drove silently to our rented SUV.

“Elite Eight is something to be proud of,” our driver said, recognizing our disappointment. “One hundred and four teams. Most are long gone.”

“Thank you. We appreciate you and this place. We’ll never forget this,” I said.

Go Deeper

Some of you are dealing with issues that keep you up at night: Your kid can’t recover after an error. He doesn’t like his coach. He’s constantly checking GameChanger and comparing himself to his teammates. He wants to quit. Your relationship is suffering.

That’s what my one-on-one coaching sessions are for.

➡️ Visit my Stan Store to book a coaching session, email questions, order playbooks, or inquire about speaking.

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About Baseball Dad & PR Guy

Baseball Dad & PR Guy is a weekly newsletter about youth sports culture and how parents and coaches shape the experience for young athletes.

Subscribers also get what I use after games—what to say, and what to leave unsaid on the ride home.

My essays are built around the 5 Moments That Shape Young Ballplayers, from the nerves before a game to the car ride home.

From the stands, I write about those moments and what they mean for confidence, identity, and a kid’s love of the game.

Read more about the 5 Moments and why they matter.

⚾ Join the conversation: Travel Baseball Moms & Dads(Facebook)
⚾ Follow along: Tony Manolatos – Baseball Dad & PR Guy(Facebook)

More at tonymanolatos.com

There are 22 fields here, all beautifully maintained, and you won’t find parents or fans behind a single backstop. We’re all seated down the foul lines, far from home plate. Massive green wooden fences rim every field, keeping out prying eyes and other distractions.

Even with the fences and the distance between parents and players, the scene can feel overwhelming. Baseball also brings unexpected challenges. The game can be brutal.

My son’s team played during Week 2 along with 103 other teams from across the country, including three from Hawaii. They played really well, finishing in the top 8 of the weeklong marathon.

I saw the best and worst from parents and players. There were times when Alex and his teammates looked electric and moments they had to fight through. One of those moments highlights how competitive this game can be, how quickly it can turn on a kid, and what it asks of players and parents when it does.

Cooperstown worships the game more than any other place on the planet. “Hello Baseball,” is how an older gentleman greeted me on our first day as we strolled through the parking lot of Double Day Field, considered the birthplace of baseball.

Alex looked like he does on Christmas morning during most of his time here. “I’m having so much fun,” he texted us from his team’s bunkhouse.

The magic wasn’t always there. You could see the game get too big for some boys, especially on Day 1. I saw it in my son. He looked tense. His swings weren’t smooth or strong.

No big deal, I thought. Normal, given the environment.

Day 2 brought less pressure and better baseball. Alex looked like himself again — driving balls all over the field, including one into the centerfield fence that landed with a thud you could hear around the park. He went 3-for-4 with a clutch hit with this team trailing 4-3. His intentions that day: “Be smooth. Go All Out. Try My Best.”

Day 3 was somehow better. He hit back-to-back home runs, each easily clearing the centerfield fence. He made his plays in the field. His pitching wasn’t nails but the defense behind him wasn’t as sharp as it normally is either. Regardless, the wins continued to pile up and Alex looked as happy as we had ever seen him.

His team finished pool play 5-0 — the sixth seed out of 104 teams. That meant byes on Day 1 of bracket play. We didn’t play until 9pm. Our game was pushed back nearly two hours because of rain. When I saw Alex before the game, he looked perplexed.

“They moved me down in the lineup,” he said.

“It doesn’t matter,” I told him. “Just keep raking.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Maybe they did it so I’m close to the top of the lineup.”

Things didn’t go his way, especially late with the game tied 3-3. His team won, but he was sad. Where Elizabeth and I had seen joy all week, there was now doubt and disappointment.

These are quiet but emotional moments not easily seen by anyone outside your kid’s inner circle, but if you’re in there with him — you see and feel all of it.

