The Travel Baseball Index
The Little League World Series Championship is upon us. Once a year in late August all eyes are on South Williamsport, PA as hundreds of young boys from across the country battle it out on the diamond for a chance to face a bunch of 6’2” Chinese “12 year olds” (wink, wink) in the championship game to determine the best youth baseball players in the world… well, not really.
According to Google search trends, interest in Travel Baseball peaks every year around June. This is right around the time when youth league season ends, and dad starts wondering if Jayden should start playing travel ball. Then by July, after getting run ruled several times, the allure wears off until the next year. This cycle repeats itself every year until Jayden gets cut at middle school tryouts and decides to play soccer and Fortnite.
An estimated 2 million of the 16.7 million kids that play baseball every year are spending 26 weekends a year grinding it out on the travel tournament circuit, while mom and dad are taking out second mortgages and title loans to get Braden enough exposure to get a scholarship at a community college program.
I am kidding (sort of). But the reality is that travel ball has grown from a niche that catered to the most elite players into a multi-billion dollar industry. Parents are spending anywhere from $5,000 to $8,000 a year on their ten-year-old son and up to $10,000 to $20,000 a year for a high schooler.
There’s no shortage of economic data measuring everything from Big Macs to cardboard boxes, which had us thinking. What if there was another way to determine which states are the wealthiest, other than by gross domestic product, income, and home values?
With spending on private training and tournaments growing every year, we here at The Pamphleteer cooked up a new economic metric that highlights where the deepest pockets in the youth baseball game are in 2025: the Travel Baseball Index.
Using data from www.travelbaseballrankings.com, we have aggregated the top fifty teams from all eleven age divisions (8U-18U) into our database. The top ten states with the most nationally ranked travel baseball teams are as follows.
1) Texas
Coming in with a whopping 63 teams, the Lone Star state boasts 11% of all nationally ranked teams. All that oil and real estate cash has been flowing into more than just football it seems. Some people like to flex with cars, jewelry, and yachts but nothing says “f-you” money like dropping twenty-five grand on coach pitch tournaments. Not only does Texas boast the most number one ranked teams, but it also has the largest share of teams under 10 years old.
2) California
Despite Gavin Newsom’s best efforts to turn the Golden State into a third-world shit-hole, baseball is still alive on the West Coast. With 58 nationally ranked teams as well as the most draft picks in the 2024 MLB draft, it may seem their position is rock solid. However, looking at the data, California has the lowest number of teams under 10 years old. With the recent move of the Oakland A’s and the folding of several minor league teams across the state, combined with declining school enrollment, it appears SoCal’s dominance of baseball is in jeopardy.
3) Georgia
Coming in with 57 nationally ranked travel teams, the Peach State reigns supreme in the Southeast. Most of the teams are concentrated in the wealthy areas of East Cobb, Marietta, and down south in the middle-class haven of Warner Robbins. Perfect Game has a large presence in the state. If you plan on playing D1 baseball east of the Mississippi, then the East Cobb National Showcase is a must for you.
4) Florida
55 nationally ranked teams in the Sunshine State is quite a surprise considering that football and basketball are king here. With Florida being a top three state for small business growth, the sky is the limit. As everyone in the industry knows, there is nothing a small business owner enjoys more than pouring massive amounts of money into assembling a team of ringers to win a baseball tournament.
5) Ohio
The Buckeye State comes in next with 48 nationally ranked teams. Ohio, with Florida, lay claim to the most amount of number one ranked teams in the often-scandalous 12U division. I’m not saying Ohio teams are cheating, but I’ve seen some awfully big “almost 13-year-olds” in my time.
6) Michigan
Michigan has 46 nationally ranked teams: an underrated feat considering how much less baseball can be played in the upper Midwest due to weather compared to the South and West Coast.
7) Illinois
With 39 ranked teams, Evanston and Joliet are hotbeds for travel ball tournaments in the summer. Many Illinois teams venture out and compete in Tennessee and Georgia to bolster their national profile.
