Remaking the landscape of youth baseball

Since opening 25 years ago, Perfect Game has assessed more than 1,200 players who eventually reached the major leagues, and more than 12,000 who have been drafted.Perfect Game

The floodlights were off inside Chase Field in downtown Phoenix. The roof was closed against the 107-degree heat. In the dim light, Perfect Game’s Jerry Ford made his way down Section 132 toward the third-base dugout. “Last year, we were in Tampa,” said Ford, who is the company’s founder, president and largest shareholder. “We like a dome so we don’t have to be concerned with rain.”

It was the first Monday after this year’s MLB draft. The next day would be the start of Perfect Game’s National Showcase, an event that features the top-rated high schoolers who will be eligible for baseball’s draft next June — in this case, the class of 2020. Though it bills itself as “The World’s Largest Baseball Scouting Service,” the company has made its name running events such as this one, putting aspirational major leaguers on display for college recruiters and big-league scouts, and staging tournaments for the most talented youth clubs.

The 72-year-old Ford has been to every National Showcase since he created the first one in 2001. In those early days, he and his wife, Betty — yes, Jerry and Betty Ford, just like the former president and first lady — and a few assistants did almost everything themselves. 

This year, more than 30 Perfect Game employees would be on site, running the event, filming and producing video, interviewing players for a SiriusXM radio show and selling Perfect Game merchandise on the concourse. Ford would be beside them, troubleshooting and making suggestions while watching the parade of prep pitchers and hitters across four days of simulated games. He’ll nominate which of those will be included in an even more selective event at San Diego’s Petco Park in August. “I still have the final say,” he said.

The idea of an American baseball player getting to the major leagues, or even the minors, without having played at a Perfect Game event or generating a Perfect Game profile has become almost inconceivable. Over 25 years, the company’s scouts have assessed more than 1,200 players who became major leaguers, and more than 12,000 who have been drafted. At the company’s unassuming headquarters in Marion, Iowa, just outside Cedar Rapids, an entire wall and part of another are covered with photos of many of baseball’s best players as 16- or 17-year-olds, wearing their Perfect Game gear. Mike Trout is there. So is Clayton Kershaw. And Chris Sale, Josh Donaldson, Manny Machado, D.J. LeMahieu and dozens more.

Perfect Game was created as a way to get Iowa’s high schoolers noticed by college recruiters and MLB scouts. It has grown into a $30 million annual business, and far more than a scouting service. All summer and fall, it runs tournaments for youth baseball teams and showcases for players across the country, collecting fees from parents, coaches and spectators. “We’ve seen the growth from year to year,” Ford said. “Tournaments that we started with 32 teams are now 400 teams.”

Along the way, it has helped to remake the landscape of youth baseball. While regional and a few national showcases existed when the company started, Perfect Game built an entire culture around them. As travel teams began to proliferate at the start of the 2000s, Perfect Game provided tournaments where they’d be seen by college recruiters — and championships to compete for that could be used as marketing material back home.

In those days, the most talented and ambitious young baseball players still usually participated in Little League, or similar community-based baseball organizations. “Little League has been around forever,” Ford said. “All these major leaguers have played Little League. Well, of course they did. Because that was about all there was. Now it’s not that way.”

Today, the parents of ambitious pre-teens will pay several thousand dollars for their children to play against other ambitious pre-teens on all-star and travel teams, and even fly with them around the country to attend national tournaments. “It’s sort of like being in an advanced placement class at school,” said Dave Wetmore, a Little League district administrator in Danville, Calif. “Parents love it. ‘Wow, my kid’s advanced.’” 

Perfect Game holds national all-star games and ranks America’s top 500 prospects for players as young as 13. Next year, they’ll do the same for 12-year-olds. Because that’s the upper age limit to compete in Williamsport, Pa., in the Little League World Series that starts Aug. 15, in essence they’ll be taking on Little League directly. “We just think that we can do a better job as an organization running youth baseball than what’s out there now,” Ford explained. “After watching so much of it, we actually see a need. We’ve decided to go into it in a big way. And there are big numbers there, too, from a business perspective. It makes sense.”

Perfect Game benefits from parents willing to pay to have their children play in tournaments where they can be seen by college recruiters and pro scouts.Perfect Game

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In Greenwood, Ind., last month, at the state’s Majors division tournament, Chet Waggoner Little League of South Bend did everything it could to stay close against powerful Brownsburg. But Brownsburg’s 12-year-olds were bigger and more talented. After a few innings, they started to pull away.  

