52. Little League

Summary

---

The Economics of Everyday Things – Episode 52: “Little League”

Host: Zachary Crockett
Date: June 29, 2026
Podcast Network: Freakonomics Radio Network

---

Episode Overview

This episode explores the evolution of youth baseball in America, focusing on the rise and transformation of Little League and the sprawling industry of travel baseball. Host Zachary Crockett investigates how for-profit youth sports have reshaped communities, family budgets, and childhood experiences—from the nostalgic sandlots of the past to today’s high-stakes, high-cost landscape.

---

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Little League, Then and Now

• Nostalgic Beginnings:
  RJ MacKenzie describes his simple, community-focused Little League experience in 1990s Pomona, NY, contrasting it with that of his son Nick, whose baseball commitments are now year-round and intensive.
  • Quote, RJ MacKenzie: “Little League was like the thing... It was just the focal point of the community where everybody went in the spring and you lived and died with whatever team you played on.” (00:58)
• Shift to Travel Baseball:
  Nick’s schedule involves playing seven days a week, sometimes for seven to eight hours a day, reflecting a broader shift toward travel baseball—markedly more time-consuming and expensive.

2. History and Structure of Little League

• Origins:
  Zachary narrates how youth baseball formalized post-World War I, with Little League founded in 1939 by Carl Staats in Williamsport, PA, emphasizing affordability and inclusiveness.
• Model:
  John Miller details that Little League’s ethic centers on accessibility—low fees, volunteer coaches, “everyone plays” rules, and scholarships for those unable to pay.
  • Quote, John Miller: “It’s very much that cost is not part of the equation. And this is for everybody who wants to play baseball. And it’s not going to cost a lot of money.” (05:46)
• Financial Backbone:
  The Little League World Series not only sustains the organization but boosts the local economy and leverages lucrative ESPN broadcast deals. (05:56)
• Scale:
  Little League remains the largest non-profit youth baseball league, with 2 million players globally. (04:43)

3. The For-Profit Sports Boom

• Emergence of Private Clubs:
  Competitiveness around the Little League World Series resulted in the proliferation of for-profit travel teams in the 1990s.
  • Quote, John Miller: “[Travel baseball] became a consumer product that a lot of families, especially in the suburbs, wanted.” (06:34)
• Financial Breakdown:
  • Registration can run from $1,000 to $6,000 per season, with total annual costs (travel, equipment, hotels) reaching $8,000–$20,000 for some families. (08:58–09:53)
  • Memorable moment: “Some of these good bats are $400. Most of these kids are swinging the bats for one year and then getting a new one.” — RJ MacKenzie (10:03)
• Massive Industry Growth:
  For-profit youth sports is now a $28 billion industry (up from $3.5 billion a decade ago) and heavily backed by private equity. (11:21)

4. Life in Travel Baseball

• Logistical & Emotional Toll:
  RJ describes juggling schedules between multiple teams, often relying on grandparents for carpooling and making constant arrangements with coaches. (08:26)
• Profit Margins:
  John Miller estimates travel clubs can operate with 30–40% profit margins, with minimal coach pay relative to club revenue. (10:49)
• Societal Shifts:
  Parents are willing to sacrifice vacations, take second jobs, and even delay retirement to fund their kids' sports. (11:21)

5. Recruitment and Escalating Competition

• Aggressive Recruitment:
  Top players, even as young as 11, are recruited by rival clubs, pitched directly by adult coaches.
  • Quote, John Miller: “...the coach who was 50 years old was texting this 11 year old with recruiting pitches.” (14:56)
• Consumer Mindset:
  Parents shop for clubs much like houses or cars, lured by flashy team names and promises of advancement. (15:09)

6. Commercialization & Inequality

• Expert Perspective:
  Author Linda Flanagan discusses how youth sports shifted from recreation to a hyper-competitive, adult-driven business:
  • Quote, Flanagan: “Now that youth sports focus on the commercial interests of adults rather than the human interests of the child.” (16:41)
• Path to College:
  Participation in costly travel leagues is now seen as the main gateway to college recruiting, increasing the pressure on average players and their families. (17:14)
• Socioeconomic Divide:
  • Participation is surging among wealthier families but declining in lower-income communities.
  • Private clubs are often racially homogeneous and dominated by families in high-income professions.
    • Quote, John Miller: “They’re all blonde with mullets and they have names like Jackson, Braden, Caden. … it becomes a country club sport.” (20:00)
  • The share of Black MLB players has halved since the 1990s. (20:28)