We knew he’d be fine. He’s a tough kid. He’d been here before, disappointed by a coach’s decision or his performance, down on himself, and then back on top. He went through it before Sectionals one year during All Stars and his hitting coach got on him. “It doesn’t matter where you play or where you bat in the order,” he barked. “This game will eat you up if you bring disappointment into it. Do your job.” Alex responded. He led his team in hitting during Sectionals.

After that rain-delayed game in Cooperstown, Elizabeth and I drove back to our cottage with Nicky and Natalie. We were anxious. The team’s next elimination game was less than 12 hours away. Would Alex bounce back by then? We knew he would likely pitch and of course be counted on to barrel some baseballs.

Seeing your kid wrestle with the brutal side of baseball hours before the final round of games — just 16 teams remained at that point — on the biggest stage he’s ever played on is tough. But taking on his disappointment would make things worse. Worrying about him is normal. Showing him is not. Our job is to be supportive and positive. Easier said than done given the long week, the heat and humidity, the cold I was battling, and the tension in the stands that grew with each victory.

“Chin up,” I said to him after that late-night game as he approached us with eyes that said he was struggling. “You’re good.”

He looked better the next morning from what we could tell during warm-ups, and he was moved up in the lineup. We reminded him to go hard, have fun, enjoy it. “This is what you’ve trained for.”

He flashed a smile and looked relaxed and confident, his old self. But the mojo from earlier in the week never fully returned.

His team won their second elimination game, advancing to the final eight before losing a heartbreaker, 9-8, to a big Texas team. Alex started on the mound that game. He left in the second inning with his team down 4-0. He had just struck out a batter before dirting a pitch and then waving his coach to the mound. His shoulder was hurting with each pitch.

I picked Alex up a couple hours later, after he and his teammates cleaned out their bunkhouse. He was fine. Quiet, but fine. He wanted to know how I thought he played.

“I think I played pretty good,” he said

Before we recapped the week I told him how proud Elizabeth and I were of him, his teammates, and his coaches. Finishing in the top 8 is a big deal, I said. Some kids on his team were sick, others were injured, but they never gave up. They had runners at the corners, down by one, when it all ended on a foul tip with Alex on deck.

His coach, Anthony Soto, fought back tears when he gathered parents and players after the final out. He told the boys he would always be available to them. Then he hugged each of them.

“Heck of a run this week by the 12u CBA Victus San Diego group in Cooperstown!” is what his travel organization said on Instagram. “Got to the Round 8 out of 104. They made the entire program proud!”

Alex and I briefly walked through his week — the defense, the clutch hits, the back-to-back home runs. We talked about his pitching, too. His off-speed stuff was working but, he said, he needed to do a better job locating his fastball, especially on fields built for hitters. Then I told him it looked like he’d carried some of his disappointment from that late-night game into the games the next morning.

“It’s okay to feel frustrated and disappointed. Those feelings are normal. You feel that way because you care. Because you’re a competitor. Because you know you’re one of the best on the field, no matter who is on the field,” I said. “But you gotta push through that. You gotta let it go and be where your feet are. This is going to happen again. You’re going to face disappointment again, and it won’t feel fair, and you’ll be mad. But you have to feel it, then flush it and get locked in.”

He was looking out the window, watching the green hills roll by — the ones that look airbrushed into the Cooperstown horizon.

“Yeah,” he said softly.

Alex was quiet that evening. Tired. Still wrestling with his emotions. The doubt and disappointment faded, but they were replaced.

“We should be playing in the championship game tonight,” he said as I tucked him in. “And I don’t get to play in Cooperstown again.”

“I’m also sad because I only have a couple more months with Coach Soto and Coach Eddie” before moving to 13u.

That’s another thing Dreams Park understands. For many 12 year olds, this is the last big youth baseball moment before they move up to new coaches, bigger fields, heavier bats, longer base paths. A lot of boys stop playing after their 12u season. It’s why Dreams Park treats these boys to an experience they’ll never forget.

Alex will be fine, but he’s still not yet where his feet are and that’s okay. If I were him, I’d relive the moments from this week for a long time, too.

