I think you have to consider all experiences.
There was a lot of change in baseball in my area about the time my son hit Junior Division (13-14) in Little League. Some thought LL wasn't competitive so they went to Legion, Pony, or Cal Ripkin and one group from our league formed a USSSA travel team. The "buy in" was $7,500 per player, and while my son was offered a slot, he declined. Worked well for them because that team won the USSSA World Series. But by the time they were done for the season, the travel/food/motels added another $2,500 to the cost.
Our LL did nothing, but a neighboring league went the other way, really stressing recreational play, not competitive play. I was shocked,a few parents actually MOVED over the off season to get out of that league.
I really thing all too often the KIDS get forgotten in this. Like I posted, I have seen too many parents push their kids so the kids are burned out before they hit high school. And I sat through many youth sports medical clinics put on by Kaiser Permanente here. Their issue is with growing bodies, and they advocate kids take at least 3 months a year off from any sport to avoid injury.
I have a baseball kid, too.
If you look at the history of youth/amateur baseball, the past century has seen many "new leagues" started, all wanting to "better" the experience in one way or another.
American Legion (1926)
Little League (1939)
Babe Ruth (1951)
Cal Ripken (1982)
AAU (1983)
They can't all be wrong, can they?
And people have always complained.
From a
1957 Sports Illustrated article:
“The two basic arguments which strike at the roots of Little League pop up year after year: it puts too much competitive pressure on the children; it brings out the monster in too many parents and adult leaders.”
Like with anything else, there are good teams, and there are bad teams; good experiences and bad experiences; good people running things and not-so-good people running things. Not all teams in every league are alike, and that includes all leagues, even the ones popular today. That's why every family has to do what's best for them and their player.
I know you live in CA. I live in MA. Baseball is different in warmer/drier climates than it is in colder/wetter ones. Here in the Northeast it is not possible to play baseball year round, so experiences may be different, even though it's the same sport. Where I live, a lot of local community-based baseball programs dried up. Literally. Fields weren't maintained properly for a long time, and what little money was available was filtered towards other sports. So programs for development were almost non-existent, even though there were still some well-meaning people around trying to hold things together. But even for them, after a while, it got disheartening. (DS had one very good coach who had put in so much of his own money, he finally threw his hands up in disgust and never coached again.)
So when you have a kid who loves baseball, shows natural talent, and really wants to play, options for development may be slim. Enter the private leagues. So many people felt the same way, they banded together to start their own teams and join better leagues. Instead of uniforms held together with safety pins, there were new uniforms. Instead of playing on old, decrepid fields, fields were rented from places who had invested in good ones. There was also a big focus on development - in some ways, more than on games themselves. So sure, it doesn't cost much to play rec ball, but what do you get for that cost? As opposed to private teams, where, yes, you pay a fee, but what you get in return is a lot, including lots of development as well as games on safe fields. So people became very much invested in these teams, and it was nice, for a change.
I think when we hear and read stories of "travel teams", people have visions of "crazy sports parents" and kids being dragged around game to game with blank stares and little investment themselves in playing. That was not our experience at all. DS was there by choice. Every year we asked him if he still wanted to play, and every year he would look at us as if we were crazy for even asking. He wanted to play! And believe me, we never paid anything even remotely close to the figures you mention; not even a fraction, really. We did travel and stay in hotels and such, but for us, it was a lot of fun as a family. We visited a lot of great places in our baseball travels: Niagara Falls, Cooperstown, Gettysburg, Hershey Park, Philadelphia, the Jersey Shore, Long Island NY, to name a few, all places we likely would not have visited otherwise; plus all of New England. Now that those days are behind us, I really cherish the time we had on those trips. We also hear that people hop from team to team trying to find whatever it is they're trying to find. My DS was on just one team (from 11U-18U). It was like a family, and the relationships he made will no doubt be for life. I honestly don't think he'd be playing in college today if he hadn't joined a private league. In fact, I know a lot of kids playing in college and just about all of them played on travel teams. So that's why I say, things have changed since your kids were involved. Heck, things have changed even since my kid was involved - I see the trend for younger and younger now. (And I'll save my thoughts on that for a different post, since this is getting lengthy.
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