7. Erosion of Traditional Leagues

• Impact on Little League:
  As top talent leaves for travel teams, local leagues suffer from declining play quality and membership, leading to further attrition—a “baseball tax” just to play decent baseball. (18:55–19:39)
• Declining Community Sports:
  According to the Aspen Institute, 30% of parents have seen their community sports program decline, merge, or close. (19:39)

8. Attempts at Rebalancing

• Equity Initiatives:
  Some subsidized programs (e.g., MLB’s RBI, city-funded leagues) are attempting to offset high costs, with notable success in cities that eliminate fees.
  • Example: Minneapolis–St. Paul saw a 38% rise in participation after removing sports fees for three years. (21:28)
• Perspectives on Sport’s Role:
  Flanagan suggests sports should accent (not dominate) children’s lives:
  • Quote, Flanagan: “They should be like the salt of life, not the food. And it has become the food for many families.” (22:08)
  • RJ MacKenzie expresses comfort with his investment: “For me...It’s money well spent.” (22:33)

---

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• RJ MacKenzie: “It’s an everyday job on top of your regular job. Can we get him to this practice?...It’s difficult.” (08:26)
• John Miller: “It’s not hard to see how you can have profit margins of over 30 or 40%.” (11:21)
• Linda Flanagan: “It’s all about keeping them one step ahead of their peers. ... If everyone else is doing this and you’re the dummy who didn’t, then your child is left with nothing.” (17:56)
• John Miller: “Baseball doesn’t function at all if you take away the top third of the talent. ... Balls go to the backstop, there’s walkathons.” (18:55)
• Zachary Crockett: “I have fond memories of picking daisies in the outfield when I was playing Little League.” (23:17)
• Linda Flanagan: “Imagine that. Now you’d be screamed at.” (23:32)

---

Timestamps for Important Segments

• (00:46) Introduction to RJ MacKenzie and his son Nick’s contrasting experiences
• (02:23) The rise of travel baseball and its costs
• (03:25) History and ethos of Little League
• (05:56) The Little League World Series and its economic impact
• (06:34) The birth and growth of private, for-profit clubs
• (08:26, 09:09, 09:28) Family logistics and financial realities of travel ball
• (10:49) The business model and profitability of for-profit clubs
• (11:21) The $28B youth sports industry
• (14:40) Intense recruiting and parent club-shopping
• (16:34) Commercialization of youth sports – Flanagan’s research
• (17:14) College recruiting and the pressure to compete
• (19:39) Community leagues in decline
• (21:28) Public interventions to increase access
• (22:08, 22:33) Reflections on sports' role in family life

---

Tone & Style

The episode is rich in personal stories, drawing on nostalgia as well as critical economic analysis. The speakers’ tone is often wry, candid, and punctuated by humor and reflection, balancing the joy of childhood baseball with the sobering realities of its commercialization.

---

Summary Takeaways

• Little League began as an accessible, volunteer-driven way for all kids to play baseball.
• The rise of for-profit travel teams, fueled by family ambitions and college recruiting, has created a “baseball tax” and widened access gaps along socioeconomic and racial lines.
• Community leagues are struggling as costs soar and top talent migrates to high-priced clubs.
• Some cities and organizations are beginning to address barriers with public funding and subsidized programs.
• The episode ends with a question: Is the current investment in youth sports truly benefiting children and communities, or has the obsession gone “a little too far”?

---

Transcript

[RJ MacKenzie]

With my Sapphire preferred card, we took

[John Miller]

a trip to a desert Oasis, earning

[RJ MacKenzie]

five times the points on Chase Travel, two times the points on all other travel, plus $100 hotel credit.

[Shannon Maldonado]

Chase Sapphire Preferred a car that's preferred for a reason.

