Back in the day, (no this isn’t a “get off my lawn” post), once you got to high school age as a baseball player, you had just two choices for summer ball once the high school season was done; you’d either play Legion ball (if they were the elite of the town) or Babe Ruth (which was still pretty good baseball), and scouts would generally depend on scouting high school and Legion games and to hang out with high school coaches to figure out who the draftable talents were.<\/p>\n
No longer.<\/p>\n
These days, every kid of note hoping for a Division 1 scholarship or pro interest out of high school plays on a travel team.\u00a0 These same players also go to Showcase events throughout the\u00a0 year, either by invitation (for the best of the best) or on their own dime, where scouts can see players in a “combine” like setting and gauge their skills in a relatively controlled environment.\u00a0 More and more, the actual performance in HS is downgraded or ignored and performances in these elite events is highlighted, since the opponent skill levels are so elevated and consistent.\u00a0 This move has badly hurt Legion ball and has decimated Babe Ruth (here locally leagues have had to combine with other towns just to field enough teams to compete, and they struggle to find enough pitching to make the games competitive), but its the way of the future.<\/p>\n
When you try to track prep kids (as I’ve begun to do more and more), you constantly hear about these teams and these events.\u00a0 So I’ve finally broken down and tried to summarize them for the local area as best as I can.<\/p>\n
This is my attempt to characterize the landscape of Travel Baseball in the DC\/MD\/VA area.\u00a0 A ton of this is drawn from participation in the recent Perfect Game Wood Bat 17-U championships, so I likely am missing teams that did not participate.\u00a0 If you come across this post and i’m missing your team, please comment as such.<\/p>\n
Elite Talent Teams Mid-level Talent Teams Lower-end Talent Teams It should also be noted that the big programs (Evoshield, Stars, DirtBags, etc) fielded a number of “alternate” teams that were not as talented as their leading “varsity” team.\u00a0 Those squads, as fielded at WWBA 2015 were:<\/p>\n Showcase Guide 2015<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n So, what events are these kids playing?\u00a0 Spurred on by this excellent summer-kick off article from Jonathan Mayo<\/a>, here’s a good guide for the 2015 summer\/fall events that the upper end rising HS seniors will be participating in.\u00a0 Some of these have already passed and are listed here for completion purposes:<\/p>\n Perfectgame.org is *the* website for these kinds of things.\u00a0 At PG’s events, all the teams, with their full rosters of players with home towns and college commits, are online and viewable.\u00a0 Very good information if you’re interested in (say) one particular team’s roster of players.<\/p>\n Prep tournament guide 2015<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n This is my first cut at this data.\u00a0 I’m sure i’m missing local teams and showcases.\u00a0 Please let me know if you disagree with my characterization of the talent level of these teams (mostly taken by eyeballing the college commits to gauge the strength of the roster), if you feel i’m missing any major teams, or if you think a show-case or tourney is missing.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Back in the day, (no this isn’t a “get off my lawn” post), once you got to high school age as a baseball player, you had just two choices for summer ball once the high school season was done; you’d either play Legion ball (if they were the elite of the town) or Babe Ruth […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,2411],"tags":[1016],"class_list":["post-10949","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-draft","category-local-baseball","tag-todd-boss"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nationalsarmrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10949","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nationalsarmrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nationalsarmrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nationalsarmrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nationalsarmrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10949"}],"version-history":[{"count":29,"href":"https:\/\/nationalsarmrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10949\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12390,"href":"https:\/\/nationalsarmrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10949\/revisions\/12390"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nationalsarmrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10949"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nationalsarmrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10949"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nationalsarmrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10949"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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