As Hall of Fame acceptance speeches go, John Smoltz’s was not terribly entertaining. He was too careful to mention each and every person who affected his life, growing up as the son of accordion teachers in Michigan, to reach any sort of real connection with the audience during a rather lengthy half-hour.
Until, that is, the last five minutes. The loudest and longest ovation Smoltz received was for the most passionate point he made near the end of his time on the podium at Cooperstown on Sunday.
It was when he tried to talk some sense into all the parents who are relentlessly driving their kids through the nonstop treadmill that is travel baseball. He was speaking of all the kids whose arms are worn out and even damaged by their mid-teens. Whose passion for the game has long since been replaced by a hollow expression, whose onetime thrill in competition has dissolved into some vague sense of duty to their parents’ commitment.
Smoltz prefaced his remarks early on when he spoke of an idyllic childhood playing all sorts of sports and games in Lansing:
“Thankfully, we didn’t grow up in Florida or warm weather where you fall prey to playing every day or all year. Two months in Michigan is long enough.”
He would take direct aim on summer baseball later on. It has completely devolved during my lifetime. And I don’t think for the better.
It once was a sport played in wonderful parentless informality. Once school ended, that was the end of adult supervision. On any normal July day like today, 10 or 12 kids assembled together by themselves, ages mixing from about 7 to 13. The rules varied depending on the turn-out. Anything other than all-time pitchers and catchers was the exception.
Often as not, Wiffle ball was the preferred choice because you could attract a bigger number of kids more easily to somebody’s backyard, just by word of mouth or bikes going by, than you could organize a group to the diamond at the school.
Our favorite was Ed Thibodeaux’s yard because it included a fenced pen for their small dog that functioned as a short porch in right field, an enticement for the more ambidextrous to bat lefty and try for the cheap homer.
And once in a great while, somebody would hit it over the house, a momentous occurrence like jacking one over the roof at Tiger Stadium or onto the freeway at Crosley Field. It didn’t happen often but when it did, it was the talk of the neighborhood for days.
That sort of kid-run game is just about extinct in a lot of places. That’s because travel leagues have come to dominate the summers of even for grade-schoolers. Rather than run around among themselves, mixing basketball, touch football, games of Manhunt and afternoons inventing dives into the creek off a rope swing, kids as young as 7 are herded into travel baseball tournaments for entire weekends.
Parents are in charge of everything. There are uniforms, brackets, multiple locations for each tournament. It’s insanity.
The clear carrot hanging from the travel league stick for many parents is the promise of a college scholarship. Which is, of course, in these times of spiraling tuition costs, no small reward. But so few kids are good enough to play at the college level. And those who are many times end up at schools where a meaningful degree is a secondary consideration.
The nuttiest part of the travel-league merry-go-round is how it drains not just the fun out of play but the life out of arms. Physical injury is occurring.
Smoltz is the first Hall of Fame inductee to enter after having Tommy John surgery on his pitching arm. He clearly felt a responsibility to guide parents, those who would point to his lengthened career after a surgery at 34, as some sort of indicator of a sensible path for their sons. So much so that he chose to say this at the climax of his speech:
“It’s an epidemic. It’s something that is affecting our game. It’s something I thought would cost me my career. But, thanks to Dr. James Andrews and all those before him, performing the surgery with such precision, it’s caused it to be almost a false read – like a Band-Aid you put on your arm.”
And it’s not, Smoltz emphasized. It’s an avenue for veteran professionals as a last resort, not a preemptive procedure for the arms of stressed-out teenagers:
“I want to encourage all the families and parents out there to understand that this is not normal to have a surgery at 14 and 15 years old. That you have time. That baseball’s not a year-round sport. That you have an opportunity to be athletic and play other sports.”
He then went on to fire a shot at the moneymakers dangling empty promises:
“Don’t let the institutions that are out there running before you, guaranteeing scholarship dollars and signing bonuses, that this is the way. We have such great dynamic arms in our game that it’s a shame that we’re having one and two and three Tommy John recipients.
“I want to encourage you, if nothing else, to know that your children’s passion to play baseball is something that they can do without a competitive pitch. Every throw a kid makes today is a competitive pitch. They don’t just go outside. They don’t have fun. They’re out there competing and maxing out too hard too early and that’s why we’re having these problems. Please, take care of those great future arms.”
At this point, nearly everyone in the Cooperstown crowd applauded. Some stood.
You’d believe nearly everyone clapping was old enough to remember a different time and a different way. Before long, there may be nobody left who even knows what he’s talking about.
I wasn’t just making up that part about the rope swing and the creek from some Stand By Me imagination. My own son, now 16, spent countless hours with his friends climbing a sturdy old tree on the bank of Brandywine Creek via 1-by-4 steps someone had pounded into the trunk. They’d then dangle out a knotted marine rope hanging from a branch. They dove and jumped into the creek from every conceivable angle, back flips, gainers, belly flops.
Last summer, a county maintenance crew, surely alerted by some helicopter parent, identified the rope swing as a safety hazard. It was cut down. And then, so were the branches hanging over the creek.
You see, activities supervised by adults are so much healthier.
