justbaseball posted:PGStaff - Thank you for the kind words re/ our sons - I sincerely appreciate them.
I need to make something clear. Perfect Game is absolutely the best showcase operator out there. I give them credit for ‘discovering’ our older son on a national level. They draw bushels of scouts and their events are well run. All of that is a fact. The ONLY things we are discussing and perhaps disagreeing about are timing, age groups, who should and shouldn’t showcase and how you can manage your pitcher son better than me.
PG - I think I wrote several times in that post above that I wasn’t blaming anyone for anything and in particular I wrote that there is no way for me to tie our son’s TJ to any one thing. I also wrote that the outcomes for our sons far exceeded anything I dreamed about. I am not looking back disappointed. I am looking in the rear view mirror with more experiences under my belt and reflecting on things that I/we did (good and bad) and proposing that IMO there is/was a better way.When I read that a tremendously well respected trainer says that showcasing/playing in the Winter is probably not a good idea for young pitchers and when I tie that to what we experienced, I have to agree! And when I think of how our sons added velocity and were fresh and ready-to-go in the Spring by taking time off in the winter to finally properly train as pro ball players - I have to agree even more!!
It is clear (and I accept) that the recruiting time line is earlier now. But if your son is super talented, I say there is even more incentive to wait until you’re sure you have the right college fit and I say that there’s good reason to hold back as other parents have figured out to do - and to not be in a rush to do too much, too soon and too often.
If what you took from the article is that "showcasing/playing in the Winter is probably not a good idea," then, with the caveat that the idea is a significant period of rest whether it be Winter, Fall or (say in Iowa), Spring, there would be no controversy. I think every reasonable person would agree. That's not the contention that is at issue. It's Cressey's statement that:
"I can honestly say that in all my years of training baseball players, I’ve only seen one kid who was “discovered” at a showcase. And, frankly, it occurred in December of his junior year, so those scouts surely would have found him during high school and summer ball; it wasn’t a desperate attempt to catch someone’s eye."
This demeans what PG, PBR, Head First and others do by, 1) making a blatantly ridiculous statement and 2) seeming to make the assumption that it is the sole responsibility of these marketers of useless showcases to mandate a particular rest schedule to all young players. There's certainly no controversy that rest is important, but that's up to the parents and players. There are a lot of bars on my way home from work. It wouldn't be the liquor industry's fault if I felt pressured by their advertising to stop and have a drink at every one of them.
Cressey also - and I don't want to assume too much from his statements - seems to make the assumption that the showcase/tournament schedule is all about getting kids to pro ball and seems to ignore the fact that the vast majority of participants aren't thinking mlb. They're thinking of the next step available to them - college.