Paying obscene money for bats is the LEAST of issues with tee/soft/baseball today.... #obsessivecult
What if 1/2 to 3/4 of every person in every community was at the lake with their kids, of either sex, from age 5 to 25, 5 to 6 nights per week, gone to a tournament every weekend from February till November, visited the local "casting coach" 3+ times per week, and every picture that both parents have put on Facebook for the past month solid was of those kids (again, girl or boy, small or large) holding up a fish. And every dad with a 6 year old girl or 16 year old boy has a 20 page blog conversation about casting techniques and mechanics. The mother's Facebook profile pic is her kid holding a bass. Now, would the kid having a $300 reel seem to be the most glaring issue? I rest my case.
You have a serious problem with youth ball.I've seen you post multiple times whining about this exact same thing and i dont understand it at all.If you dont wanna be involved with youth sports or get tired of seeing posts on your Facebook page about lil Jimmys homerun thats your business..delete your "friends" that you get so sick and tired of who keep posting that chit on your Facebook and move along.If us being a part of what you call an "obsessive cult" that has zero effect on you bothers you that bad then you need to take up more hobbys that keep you from worrying about what other people do.
Ha!...saying I have a serious problem with it is a massive understatement. It is the most comprehensive, all-encompassing, grossly consuming, widespread idolatry that has ever existed on the planet. Now...that better explains how I feel about it.
Next time our preacher uses some trite, harmless example of the idols in our lives during one of his sermons, I'm going to interrupt and ask for a show of hands from everyone in the room who spent more than one day this week talking about it, practicing it, buying stuff for it, going to one of the 9 different academies that have recently sprung up in our city, planned a vacation around a tournament, didn't come to church for 20 Sundays in a row last year during travel ball season, etc. You know, if we're gonna talk about inexplicably obessessive idolatry, let's just cut the crap and use an example that 400 of the 500 people in this room can relate to. Even the preacher, sir!
It's truly not a personal vendetta, but it affects me personally in that my job requires me to interact with clientele face-to-face, and literally for 9 months of the year it's just about wholly impossible to nail down any family for 30 minutes any day of the week because they're always at the ball fields. And I teach a Sunday school class of about 50 adults (ages 30-50), and I'm not fudging to say that on any Sunday during the warm months we may have 5 to 10 couples gone to tournaments. I sit before class and listen to multiple conversations about the double, triple, even quadruple headers their kids played in yesterday. What really catches my attention though is how the parents just gleam with excitement about it. I'm sorry, it's just like nothing I've ever seen. Heck, when we were kids, our parents probably didn't even come to half our games, and they were darn sure never at a practice (which we only had maybe two per week?). And my dad would've throat punched me if he thought I even had a dream about a $300 composite baseball bat???!!!...yet today we have dad's bragging and competing about who'd kid has the nicest, most expensive bat(s). Can we please stop acting like this modern day youth ball thing is normal???