[Zachary Crockett]

Cards issued by JP Morgan, J's bank and a member FDIC subject to credit approval terms apply.

[Shannon Maldonado]

My name is Shannon Maldonado. I'm the founder of Yaoi, a gift shop from the lens of artists and handmade objects. I chose Shopify because when I was testing other platforms, it was definitely one of the most user friendly. It was important to me to think about where we would be in the future. All of the tools for reading your sales, like planning, invent, they're just right there on your dashboard. For anyone starting a small business, the biggest thing I can tell you is it doesn't have to be perfect. Shopify can help you build upon it. Start your free trial on shopify.com

[Narrator/Announcer]

Growing

[Zachary Crockett]

up in the early 90s, RJ MacKenzie's life revolved around baseball. And in his hometown of Pomona, New York, it was all about Little League.

[RJ MacKenzie]

Little League was like the thing that's what we all look forward to. It was just the focal point of the community where everybody went in the spring and you lived and died with whatever team you played on.

[Zachary Crockett]

For Mackenzie, Little League was pretty chill. Sometimes he pitched, sometimes he played first base or third base. Other times he just goofed off with his friends in the dugout. And for his parents, it was an affordable and convenient way to keep him busy. They'd drop him off at practice with the volunteer coach and pick him up a few hours later. Baseball became Mackenzie's lifelong passion. He went on to play in college and became a physical education teacher in a suburb outside of New York City. These days, he's focused on the baseball career of his 13 year old son, Nick.

[Linda Flanagan]

Trying to make the major leagues. That's really what I want to do.

[Zachary Crockett]

And who do you want to play ball for?

[Linda Flanagan]

The Yankees? It's very obvious.

[Zachary Crockett]

But Nick's youth baseball experience is very different from his dad's.

[Linda Flanagan]

I would say I probably play seven days a week and seven hours a day.

[RJ MacKenzie]

Yeah, on the weekends. For him it could be seven, eight hours. And then during the week it's right after school and then sometimes right after that is another game. It's like full go until mid August, like every single day. Nowadays it's kind of Little Leagues getting left in the dust and everybody's playing travel.

[Zachary Crockett]

These travel baseball teams don't just require more time they cost thousands of dollars a year and they're part of a broader shift toward for profit youth sports in America.

[John Miller]

If you're willing to pay the membership fees, they will happily take your kid. I know of owners of for profit travel baseball clubs making over $200,000 a year running essentially Little League baseball teams

[Zachary Crockett]

for the Freakonomics Radio Network. This is the economics of everyday things. I'm Zachary Crockett. Today Little League. When professional baseball became popular in America in the late 1800s, there weren't any formalized youth leagues. If you were a kid who wanted to be the next Honus Wagner or Cy Young, your best bet was to get some friends together and go to a local sandlot. That changed after the First World War.

[John Miller]

The 20s had been this time of prosperity and allowed men the leisure time they needed or wanted to coach their kids. And that's when youth baseball really came into its own.

[Zachary Crockett]

That's John Miller. He's a self described baseball nut.

[John Miller]

I played in Little League. I played in college. I played men's league semi professionally. In my 20s I worked as a scout for the Baltimore Orioles. I've done all kinds of things in baseball.

[Zachary Crockett]

Miller is also a journalist who's written about the history of youth sports. He says that a number of youth baseball clubs were formed throughout the 1920s and 30s, but one of them eventually rose above the rest.

[John Miller]

Little League was basically the one that won out.

[Zachary Crockett]

Little League was founded in 1939 in Williamsport, Pennsylvania by a lumberyard clerk named Carl Staats. He wanted to provide an affordable way for boys to get into baseball. The earliest teams were funded by sponsors like a local dairy farm and a pretzel company.

[John Miller]

Players who came of age in the 50s and 60s, almost all played Little League baseball. The classic structure in the old days was Little League, then high school and then college.

[Zachary Crockett]

Today, there are a number of nonprofit baseball leagues for kids like Pony, Babe Ruth and American Legion. But Little League is the largest of the herd, with around 2 million participants from the ages of 4 to 16. It has thousands of local chapters across every US state and in more than 80 other countries.

