>> Is it so hard to set up a game between your kids and others?

Yes. Yes, it is actually reasonably hard to coordinate 18+ kids and thier familes (thats the minimum size for two baseball teams), have an experienced adult coach them, and hire a referee (if that is judged to be necessary), coordinate field usage, advocate for local governments to set aside sports and play space and protect existing space from development.

Now are many American youth sports leagues a bit nuts about the competitive or developmental aspects? Absolutely, and baseball is one of the worst. I really want a checkbox that says "do you want your kids to play in the major leagues some day" so I can not check that and hang out with other parents just there for fun. But coordinating sports and recreation (and ensuring space and facilities for sports and recreation exist in the first place) is not a trivial exercise and is why most local governments have an entire department set aside for it. Parks and Recreation may be a funny and absurd series, but in real life those people do real work that has real benefits.

> Yes. Yes, it is actually reasonably hard to coordinate 18+ kids and thier familes (thats the minimum size for two baseball teams), have an experienced adult coach them, and hire a referee (if that is judged to be necessary), coordinate field usage, advocate for local governments to set aside sports and play space and protect existing space from development.

How did people coordinate this before the invention of all these digital communication devices that we now find our selves so desperately dependent on like we're stuck in The Matrix?

>How did people coordinate this...

I think you might be referring to a time when kids could play unsupervised and before independence-building play was replaced with wall-to-wall no-trespassing signs and overseen by a system that makes sure each minor transgression is forever leveraged into multiple, life-harming punishments.

Sports leagues have been a thing for generations, so it's worth noting that the answer to "What did you do before all this digital stuff" isn't "kids just did their own thing" -- they still organized leagues.

(Fewer of them, to be sure.)

If I recall right, sports leagues are a thing of 20centure. It was not much of a thing before.

It may or may not qualify as "generations".

Many of the kids in little league today had grandparents and even great grandparents who did little league.

1970s: Our rural town had a little league field. Up by me was another plot of cleared land where we hillbillies would play.

The decades before this favored informal games. Afterward, league play dominated kid-ball.

Pen and paper, the way most organizing was done before the digital age. You went to a community center, signed your kids up. Can you imagine organizing 18 kids without all these devices? Little League has been around since 1939, the need for a coordinating organization isn't a recent change.

And that’s pretty much how it’s done in the LL my kid played in a few years ago. Parents show up to a local pizza place during a registration day. They bring the filled out paper enrollment form, the kid tries on some jerseys for size, and then pay the fee. Congrats, Johnny (or Jane) is signed up for LL.

I read in a history book that human beings managed to coordinate entire empires that stretched across continents with out digital electronics.

Facetiousness aside, I'm flabbergasted that I'm reading people on HN defend these kinds of abhorrent data collection and retention polices and using the difficulties of coordinating 18 people as an excuse for them.

It's like some cyber stockholm syndrome where people feel the need to make justifications for the behaviour of malevolent entities that they have wilfully shared their data with. The requests are so unbelievably intrusive that they remind me of the Ivy League nude posture photos[1]

I give it 6-24 months before we're reading a story here about a mass data leak from Little League or something equivalent like Boy Scouts of America or whatever.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivy_League_nude_posture_photos

To be clear, I’m not defending the collection of the data; that’s stupid, and is a good example why there should legislative minimum fines for data breaches and bond requirements to process certain types of data, as well as standardized privacy policies and regulation

However, the comment I was responding to was regarding the need to have any coordination at all. It’s good and right that these organizations exist, they just don’t need to collect PII as described in the article.

> I read in a history book that human beings managed to coordinate entire empires that stretched across continents with out digital electronics.

You asked specifically for little leagues. The across continents coordination is done by a.) delegating rulership to local warlords b.) keeping military power strong enough to keep those you those in check. It had massive limitation in terms of what it could achieve and has zero to do with organizing of competitions for kids.

Plus, the central power would not bother to micromanage little teams. It is our culture that finds little leagues important, not theirs.

You absolutely can find recreational leagues that are less rigorous - although for safety reasons they'll still tend to be particular about ages. Baseball is a relatively dangerous sport if there's a massive imbalance. It's important that pitch speed, bat speed, reaction times, and overall mass scale up smoothly and roughly uniformly.