We spent our last day shopping, having lunch, visiting the Hall of Fame (for the second time), and a historic farm and art museum. “I’m gonna miss this place,” Alex said at lunch. “I love it here.”

On the way to the airport, he said: “This has been a great last day. It really cheered me up.”

All of us said “Goodbye Cooperstown” as we pulled out of town, more in love with the game than before we arrived.

Go Deeper

Some of you are dealing with issues that keep you up at night: Your kid can’t recover after an error. He doesn’t like his coach. He’s constantly checking GameChanger and comparing himself to his teammates. He wants to quit. Your relationship is suffering.

That’s what my one-on-one coaching sessions are for.

➡️ Visit my Stan Store to book a coaching session, email questions, order playbooks, or inquire about speaking.

Book a Session

About Baseball Dad & PR Guy

Baseball Dad & PR Guy is a weekly newsletter about youth sports culture and how parents and coaches shape the experience for young athletes.

Subscribers also get what I use after games—what to say, and what to leave unsaid on the ride home.

My essays are built around the 5 Moments That Shape Young Ballplayers, from the nerves before a game to the car ride home.

From the stands, I write about those moments and what they mean for confidence, identity, and a kid’s love of the game.

Read more about the 5 Moments and why they matter.

⚾ Join the conversation: Travel Baseball Moms & Dads (Facebook)
⚾ Follow along: Tony Manolatos – Baseball Dad & PR Guy (Facebook)

More at tonymanolatos.com

A baseball dad who pitched for Stanford in the College World Series and in the big leagues shared two stories you won't want to miss. Brian Sackinsky told us about car rides home when he was a kid, and when his son told him he didn’t want him to come to his games anymore. He was a coach for his son’s team, but he honored his request.

Some things that came up are keeping parents up at night — kids who can’t bounce back after an error, kids obsessed with GameChanger for the wrong reason, players who don’t like their coach, kids who can play but want to walk away.

But here’s the good news: it’s all fixable.

The full session recording is now available for paid subscribers. So is my conversation with mental performance coach Dave Austin, who works with players at every level on exactly these issues.

Two sessions. Real answers.

If you’ve been thinking about upgrading to a paid subscription, now’s a good time.

Subscribe now

Speaking of paid subscribers, I’m late on this because he jumped on board early — but huge thanks to Nimer Saikaly, who was my first paid subscriber. Nimer is not a baseball dad but he is a dad and he correctly pointed out that the lessons baseball teaches transcend the ballfield. Thank you, Nimer!

Go Deeper

Some of you are dealing with issues that keep you up at night: Your kid can’t recover after an error. He doesn’t like his coach. He’s constantly checking GameChanger and comparing himself to his teammates. He wants to quit. Your relationship is suffering.

That’s what my one-on-one coaching sessions are for.

➡️ Visit my Stan Store to book a coaching session, email questions, order playbooks, or inquire about speaking.

Book a Session

Read more

One word kept showing up. Daddy Ball.

A dad in Wisconsin told me about his son — top 15 fastest kid in the state, played on a team that hadn’t lost in three years. When they walked him to avoid home runs and RBIs, he took it as a challenge and stole. Then they moved up to a new team and the dad coaches buried him in the batting order behind the slowest kid on the team. Went from shortstop and center field to the bench. Led the team in OBP, RBIs and steals anyway. Hit the team’s only home run. Hasn’t played another season since.

Then there was this from Dr. Randi Taylor-Toomay, head coach of the women’s volleyball team at the University of La Verne: “It’s not what we’re not giving them. It’s what we ARE giving them. Year round travel, no breaks, daddy ball dominates Little League and lacks development, lack of choice and time to play other sports leads to over-specialization, and finally you’ve got all the classic signs of burnout before they turn 13.”

Basketball coach Nick Aldiero from New Jersey had a different take for me and his 68k followers. “There is an overwhelming amount of parents who ruin sports for their own children as well as others. Big children — the adults — have made it about themselves. Constant pressure, sideline coaching, talking poorly about other players and coaches.”