[John Miller]

The Little League charter is based on sportsmanship and volunteer coaches, volunteer umpires, participatory rules like you have to play every player in every game.

[Zachary Crockett]

Because the teams and games are run by volunteers, local Little League chapters don't have much overhead. Uniforms, equipment and field maintenance usually cost in the low five figures. Leagues cover those costs through grants, fundraisers and modest membership dues, usually $100 to $300 per kid per season. If a parent can't afford the dues, they get a free pass. The organization won't allow any player to be turned away for financial reasons.

[John Miller]

The ethos, I mean, it's very much that cost is not part of the equation. And this is for everybody who wants to play baseball. And it's not going to cost you a lot of money.

[Zachary Crockett]

The Little League organization also has a secret weapon to help keep this ethos alive. The Little League World Series. Regional Little League teams in the US and in other countries around the world compete in a tournament that culminates in Williamsport, Pennsylvania. The event generates an estimated $40 million a year for the local economy, and ESPN pays Little League millions more for the broadcast rights. The success of Little League has helped turn youth baseball into a ubiquitous part of American culture. And that means competition.

[John Miller]

So the impetus to have private baseball clubs, or what's euphemistically called travel baseball clubs, it really started in the 1990s and it came out of Little League. The Little League World Series was so popular and so successful that it became this cultural icon. People would watch the Little League World Series and they would dream of playing in this tournament. And all over the country you had very ambitious coaches, baseball dads, who would gear up every summer and try to advance to go to Williamsport. And then they would get knocked out in mid June or early July and have another two months of summer with nothing, no baseball to play. And so private operators started organizing tournaments and charging 2, 3, $4,000 a season and then hiring professional coaches. And that became a consumer product that a lot of families, especially in the suburbs, wanted.

[Zachary Crockett]

That includes families like the McKenzies. RJ first realized that his son Nick had talent. At around nine years old, he was throwing the ball harder and batting better than the other kids in Little League. So RJ started shopping around for a travel baseball league. And In Orange County, New York, where the McKenzies live, there was no shortage of teams to choose from.

[RJ MacKenzie]

Within an hour of my house, I would probably say there's 20, 30 teams that you can play on.

[Zachary Crockett]

Nick is now 13 and plays on two different travel baseball teams, the OC Smash and OC regulators. He also still plays in his local Little League and on a middle school team made up of the best seventh and eighth graders in the area. RJ and his wife both work full time as teachers, and getting their 5 foot 6, 105 pound slugger to all those games requires some logistical jujitsu.

[RJ MacKenzie]

Yeah, it's busy. It's an everyday job on top of your regular job. Can we get him to this practice? If we can't get him, then his grandparents pick up the slack, they'll take him. And then it's calling the coach from one team and another team and trying to hopefully work out, can we move this practice? He can't make this one. He can make this one. So it's difficult.

[Zachary Crockett]

It's also a big financial sacrifice. Little league only charges a registration fee of a few hundred dollars per season. But travel baseball is a different story.

[RJ MacKenzie]

Sometimes it could be as cheap as like $1,000 up to, you know, some of these ones are five, $6,000 just to register with the team.

[Zachary Crockett]

Registration fees usually wrap in the cost of uniforms, coaching and practice facilities. And at the higher end, teams might also cover the entry fees for tournaments, which can be hundreds of dollars each, but they don't tend to cover the cost of all the travel. To get to those tournaments, you start

[RJ MacKenzie]

adding in, you know, we're a family of four, so all four of us are going to the hotels for the weekend. You're feeding four people, you know, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, gas mileage, wear and tear on your car. I mean, you're probably looking for like an average travel team, probably somewhere in that eight to $10,000 range per season. And I have some friends that are, you know, they're up around the 15 to $20,000 range.

[Zachary Crockett]

On top of that, you've got the cost of equipment, cleats, a helmet, a travel bag, a good glove, and some very pricey bats.

[RJ MacKenzie]

You're talking, you know, some of these good bats are $400. Most of these kids are swinging the bats for one year and then getting a new one.