Only a few years ago, Chet Waggoner was one of seven different Little Leagues in South Bend. Now there are four. “One of those has just two teams,” said Joel Coty, who coached a Majors team during the season. Participation numbers have remained steady, but only because the area from which Chet Waggoner was allowed to draw expanded as other leagues around it folded. “Talent-wise,” said Rob Piechocki, another coach, “we’re definitely not as strong.”

The state competition also has been affected. Indiana’s Little Leagues were always divided into 14 districts. That has been reduced to 10 as the number of participating leagues continues to shrink. 

Nationally, participation figures are difficult to interpret. There are more pre-teen American boys than ever — and more of them playing baseball. But in most cities and towns, a big chunk of the best players, and many of the not-so-great ones, leave Little League by age 10 to join a private team that plays in tournaments.

“You see it all the time, especially in communities where parents have been successful,” said Bernie Paul, who has held executive positions over the past decade for the Zionsville, Indiana, Little League. “They want to lay a path for their kids to be successful, too.”

These tournament games look a lot more like the big-league games kids watch on television. Unlike in Little League, leading off bases is allowed. All team members don’t necessarily have to play. For 12-year-olds, the pitcher’s mound is 50 feet from the plate, not 46. Bases are farther apart.

A 2009 Perfect Game scouting report on Christian Yelich said “he just keeps getting better.” Yelich won the 2018 NL MVP award. Perfect Game

Paul’s son played on a successful Little League All-Star team as a 9-year-old. While driving to a game, Paul overheard one boy tell the others that he was leaving Little League to play in tournaments “because the baseball was better.” The following season, all but Paul’s son were gone. If that team had stayed together, Paul believes, it would have been able to defeat Brownsburg — a southern Indiana Little League that has produced big leaguers Tucker Barnhart, Lance Lynn and Drew Storen — and advance to the state tournament. “That’s not the worst part,” Paul said. “We missed the kids, but I really missed the parents. Because half of them were coaches. Those were most of the coaches in the league.”

On the second field in Greenwood, Broad Ripple Haverford was about to play Forest Park. After players were introduced, they stood along the first- and third-base lines. Then they hustled to their dugouts. Standing at home plate, Janet King, the assistant administrator for Indiana’s Little League District 12, noticed an omission. “Players! Players! Come back,” she said. “Come back so you can shake hands!”

Mike Jones, who runs Broad Ripple’s Little League, looked on approvingly. “The focus of Little League baseball is about being good neighbors, being a good community, being good schoolmates, being good teammates,” he had said before the game. “Only a fraction of the kids are ever going to go on and play college ball, or even high school ball. Our message is, let’s keep kids in the game. Who cares if you win? Let them strike out. Let them boot the ball. Maybe the top-level of kids need to go travel, but not the second and third and fourth levels. They need to be playing in a local rec league with their friends. Having fun. And staying in the game.” 

At the same time, Broad Ripple Haverford has managed to retain a high percentage of its players by offering its own version of travel ball. The top players form teams that enter weekend tournaments outside the Little League umbrella. “We pay our own insurance, do it all ourselves,” Jones said. He reports that his showcase programs, playing as the Broad Ripple Bluehawks, are “very competitive” against the pure travel teams. 

Sending select teams to tournaments during the Little League season used to be on the long list of infractions that could get a local league sanctioned, or cost it accreditation. For years, Little League was intransigent. Things had to be done a certain way. Each of the restrictions in its so-called Green Book was the result of someone who had tried to beat the system, overstepped the bounds in pursuit of a competitive edge. Taken together, though, they created a rigid framework that frustrated league administrators who wanted to implement new ideas. 

But Little League International, the organization’s governing body, has come to understand that the near-monopoly it had has evolved into a fight for survival. “We have to adapt,” said Dan Velte, the senior director of league development. These days, Velte and his staff encourage what he calls “extraordinary activity.” If there’s an innovation a league wants to try, even if it’s against the rules, it can apply for a waiver. If that innovation turns out to work, it will be discussed at the quadrennial Little League International Congress, or at regional meetings. “We’re educating each other,” Velte said.  

Wetmore’s California District 57 is centered in Danville, on the edge of the Bay Area. It has used youth soccer programs as a model, forming rec teams, house and upper house teams, and competitive showcase teams. Every spring break, he’ll drive down to San Bernardino with 14 kids — not necessarily the best players, he stressed, but among those whose families have committed to Little League and volunteer regularly — and compete in a tournament on the same field where the state tournament is played in July. 

“They all get a uniform, they all get pins, they all get a cap,” Wetmore said. “It does a lot to market our program.” Even so, he understands that he’ll probably lose his best kids to travel teams somewhere along the way. Little League’s mandatory participation rules work against him. “Some parents don’t want their kid playing with little Dave, who’s dropping the ball every flipping time,” he said. 

