OT: John Smoltz Warns Parents of Young Baseball Players

[Goose85]

Crazy the numbers on young kids having Tommy John surgery. More than half of the Tommy John surgeries are on 15 to 19 year old kids, and increasing at 10% per year.

Encourages kids to play multiple sports, and throw more in non competition events.
Interesting read.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/john-smoltz-tommy-john-hall-of-fame_55b62cace4b0a13f9d18fdd3?

[IWB]

Crazy crazy parents out there, especially in baseball. Overheard this one this year.

Random parent: "How's little Billy doing?"
Psycho Parent: "He's on tylenol and ibuprofen, he's pretty sore so I'm gonna make him take it easy this weekend."
Random parent: "Good idea."
Psycho Parent: "Yeah, I'm going to limit him to 100 pitches."

Yeah, kid is so sore he's on meds, so he'll hold him to 100 pitches.

And the best part? Kid is only 10 years old.

[eastly]

Couldn't agree more -- obnoxious behavior seems to be particularly prevalent in parents of sponsored club teams made up of hired guns. Last weekend, my son played in a U14 tournament for our town's travel team. One mother's son was so upset b/c her son was subbed out of the game that she yelled from the stands to their coach, "Why don't you take so and so out of the game instead? He's the one who's been making all the errors." A father apparently had an issue with telephone polls; after a bad play he used one as a punching bag. Sadly, their bad behavior was rewarded when they won. You'd have thought it was the 7th game of the WS, by the way they reacted.