The comments in the thread highlight the tension between parents and coaches.

So who is to blame for driving kids from the game: dad coaches or toxic parents?

In our neighborhood, like a lot of neighborhoods in Southern California, there’s a travel baseball organization that’s been around a long time. Deep community roots. Rosters are filled mostly with local kids. The little ones see the older kids in the swag — the hats, the dry fits — and want in. Entry-level travel ball at a price that doesn’t bust the budget. For a lot of families, it’s the perfect on-ramp.

The downside is almost always the same: Daddy Ball.

When you’re local and low-cost, you get volunteer coaches. And volunteer coaches are almost always dads. And dads coaching their own kids almost always creates tension. Sometimes a little. Sometimes a lot.

A few years ago, the age group my son played for had two teams — an A team and a B team, both coached by dads. Alex played on the A team. A familiar pattern emerged. The coaches’ kids tended to bat at the top of the lineup and play the premium positions. It happened enough that parents started talking about it in the stands. Kids started noticing too. Once the kids start noticing, it becomes a bigger problem.

One moment proved to be the tipping point. The manager was asked to partially fill a USA Baseball roster. You can guess what kids were selected.

We called a parent meeting with all three coaches. It went okay. Not great. Not long after, that team dissolved and the B team did too.

Looking back, I’m not sure I would do anything differently. That team proved to be a good incubator for Alex, a foundational block. He learned a lot, and nothing about baseball is perfect.

Soon after my son’s first travel ball team splintered, the director got involved. This is a man with deep roots in the community, deep roots in baseball, a guy who knows these kids and their families and has seen everything youth baseball can throw at you.

He invited several of us to his house. Sat us down in his living room and told us he was going to create something new — a national team, coached by himself and other professional coaches. Paid coaches. A couple of recent college grads who played the game. And a friend of his who had played in the minor leagues.

I don’t think anyone walked out of that room saying no.

That next season was one of Alex’s best. I’ve thought about why.

It was the coaches. The coaches liked him and he liked them. That sounds simple but it isn’t. When a kid connects with a coach — really connects — he plays differently. Looser. Faster. With more confidence.

One coach in particular, the former minor leaguer, took Alex under his wing. They joked around a lot. If Alex smoked a liner right to the center fielder, this coach — whether he was at first base or in the dugout — would holler: Stop hitting it right to people, you big dummy!

Alex loved it. That kind of thing — a coach who can make a kid laugh in the middle of a tight game — is rarer than it should be. It loosens everything up. It’s the opposite of pressure.

In Arizona about 15 months ago, at what turned out to be Alex’s last tournament with that team, there was a play at second base. One of those big bouncing ground balls you can’t sit back on. You have to charge it, field it on the move, and make the pick. If it gets by you, it looks bad. When you make it, it looks beautiful.

Alex made it. Inning over. As he came off the field one of his coaches slapped his hand and said: Attaboy! That’s how I taught you to play infield. Those two still train together. He’s Alex’s fielding coach and probably will be for the foreseeable future.

Alex moved on to a different team after that season. Left on good terms. We’re still in touch with all of those coaches.

A lot of professional travel ball organizations mention it early in that first conversation with new families: No daddy ball. No dad coaches. It’s a selling point that lands.

A lot of the kids on my son’s current team stopped playing Little League at a young age either because of Daddy Ball or because the level of play wasn't competitive enough. The expectations on his team are high and competition is constant, but there’s a lot of joy in the dugout. I can see it in how my son interacts with his teammates and coaches.

The coach who oversees all the younger teams, 9u to 12u, recently told Alex during a tournament that when he was growing up his family didn’t have much money, so before games and practices his dad would make him a bread and banana sandwich. Told Alex he should try one sometime, “and don’t be afraid to slap some peanut butter in there.”

Alex came home and told me about it. Said he wanted to try a bread and banana sandwich. I made him one. He’s been eating them ever since.

The coaches your kid plays hardest for build a bubble around their teams. It blocks the noise. It's where the relationship lives. It travels too.