In Penfield, N.Y., a Rochester suburb, the Little League is organized around Rose’s Café, known to everyone as Rosie’s — the concession stand at the middle of a 13-field complex. After each game, players get a $1 token from their manager to spend there. “They go in and ask for a ribeye sandwich and pay with five tokens,” said Greg Kamp, the league president. When families consider leaving Penfield Little League for a travel team, the prospect of not spending summer evenings hanging around at Rosie’s makes them pause. “They’re torn over their love for Little League, their love for that experience,” Kamp said. 

At one point, Penfield’s board members surveyed players about what aspects of travel ball seemed most enticing. The overwhelming answer was the coolness of the uniforms and the ancillary swag. So when Penfield started travel teams under the purview of the league, they gave them an exciting name, the Predators. Then they outfitted them like the other travel teams in the area. These days, Penfield hosts an annual select tournament that has brought in Little Leaguers from as far as Cincinnati. Until recently, none of that would have been allowed. “There was a time when trying to get a waiver or exception from Williamsport was difficult,” Kamp said. “They’ve really changed. I think they’ve adapted to the marketplace tremendously.”

Velte points to Penfield as one of Little League’s success stories. Yet with all that, its numbers also have declined. From 1,300 kids, the league dipped to 950. “It’s not the kids that are the problem,” Kamp said. “It’s the parents. They’re the ones with the vision of the college scholarship in their heads, or their kid being able to make it to the majors. If you could take the adult out of the equation, nine times out of 10 it would be OK.”

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On a 120-acre plot of what used to be farmland outside of Marion in Iowa’s Linn County, the Prospect Meadows complex opened at the end of May. Perfect Game doesn’t have an ownership stake in the facility, but it has committed to staging events there. Eight fields have been built. Eventually there will be 17.

At the same time that Brownsburg, Broad Ripple and the others were battling last month to determine which town would send its 12-year-olds to Little League’s Great Lakes Regional, some of the best 17-year-old players in the Midwest had gathered at Prospect Meadows for what Perfect Game had billed on T-shirts as the “World Wood Bat Championships.” At the quarterfinals on Sunday morning, teams with names like Force Elite 17u Red, St. Louis Prospects and Minnesota Blizzard were playing games that didn’t really mean anything, in the scheme of things, but just might get someone noticed by a recruiter. 

Cubs shortstop Javier Baez was given a 10 (out of 10) grade by PG.Perfect Game

These are players who decided (or whose parents decided) to abandon Little League for what they see as a higher level of baseball and a clearer path to play in college and ultimately the pros. Already, many rising seniors had committed to colleges. The Hitters, from southeast Wisconsin, had eight headed to Division I schools, including Louisville, Iowa and Oklahoma. The Rays, also from Wisconsin, had one shortstop committed to Arizona State and another committed to Clemson. Some of their teammates were headed to Vanderbilt, West Virginia and Coastal Carolina.  

Mitchell Alba of Franklin, Wis., who pitches for the Hitters, played Little League until he was 10, just like his older brother, Max. “When we started with Max, Little League was the only option available,” said Becky Alba, Mitchell’s mom. “Then my husband and a friend started their own travel team and coached them. They went everywhere.” The dads handed off Max to Hitters when he turned 14. Then they recreated the same kind of team for Mitchell. 

Max earned a flawless 10 rating from Perfect Game and now pitches for North Carolina. Mitchell is narrowing his choices, which include several D-I schools. That local Little League? It isn’t doing as well. “It used to be one of the biggest in the region,” Alba said. “It had more than 2,000 kids. Now there’s maybe 500.” She shrugged. “Everyone has gone to travel teams.”

Perfect Game never set out to ruin Little League. All Ford wanted to do, he said, is give prep players in Iowa the chance to get recruited by top baseball schools. For reasons that have been lost in time, Iowa’s high school baseball programs run on a different schedule than the rest of the country. Instead of the spring, they play in the summer. For the aspirational college or professional player, that poses a problem. “I could see it clear as day,” said Ford, who at the time was the baseball coach at Iowa Wesleyan. “There were exceptionally talented kids who weren’t getting recruited out of the state of Iowa.”

By 1995, he had figured out a solution. He’d gather the best kids in Iowa in a spring league. They would have occasional practices, then play weekend tournaments. “We took what had been a real difficult state to scout and turned it into the easiest state,” Ford said. Within a year, Iowans were getting scholarship offers to major schools — USC and UCLA, Texas and Baylor, Florida State and LSU. Soon Iowans started getting drafted in the third and second round, even the first. “That hadn’t been happening before,” Ford said.