8) Indiana
A state mostly known for basketball comes in with 33 nationally ranked teams. The Hoosier state punches above its weight as it has the lowest population of any state in the top ten, with just 7 million people.
9) New Jersey
The birthplace of baseball sports 31 nationally ranked teams. Jersey leads the nation in teams ranked dead last and in the bottom quintile as well, which makes one wonder if they’re just grabbing kids off the street and throwing them out there on the diamond.
10) Maryland
The home of Cal Ripken boasts 23 nationally ranked teams.
Chasing the Perfect Game
By now, you are probably wondering why parents spend tens of thousands of dollars and 200 days a year driving their kids to training three days a week, plus all-day double and triple headers on Saturdays and Sundays. The answer is found in a recent Fox Business article about Perfect Game.
Founded in 1995 in Iowa, Perfect Game sought to provide a place for young players to get noticed. It now boasts that it is the world’s largest baseball scouting service, putting on high level showcases and tournaments in forty states across America. In 2018, Perfect Game was taken over by an investment group led by former sports industry executives Rick Thurman and Rob Ponger. The duo set about turning what was a former “great scouting organization” into what he now refers to as the” Disney experience for Baseball.”
"The dad outside having a catch with his 10-year-old had no clue what Perfect Game was, right,” Ponger told FOX Business. “PG? Never heard of it. Well, your kid's not of age yet, so you never heard of it. And that was a big issue for us ultimately, was here is this elite brand, powerful brand and so few people knew about it.”
Ponger wanted to go down in the market to the 9- to 13-year-old age group. To try and accomplish that, he wanted to build a media business, with no better time to do so than during COVID.
"I mean my 8- and 11-year-old kids think they're their own brand, right? Like they're starting YouTube channels, right? So I think you're gonna see more of that and the ability for a kid to go to a 9-, 10-, 11-, 12-year-old event," Ponger told the network.
What PG executives are saying here is that the business opportunity they saw was to take what used to be simply a means of getting to a bigger stage and transform it into the Big League show itself. Kids now want to play travel ball because that is essentially the “Big Leagues”.
If you are a parent of a child in youth sports, you have no doubt observed the status flex that comes with the phrase “My kid plays travel.” While this might be true for elite tournaments nowadays, you will find people who sign up for the lower-priced, value-oriented, local tournaments exhibiting the same mindset despite clearly not having a kid with that level of talent.
The other side of the equation here is what I like to call the Training Industrial Complex. Most of your big travel ball organizations have a training center element that serves as their main revenue source. They will set up shop and charge varying rates depending on their prestige.
They will also send out scouts to local rec leagues looking for the best athletes in an area, and in some cases, will even pay parents to put their kid on a travel team if they are talented enough. This might sound silly, but all it takes is to get one kid signed to even the smallest podunk community college or D3 program, and parents will open up the checkbook. The industry feeds off the competitiveness of sports parents.
So where do we go from here? Where will this industry be in the next 5 to 10yrs? With NIL in college approaching astronomical numbers, the natural progression would be for elite travel ball kids to start getting a piece of the action. Ponger hints at this:
"It's content. If we have the game. This kid can go tell the story. He could do like a day in my life. I went to play baseball today. I warmed up this way. After that, I watched my highlights on YouTube. This is a virtual album that follows your life right now. In theory, a kid can play in our tournaments from 9 to 18, and we could show you the entire progression."
As PG’s revenues grow into the billions and kids turn into wannabe online celebrities, it will become less about the game of baseball and more about entertainment and going viral. The reality is that by the age of 13, 70% of kids that play baseball quit and do something else. If you are a parent with a kid in baseball, or any other sport for that matter, I would encourage you to resist falling into the money trap that travel ball has become.
I have made a lot of money as a travel ball umpire over the past decade riding this wave, and I can tell you with confidence, if you really want to help your child develop athletically, have them not only play multiple recreation sports, but exercise and train with them frequently. You will be shocked by how much a kid can gain from training physically in the yard or park just once a week.
Until next time this is your ole buddy Porter signing off.