The competitive parents griping in the stands and adding pressure, the dads in the dugout who play favorites and damage culture and confidence—they leave something behind too. We all do. The question is what we want that to be, and whether we even see it.

Daddy Ball coaches don’t see it, and if they do they ignore it. There’s a reason they get a bad rap. Too often they leave behind bad memories.

Great coaches leave something else behind, something more important than better footwork and tighter swings. They’re not perfect but they know how to influence, motivate, and instruct while building confidence—not tearing it down. That’s rarer than it should be.

“TONY,” a Fullerton College coach with 40 years of experience said in a comment on my reel. “We can take a game these kids love and make them hate it and not come back. Or we can teach them to be a good person, not necessarily a good player, but a good person. Most coaches are not taking the time or making the effort to see that these kids grow up to be good people, not just good ballplayers.”

###

Go Deeper

Some of you are dealing with issues that keep you up at night: Your kid can’t recover after an error. He doesn’t like his coach. He’s constantly checking GameChanger and comparing himself to his teammates. He wants to quit.

That’s what my one-on-one coaching sessions are for.

Visit my Stan Store to book a coaching session, email questions, order playbooks, or inquire about speaking.

Book a Session

About Baseball Dad & PR Guy

Baseball Dad & PR Guy is a weekly newsletter about youth sports culture and how parents and coaches shape the experience for young athletes.

Subscribers also get what I use after games—what to say, and what to leave unsaid on the ride home.

My essays are built around the 5 Moments That Shape Young Ballplayers, from the nerves before a game to the car ride home.

From the stands, I write about those moments and what they mean for confidence, identity, and a kid’s love of the game.

Read more about the 5 Moments and why they matter.

⚾ Join the conversation: Travel Baseball Moms & Dads (Facebook)
⚾ Follow along: Tony Manolatos – Baseball Dad & PR Guy (Facebook)

More at tonymanolatos.com

You all liked the reel and essay I posted last Sunday about two boys who walked away from baseball. More than 500,000 views, 3,000 likes, and 1,000 comments across Instagram and Facebook. Parents, coaches, former college and pro players, professors. Some were funny. Some were heartbreaking. Some were both. Thank you! —Tony

Don’t sweat All Stars. Seriously. It’s not a big deal.

I say that knowing it can feel like one. Some kids quit the game because they’re passed over. Friendships are lost. Lawsuits filed. Seriously. Lawsuits. Every year, I’m told, and the lion’s share right here in Southern California—the epicenter of youth baseball.

I’ve seen the good and the bad with All Stars. We lived it. Our son Alex, who aged out of Little League a year ago, was a multi-year All Star — his 10u team played for the state championship. There were moments we loved and some we'd redo. Big picture? It doesn't matter. But it doesn't always feel that way.

I mention this because Little League seasons are wrapping up and that means All Star teams are being picked, and if you spend any time in youth baseball groups on Facebook you can see the anxiety rising like a rogue wave. So before it pulls you under, read this.

Baseball Parents & Coaches: sign up for a paid annual subscription and I’ll send you a free link to join my live session on May 27th.

🟠Ramp down the game-day pressure.

🟠Protect your relationship with your kid.

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Your kid's travel ball coach — if he's legit, and Southern California has some of the best in the country — is not going to ask you about All Stars. He doesn’t care. He wants to see if your son moves with athleticism. If he plays fast and with confidence. If he has good footwork and a strong and accurate arm. If he takes good swings. If he’s coachable and understands the game. If he’s a good teammate who hustles.

That’s the evaluation. Not All Stars.

The kids who are great at 10, 11, 12 are often just winning the puberty race. The travel ball coach knows that. The All Star selection committee looks through a different lens—and it does their work behind closed doors.

If you talk to anyone in your local league about the All Star selection process here is how that conversation will go:

Can I see the vote tally? No.

Why don’t we just let the kids decide? Because they will vote someone onto the team who doesn’t belong.

Why not take the voting out of it and let the stats decide? Because some of the moms keeping score don’t know what they’re doing.