The baseball part worked. “But,” Ford added, “we were going broke.” To raise money, he organized out-of-state events in the fall: one in Fort Myers, Fla., another in San Antonio. For several years, the fourth-quarter revenue from those events exceeded that of the first three quarters combined. Ford saw that he’d have to go national for the business to survive. He had worked nine years as a Minnesota Twins scout, so he had connections. And he knew how to run a tryout. “Showcases were the same thing,” he said. 

Once scouts and recruiters became convinced that the best players would be attending the Perfect Game events, they signed. “All of a sudden, you’ve got 300 teams playing there,” said Roy Clark, a former Braves scouting director. “All the best players in the country.” And once the best players knew that they’d be seen by everyone meaningful in professional baseball and college coaches too, they were eager to be included. 

In January 2002, Ford staged a showcase in Fort Myers for high school freshmen and sophomores. At that time, MLB scouts rarely followed underclassmen. Even colleges didn’t scout them. But just as he understood that parents would invariably give their kids what they believed to be the best chance for them to fulfill their aspirations, Ford realized that scouts were motivated by fear. If the Yankees and Cardinals were looking at younger players, well, the Red Sox and Cubs needed to do it too. The Fort Myers event turned out to be the largest baseball showcase held up to that time — 500 kids, ages 14-17, none of them rising seniors. Some teams sent half their scouting staffs. “After that,” Ford said, “we knew that we were going to get over the hump.” 

Jerry Ford, a former scout with the Minnesota Twins, started Perfect Game to gain exposure for Iowa high school players but soon shifted to national showcase events to put talent on display.Perfect Game

Ford doesn’t look like a prosperous businessman. He wears mesh-backed baseball caps with logos of farm machinery companies, and long-sleeve Western shirts with patch pockets. “I know baseball,” he said. “I was real good at the baseball stuff. I didn’t care about the business. I didn’t like business. I still don’t like business.” Nevertheless, he seems to have a knack for sizing up a situation and finding opportunities hidden in plain sight. 

The company became profitable in 2003. From there, its growth was slow and steady. “Half a million dollars every year,” said controller Mike Weaverling. The revenue didn’t just come from the events. The reports and rankings generated by its evaluators can be purchased on the company’s website by parents, coaches and scouts for what is now a $74.99 annual fee for the most basic package, up to $599.99. Entry fees and gate receipts from the tournaments now account for some 60% of Perfect Game’s revenue; database subscriptions and gear each contribute another 10%. The rest comes from more innovations, such as distributing Statcast-enhanced videos of the National Showcase to MLB teams this year for $20,000 each. And everything is trending upward. “We wouldn’t sell the company now for $100 million,” Ford said.

Ford isn’t stopping there. Perfect Game is expanding into workout videos that use artificial intelligence to create personalized instruction for users … and to the Dominican Republic, a baseball hotbed where scouting typically ends when a player turns 16 … and to softball, which is a decade or two behind baseball in scouting and recruiting. A new scorekeeping app will be able to sort the videos of its events and let subscribers watch only the plays that particular players were involved in. Ford, who had no formal business training — or informal training either, really — can hardly keep up, even though most of the ideas are his. “I don’t feel like I’m in over my head,” he said. “I know I’m in over my head.”

No area is growing faster than the pre-prep events. “The first few years we did 13- and 14-year-old showcases, nobody came but the agents,” Ford said. “Next thing you know, there’s 200 college coaches there. And within a year, all of college recruiting changed. That’s when 14-year-olds started signing. We were responsible for that. I don’t know if I want that to be known, but we were responsible.”

Perfect Game started to get involved with players as young as 12 about three or four years ago, Ford said. “We’d done small things before that, but we hadn’t really done a lot. Last year, we made the big jump. It will be bigger next year, and bigger the year after that.” He stressed that he never intended for Perfect Game to compete with Little League. “But if teams do want to compete against Little League, we give them a platform.”

Going young is a business decision in multiple ways. The tournaments will generate revenue, and a list of the best 500 12-year-old players in America as determined by the company’s scouts. They will also provide performance information that previously didn’t exist. “We wanted to be able to know what kids run, and what they throw,” he said. “What’s average for a 12-year-old, and what’s above average. Then we can track the information for each player over the years and see how they progress.” That data, scouting directors believe, will be valuable because it will let teams see how potential draft picks have improved — on a steady arc, or in incremental leaps, or perhaps not as much as desired.

Baseball’s growing interest in such metrics fits perfectly into Perfect Game’s approach. “The biggest asset we have,” said Weaverling, “isn’t anything monetary or a building. It’s the data we have on these kids.” 