[Zachary Crockett]

Do you buy new bats every year?

[RJ MacKenzie]

I hate to say, but yeah, he'll get like two, three bats a year.

[Zachary Crockett]

And then Mackenzie still has to pay to watch Nick play. His tournament games often take place at privately owned sports complexes that charge five or ten dollars to get in.

[RJ MacKenzie]

Yeah, it's become a business now. I would definitely say there's a lot of profit to be made.

[Zachary Crockett]

John Miller coached a for profit team himself a few years ago in Pittsburgh. He's run the math on travel baseball leagues, and he says they're making a killing.

[John Miller]

I mean, if you run 20 teams and you charge $5,000 a season for 12 kids per team, that's $1.2 million in revenue. The coaches are paid basically minimum wage. I was paid $3,000 for a season, so 1.2 million, minus 60,000 to pay all the coaches and then minus your cost for balls and for entering these tournaments and for facilities to practice in. And it's not hard to see how you can have profit margins of over 30 or 40%.

[Zachary Crockett]

One estimate values the for profit youth sports industry at around $28 billion, up from 3.5 billion just a decade ago. The growth is largely fueled by private equity firms who are pumping hundreds of millions of dollars into sports complexes and travel clubs. There are companies like Perfect Game, which host baseball tournaments with entry fees that can top $2,000. But these costs don't seem to be driving parents away. In fact, a 2019 survey by the Harris Poll found that one in three parents take fewer vacations to fund their kids sports. One in five has considered taking on a second job or delaying retirement. Between 2021 and 2022 alone, the share of American kids playing travel sports doubled to 29%. And that's a problem for the organization that started it all.

[John Miller]

You need the best players who can kind of lead the game to make it functional. And and if you lose them, the little leagues will fall apart.

[Zachary Crockett]

That's coming up.

[Narrator/Announcer]

The Economics of Everyday Things is sponsored by Mint Mobile. Mint Mobile plans are only $15 per month. Wondering what's the catch? There isn't one. There are no gimmicks and no gotchas. Just unlimited talk, text and data, fast, reliable coverage on the nation's largest 5G network and an award winning care team that makes Mint Mobile catch. You can bring your current phone and your number, choose from 3, 6 or 12 month plans and say goodbye to a monthly bill. Ditch overpriced wireless with Mint Mobile. It's so easy. Sign up online and get three months of premium wireless service for 15 bucks a month. To get your new wireless plan for just 15 bucks a month, go to mintmobile.com economics that's mintmobile.com economics cut your wireless bill to 15 bucks a month at mintmobile.com that's it. There's no catch. $45 upfront payment required. Equivalent to $15 a month new customers on first three month plan only speeds slower above 40 gigabytes on unlimited plan. Additional taxes, fees and restrictions apply. See Mint Mobile for details.

[Discover/Mint Mobile Advertiser]

It's smart to always have a few financial goals. And a really smart one. You can set earning cash back on what you buy every day. And with Discover, you can get this. Discover automatically matches all the cash back you've earned at the end of your first year. Seriously, all of it. And we trust you to make smart decisions. After all, you listen to this show, see [e-mail] credit card.

[Linda Flanagan]

When it's time to scale your business, it's time for Shopify. Get everything you need to grow the

[Shannon Maldonado]

way you want, like all the way.

[Linda Flanagan]

Stack more sales with the best converting checkout on the planet. Track your cha chings from every channel right in one spot and turn real time reporting into big time opportunities. Take your business to a whole new level. Switch to Shopify. Start your free trial today.

[Zachary Crockett]

John Miller says that for top youth baseball travel teams, recruiting the best players can get intense.

[John Miller]

I coached four years in this private club in Pittsburgh and after the second year, my best player got recruited by another club that was bigger and had more resources. And the kid was 11 and the coach who was 50 years old was texting this 11 year old with recruiting pitches.

[Zachary Crockett]

So this is something that happens in private baseball. Like 11 year old kids just getting recruited like free agents all the time. And the parents, they shop around too.