Why don’t we take some of our fees and get our volunteer scorekeepers some training so the stats are accurate? You can’t trust GameChanger.

Bottom line: the adults in charge of shaping the All Star experience aren’t giving up control.

If your kid makes the team, understand a few things going in: there’s a lot of rules for kids and parents, some written and some unwritten. The people in charge take this stuff very seriously. Not all of them but a lot of them. The system, not unlike an entrenched bureaucracy, does not welcome feedback or inquiries.

Here is what one All Star coach told me after I politely (I swear I was Mr. Positive) emailed my son’s manager and asked him to have a conversation with my son about his pitching rotation: “You’re not supposed to say anything to an All-Star coach other than, ‘Good game.’”

All of us who’ve been around Little League have an All Star story or two. Dave Austin, the mental performance coach who works with big leaguers — I interviewed him recently — told me about “Mr. Baseball” in his town, a guy who sounds familiar to a lot of us. He worked against Dave and his then 11-year-old son, the best second baseman in the league. Dave’s son didn’t make All Stars because Mr. Baseball and the other folks running the league didn’t like Dave.

Dave’s story and others like it play out every season in leagues across the country. We know better. All of us. That doesn’t mean there’s less madness or anxiety, but you don’t have to take any of it on.

Here’s what I wrote to a mom on Facebook who said she was “heartbroken for her boy” because she’d heard he wasn’t going to make All Stars:

“Try to take the long view and understand that little leagues are run by a handful of folks and very often there is not a lot of transparency or accountability. Keep in mind this will pass soon. My honest advice, unless someone has gone out of their way to hurt your kid, let it go. Good luck to you and your son!”

These are uncomfortable truths, but they’re truths:

—Power in little league is centralized. Every little league has a clique.

—Families connected to the people in power are usually happier around All Star selection day than families on the outside looking in.

—Volunteers — moms and dads — deciding who makes All Stars from a pool that includes their kid, their kid’s best friends, or your kid, aren’t going to run a clean process.

The system is not set up to go your way. That’s okay, because it honestly doesn’t matter much.

If your son is selected, enjoy it. It is fun. In the moment it feels like a big deal, and for him it is. Be proud. Celebrate. Then get ready for a long, hot, dusty, expensive summer with a lot of highs and some lows.

If he ends up on the outside looking in, try not to take on his disappointment. If you do, that’s okay, but don’t let him see your emotions. Keep things positive with him, but also don’t be afraid to talk straight if you think politics was in play. Kids get it and they appreciate knowing we do too.

Most importantly: Go get a burger. Remind him his baseball journey is long and it’s just beginning. And tell him the best part is you finally get to take that summer vacation.

###

So what do you say when your kid goes 0-for-4? Or strikes out with the game on the line? Or walks to the car knowing he didn’t have it that day?

The moment isn’t the hardest part. What happens next is. I’ve been there. And I’ve gotten it wrong.

###

Go Deeper

Some of you are dealing with issues that keep you up at night: Your kid can’t recover after an error. He doesn’t like his coach. He’s constantly checking GameChanger and comparing himself to his teammates. He wants to quit.

That’s what my one-on-one coaching sessions are for.

Visit my Stan Store to book a coaching session, email questions, order playbooks, or inquire about speaking.

Book a Session

About Baseball Dad & PR Guy

Baseball Dad & PR Guy is a weekly newsletter about youth sports culture and how parents and coaches shape the experience for young athletes.

Subscribers also get what I use after games—what to say, and what to leave unsaid on the ride home.

My essays are built around the 5 Moments That Shape Young Ballplayers, from the nerves before a game to the car ride home.

From the stands, I write about those moments and what they mean for confidence, identity, and a kid’s love of the game.

Read more about the 5 Moments and why they matter.

⚾ Join the conversation: Travel Baseball Moms & Dads (Facebook)

⚾ Follow along: Tony Manolatos – Baseball Dad & PR Guy (Facebook)

More at tonymanolatos.com