Teams in Little League are restricted by changes they can make because of the organization’s rules.Photo provided by Bernie Paul, Zionsville (IN) Little League

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When Little League’s Velte travels, he tries to visit one of the member organizations. When he started planning a trip to Dallas last winter for a coaches convention, he immediately knew where he wanted to go. The participation numbers for Arlington Southwest Little League were among the best anywhere. What was its secret?

Starting with tykes as young as 3 and extending through high school, Arlington Southwest has grown from 250 players to more than 1,000 over the past decade. While games were once contained on two fields, now 10 are used. “When I got here,” said Brett Smith, who owns an industrial supply business and has run the league for a decade, “it was totally backward. Our customers are the parents. But they were catering to the kids.” Now staff members roam the complex with walkie-talkies, catering to every need. Golf carts shuttle elderly spectators to and from the snack bar, where everything costs $1. Every season, the league hands out $5,000 in gift cards from local merchants to random fans in the stands as a way to give back to the community. Any adult who has any interaction with a child must be wearing a badge, identifying himself and his role.

Smith’s philosophy can be summed up in an email he sent when asked about his league’s success. “This is a business,” it read. “It was not run like a business until this leadership team took over. We had rules and policies in place that benefited the board (free pictures, free practice time) and nothing was transparent. I recruited like-minded people who were also business people and I pounded this one notion into everyone’s head: These are customers. We offer a product. If the product is not very good, they will go somewhere else.” 

At times, running Little League like a business means ignoring rules and bylaws that don’t seem to make sense. Why disperse players in a draft if kids are far more likely to stay in Little League if they’re allowed to play with friends? Why not rent a beer cart and have it roam between the fields? Surprisingly, too, Smith disdains the idea of the all-star tournaments that are a measure of success for most Little Leagues. He has no interest in amassing a team good enough to get to Williamsport for the World Series. “I’ve got 1,000 kids,” he said. “Sixty-five of them made all-stars. Why in the world would I cater to the 5 percent?”  

Velte emailed Smith, asking if he could have a meeting with some board members. We don’t have meetings, Smith replied, but members try to get together over breakfast every Saturday at 6 a.m. Velte was welcome to join them. Privately, Smith wondered if Velte was coming to reprimand him, even threaten to strip his league’s certification. If so, so be it. He was certain that what he was doing was the correct way to proceed in his community. “I can’t speak for anywhere else,” he said.

Velte was expecting to see Smith and maybe a couple of others. When he arrived at the breakfast, he found 30 of the 66 board members waiting. As they discussed the league, he was astonished that the board seemed to speak with a single voice. “I just can’t believe you guys are all on the same page with how this thing is run,” he said. 

At one point, Smith explained that his leagues didn’t draft players. “We’d be putting together teams and parents that don’t want to be together,” he said.

“Well, that’s in the Green Book,” Velte said. “You have to draft.”

“Well, we don’t,” Smith responded.

“We’re rule enforcers,” Velte explained later. “And that’s never a popular position to be in anywhere in this world.” But Velte is smart enough to understand that Little League will face an existential crisis if it doesn’t evolve. By the time he left the breakfast three hours later, he had a notebook full of thoughts and suggestions to take back to Williamsport. 

Smith’s model might well be the future. He figures that Little League can’t compete with teams looking to travel to Perfect Game’s tournaments. Why try? The community entertainment it offers, a user experience rivaling a luxury hotel in its attention to service and detail, sends customers home happy. And isn’t that what any business has to do to survive?

But there’s a complication. The single biggest annual payment Little League International receives is some $7.5 million from ESPN for broadcast rights to the Little League World Series and regional tournaments. If every Little League followed Smith’s lead, not attempting to convince elite players to stay and de-emphasizing all-stars, the quality of play in Williamsport would noticeably decline. Would America care? Or do viewers merely want to see teams that represent specific towns (and even neighborhoods) compete to see which emerges as best? “That’s the crucial question that needs to be answered,” said Indiana’s Paul. “I don’t know what that answer would be.”

For his part, Ford would welcome further differentiation between Little League and Perfect Game. “I like a lot about Little League,” he said. “It’s just different than what we do.” Before he heads off to Fort Myers and Labor Day weekend’s 14u Select Festival, he’ll settle into a chair at home and catch some of this month’s Little League World Series. More than maybe anyone else, he knows that there are a whole lot of 12-year-olds who aren’t in Williamsport with more talent than the 12-year-olds who are. But to at least one viewer, that doesn’t matter. Ford isn’t interested as a scout or even as a competitor, but as a lifelong fan. 

“Of course I’ll be watching,” he said. “It’s baseball.”  

Bruce Schoenfeld is a writer in Colorado.