[John Miller]

Many parents are obsessed with finding the right travel baseball club for their kid and will shop for a travel baseball club the same way they shop for a car or a nice house. Some of these private clubs have ridiculous names that try to appeal to people's sense of kind of like testosterone fueled ambition. You know, I've seen hardcore elite, that word pops up all the time. These sort of flashy brands, flashy colors, they try to create to draw in more parents and families.

[Zachary Crockett]

For the really elite players, the training can get pretty hardcore.

[John Miller]

They have velocity camps now where you can send a baseball player just to improve their velocity pitching. So you do a lot of like weighted ball training and special drills and you end up throwing 100 miles an hour and probably blowing out your elbow. I mean, that's kind of what the youth baseball landscape looks like now.

[Zachary Crockett]

But travel baseball is no longer just for highly skilled kids.

[John Miller]

Most clubs are not that discriminating. They will happily take your money. I went to a tournament last weekend and I was kind of shocked at how average, low the level was.

[Zachary Crockett]

Experts say that this trend is playing out across other youth sports too.

[Linda Flanagan]

My name is Linda Flanagan and I'm the author of Take Back the How Money and Mania are Ruining Kids Sports and why It Matters.

[Zachary Crockett]

Flanagan has researched the commercialization of youth sports and its impact on kids and their families.

[Linda Flanagan]

When I was growing up, which was quite a while ago, sports were something parents signed their kids up for to get some exercise to keep them busy. They were local, focused on fun, low cost, you know, basically recreational. Now that youth sports focus on the commercial interests of adults rather than the human interests of the child.

[Zachary Crockett]

Flanagan says there's a reason parents of average athletes are spending thousands of dollars on for profit sports leagues.

[Linda Flanagan]

What's happened is that now college recruiting takes place almost entirely through these pay to play clubs and private tournaments because they can see more kids that way. So it does in fact help them get into college. It helps them get recruited by college coaches.

[Zachary Crockett]

On its website, Perfect Game markets its tournaments as the largest amateur baseball scouting service in the world. Scouts from nearly all NCAA Division 1 teams and all 30 Major League Baseball clubs go to check out the players. Flanagan says that parents worry that their kids will get left behind if they don't compete at the highest level.

[Linda Flanagan]

Look, we're a capitalist competitive society and youth sports parents are probably more naturally competitive than other parents. And it feels like, well, you want to give your child an edge. It's all about keeping them one step ahead of their peers. It's that brutality cascade where if everyone else is doing this and you're the dummy who didn't, then your child is left with nothing.

[Zachary Crockett]

Many kids who play travel baseball tend to stay in Little League at least until they're 12 for a chance to play in the Little League World Series. But RJ MacKenzie says the talented kids who stay aren't fully invested.

[RJ MacKenzie]

Once they start getting into like 13, 14, 15, then the kids really drop off. But up to 12, you'll still see a lot of the talent stay, but they're not participating in every game. They're not living and dying with every Little League game like it used to be.

[Zachary Crockett]

Miller says this disengagement is affecting the quality of play in Little League.

[John Miller]

Baseball doesn't function at all if you take away the top third of the talent. If you don't have the strike throwers and the kids who make the basic plays, the game just falls apart. Balls go to the backstop, there's walkathons.

[Zachary Crockett]

It's very boring, which means the remaining parents start to pull their kids out.

[John Miller]

So what's happened is as the best players have left to play, travel, the leagues remaining, the level goes down and the parents realize how boring it is. And so they go looking for a league that has your basic functional baseball with strike throwers, and that's the private league or the private teams. And so they end up paying what I think it was like a baseball tax to go play baseball.

[Zachary Crockett]

According to The Aspen Institute, three of 10 parents say their kids community sports program has declined in membership, merged with another program, or closed altogether. In many cities and towns, it's becoming harder for parents to Find a baseball league they can afford.

[John Miller]

I once googled the professions of all the parents on my team and it was like four things. It was like finance or financial planning, medical stuff or medical sales, legal stuff like lawyers or construction contracting. And it was like 99% white. I think in four years I had one black player. They're all blonde with mullets and they have names like Jackson, Braden, Caden. You know, the danger is, as one former Major League baseball catcher, Charlie Moore put it to me, it becomes a country club sport.

