Commercialisation of sport in the US is like being hit over the head with a baseball bat

You may remember Alyssa Milano from Charmed, a long-running television show about the adventures of a trio of sister witches in San Francisco, charged with keeping evil demons and the like at bay. She might even be familiar as the 1980s child star of the Tony Danza sitcom Who’s the Boss? or the Arnold Schwarzenegger movie Commando. In these and other roles on screens big and small, Milano carved out a prosperous career as an actor over several decades, her enduring celebrity underlined by the fact she boasts 3.4 million followers on Twitter/X.

“My son’s baseball team is raising money for their Cooperstown trip,” she posted on that very platform last week, above a link to a GoFundMe page with a target of $10,000 (€9,270). “Any amount would be so greatly appreciated. You can read more about the team and make a donation here.”

The public response to the solicitation was vicious, many lambasting the multi-millionaire for seeking charity to fund her 12-year-old and his pals travelling 3,000 miles to play a tournament. Some pointed out her husband is a successful Hollywood agent so the couple can hardly be short of a few bob.

Arguably the most graphic demonstration of the anger can be gleaned by those who donated $5 just so they could do so under offensive pseudonyms like, “Doesn’t Alyssa Have Enough Money”, “Here’s $5 for the Dumb C**t saves America Fund”, “Spoiled Anti-American Begging for your money”, and “Alyssa Milano is a f**king c**t”. Charming.

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Through whatever curious amalgam of myopia and naivete, Milano appeared taken aback by the bile. Facing a barrage of negative headlines, she took to X again to point out that she has previously bought uniforms for the players and coaches, hosted birthday parties for kids on the team, and paid the monthly dues for boys who were unable to afford them, the last part speaking multitudes about everything wrong with youth sport here. Not only that, the children also did a lot of fundraising of their own through car washes, movie nights and “many other fun things”.

Proving the old adage about there being no such thing as bad publicity, or no celebrity grift the gullible hordes won’t fall for, Milano’s GoFundMe blew through its target and passed $11,000. Her reputation seems to have survived the buffeting, and everybody involved, fans and detractors alike, kind of missed the point of the entire debacle. This was not merely an actor making a fool of herself by demonstrating how removed she was from the real world; it was also one more episode hammering home that children’s sport in America is a $19.2 billion business and no longer fit for purpose.

[ Shohei Ohtani, the $700m man, is a product of brutal Japanese baseball culture that’s turning children off the game ]

During the build-up to next week’s clash between the Kansas City Chiefs and San Francisco 49ers, just about everybody in this country will be tapped up by a fundraising family member or friend desperately asking them to buy Super Bowl squares, to gamble on predicting the score in each quarter. The commercialisation of children’s games ensures that this pestering is what any parent is expected to do to underwrite a sporting kid’s continued participation at the so-called elite level. It’s a culture so dystopian that the greater the financial strain it puts them under, the better some moms and dads seem to think the son or daughter is doing.

If you can get 20 teams of 12 players each paying $2,500 a season, that is $600,000 in revenue

—  John W Miller, America magazine

It costs between $2,500 and $10,000 a year for a child to join a competitive baseball or softball (the distaff version) team. Every one of these outfits will then require huge expenditure for travelling to out-of-state tournaments and weekend stays in hotels. A lot of credit card debt. Struggling players will be advised that to improve they must get private lessons, at $150 an hour, to be paid to a money-grabbing coach within the club. The commodification of a game once played on street and sandlot by neighbourhood kids has spawned a lucrative industry and a white bread country club sport beyond the reach of most American families.

“The private baseball and softball business model relies on scaling up to as many teams as possible,” wrote John W Miller for America magazine. “If you can get 20 teams of 12 players each paying $2,500 a season, that is $600,000 in revenue. With part-time coaches making only a few thousand dollars a season, club owners can easily make several hundred thousand dollars a year… There is so much money in private youth sports companies that former Major League professionals are now investing in clubs instead of looking for jobs in professional baseball.”

A father-of-three from Chicago, Pat McGann, turned his experience of modern sports parenting into part of his stand-up comedy. Having grown up in an era when kids all shared the same wooden Louisville Slugger, he now watches his over-scheduled son play on a team where every boy swings a personalised aluminium bat worth a few hundred bucks even though they rarely manage to hit the ball.

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“Kids’ sports have been ruined by all these dads that didn’t make it,” said McGann. “They just want to teach them it’s a game, that’s what they say, so we’re playing 80 of them in 60 days. We have 80 games in the next 60 days! Some are in other states; 11-year-old kids, where are you going? You could go around the block and get your ass kicked! Why are you flying to Connecticut?”

They could go round the block. Or start a GoFundMe.