The reason why it's so formalized beyond that is that travel ball at 11-12 years old is the beginning of the pipeline to the pros. There are millions of dollars of signing bonuses waiting just a few years down the line, but you don't get drafted unless you're a high school star, and you don't get to play for the high school varsity team unless you're getting the coaching from the top-tier youth leagues.

> you don't get to play for the high school varsity team unless you're getting the coaching from the top-tier youth leagues

This is pretty much the case. By age 12 or so, the local kids who have skill and interest have been identified. They are shunted out of the parks and rec leagues into travel teams and they play together up to high school. Of course there are still tryouts but if you're a freshman and unknown to the coaches, you have to be either a move-in who has been playing travel ball elsewhere, or one of the rare naturals at pitching or hitting to really get noticed at that point.

Why not cover the safety aspect with simple height and or weight ranges like boxing etc? That seems like it would work better and is much easier to check.

There is probably some risk of incentivizing kids to mess with their weight.

Yeah, weight classes in kids' sports are a terrible idea.

The only exception is in individual combat sports (wrestling or judo, for instance). In those cases, not only is it a safety issue, but the 'penalty' for failing to make weight is just that you have to compete in the next weight class up, not that you or your team are ejected from the competition.

European rowers (and I include British people here) are kind of shocked that the US has lightweight categories at high-school level. I suppose, though, that if people are chasing lucrative scholarships to college lightweight teams that might be an incentive...

* I suppose, though, that if people are chasing lucrative scholarships to college lightweight teams that might be an incentive...*

Scholarships for men's rowing largely don't exist. There are a few schools with full varsity programs, but not many.

Women's rowing, as a scholarship activity, is a largely new thing - there was a massive increase in women's rowing in the 1990s in order to comply with federal regulations. The men's football (American, not soccer) team has 85 scholarships available - rowing is an easy way to add 20+ women's scholarships.

As for lightweights in high school, I was one. If there was no lightweight program, I likely would have stuck to XC running. No way I could compete against the typical 180lb+ heavyweight at 140lbs.

Yea, height at the beginning of the season seems like the better option. Older kids might end up with a skill advantage, but it’s a team sport.

Because thats less monetizable.

> Why not just get kids together to play baseball?

You can, if everyone trusts everyone involved, and you just want some casual fun. But beyond that...

Some of the developmental/training issues have been mentioned, as well as some allusion to safety. Also related is liability; do it enough and there are going to be injuries, some of them serious. And if you haven't planned for this, it's quite easy for someone to unexpectedly end up responsible for a huge unexpected liability.

Let's be honest. Safety and liability issue is a convenient excuse and in reality, a small part of the reason.

The developmental aspect is the real reason. When you're talking about the 7/8/9 grades, the point of Little League is to get the attention of scouts for professional organizations and colleges. When you introduce millions in signing bonuses to an 18 year old or athletic scholarships, you're begging for adults to poison the well. Little League has a history of cheaters and the organization, at best, is frequently overwhelmed in dealing with them.

Little League is a very US institution, but even in places with socialized healthcare there are non-medical costs of injuries and potential liability attached to them, and anyway, while universal coverage is common outside of the US, many nations acheive it without socialized medicine.

"while universal coverage is common outside of the US, many nations acheive it without socialized medicine."

Can you expound on that further and provide some sources for future reading?

I guess it's referring to private insurance schemes like on Germany or Switzerland, which however are highly subsidized and/or regulated.

Its little league. Its literally a US institution.

I'm pretty sure non-pecuniary damages are ground for civil cases in plenty of non-US jurisdictions.

The national league organizations do a lot of good things. I would say that most importantly they have standardized coaching education, e.g. what should kids be learning at each age level. Then locally you have clubs and leagues that operate to schedule games and do all the legwork of reserving time on fields for games and practices, raising funds to pay for it, handling communication with parents, etc.

Sure if you just want to just show up at the park on Saturday afternoon to see who else is there and hit the ball around, you can do that. Without some structure and organization, it will never go beyond that.