[Zachary Crockett]

Since the rise of for profit youth baseball in the 1990s, the percentage of black players in Major League Baseball has been chopped in half to around 8%. Across the board, youth sports participation has gone up for higher income families.

[Linda Flanagan]

And then in lower income communities, there aren't the options there used to be. It's feast or famine.

[Zachary Crockett]

There are some efforts to fix these issues. Some of the for profit leagues, like Perfect Game, have their own initiatives to reduce the cost of tournament play. Major League Baseball runs an organization called Reviving Baseball in the Inner Cities, or RBI for short. It claims to cover the cost of league play and tournaments for underrepresented communities. And in many cities, there are subsidized programs that will take kids to the same tournaments the travel leagues go to for a fraction of the cost. Other communities have used public funding to revitalize existing sports leagues.

[Linda Flanagan]

States are now using more of their public dollars to underwrite youth sports organizations. We saw this in Illinois. They appropriated $10.5 million to that end. The city of Philadelphia has done the same. Minneapolis, St. Paul, they used funding to eliminate all fees for youth sports for three years. And it saw a massive increase, like a 38% increase in numbers of participation of kids.

[Zachary Crockett]

Meanwhile, some of the parents who can afford travel baseball for their kids are wondering if the sports obsession has gone a little too far.

[Linda Flanagan]

My husband's an athlete. I was a coach for 19 years. But sports aren't that important. I mean, they should be like a part of life. They should be like the salt of life, not the food. And it has become the food for many families. Parents can only see that later, like, wow, you got a little carried away.

[Zachary Crockett]

But other parents like RJ MacKenzie are willing to stick it out to see what happens.

[RJ MacKenzie]

In the beginning, I'll be honest, there was little talent. I could see that he was athletic, but he wasn't a baseball player yet. As he progressed and got older, we started to really see the talent come out. I'm not going to say he's a great player. Yet, but he's a really good player. For me. It's not about him getting a scholarship or anything like that. It's something that he shows value in and he puts in the work ethic and all that stuff. It's money well spent

[Zachary Crockett]

for the economics of everyday things. I'm Zachary Crockett. This episode was produced by me and Sarah Lilly and mixed by Jeremy Johnston. We had help from Daniel Moritz Rapson. I have fond memories of picking daisies in the outfield when I was playing Little League.

[Linda Flanagan]

Imagine that. Now you'd be screamed at.

[Zachary Crockett]

The Freakonomics Radio Network the Hidden side

[Discover/Mint Mobile Advertiser]

of Everything

[Zachary Crockett]

Hey, Fidelity, how can I remember to invest every month?

[Linda Flanagan]

With the Fidelity app, you can choose a schedule and set up recurring investments in stocks and ETFs.

[Zachary Crockett]

Huh.

[John Miller]

That sounds easier than I thought.

[Linda Flanagan]

You got this?

[John Miller]

Yeah, I do.

[Zachary Crockett]

Now, where did I put my keys? You will find them where you left them.

[RJ MacKenzie]

Investing involves risk, including risk of loss. Fidelity Brokerage Services, LLC Member NYSE SIPC

[Zachary Crockett]

who knew Walmart business could help a thriving office motivate their employees? Pamela knew. She uses Walmart business to get the assortment of items her team needs at

[John Miller]

the prices she loves.

[Zachary Crockett]

As the office manager, it's my job to make sure my team stays on top of their game. I can get the basics like cleaning supplies and paper towels, but what they really care about Snacks. And she can get everything they need when they need it. Greg loves wheat crackers. Brenda craves sour candy.

[Narrator/Announcer]

And Max.

[Zachary Crockett]

Oh boy. He needs protein bars and milk and applesauce. It's Walmart, built for your business.

[John Miller]

Who knew?

[Discover/Mint Mobile Advertiser]

It's smart to always have a few financial goals. And a really smart one. You can set earning cash back on what you buy every day. And with Discover, you can get this. Discover automatically matches all the cash back you've earned at the end of your first year. Seriously, all of it. And we trust you to make smart decisions. After all, you listen to this show. See [e-mail] creditcard.