 I know this is going to ruffle feathers. Prompt the graphics of geographical MLB draftees by state. These are observations of a paradigm shift in Travel Baseball. Generally, paradigm shifts take a while to trickle through an entire sport or industry, but some of the results from highly competitive tournaments are evident. Of course, perceptions can linger for a while and there can be a lot of people that are very ethnocentric in their beliefs that one region is superior to another.
TBR is a national website, but we would like to highlight one region-The Midwest. Baseball in the Midwest has improved exponentially in the last 4 years. There is a lot of parity in the Midwest and many of these teams are consistently going south and performing at a high level. These same teams are not by any means always dominating in the Midwest either. At any given time, there’s 5-10 teams in an age group that can compete at a high level against other Midwest teams. Some of these teams are heading south, staying in hotels, dealing with a very hot climate, and all the other distractions of going on the road- yet according to the results below, they are competing at an inordinate level compared other regions in highly competitive tournaments. It should also be noted that several of these teams have competed in TBR Tournaments, like the TBR Elite World Series specifically, and didn’t fare too well. We took a small sample of 7 of the most perceived competitive tournaments last year. There are several more very competitive tournaments, for the sake of this article we left out the TBR Elite World Series as we have Top teams from the Midwest/Mid-Atlantic regions, but the southern teams generally stay south. A few(of many) examples from 2023: 2 Midwest Teams in final 8 of 14u PG National Elite Championship 8 Midwest teams of 72 total teams 1 Midwest teams in final 4 of 16u PG National Elite Championship 25 Midwest Teams out of 120 Total Teams 3 Midwest teams in final 8 14u PBR National Championship at Lakepoint 12 Midwest Teams out of 104 total teams. 2 Midwest teams in final 8 of 15u PBR National Championship at Lakepoint 34 Midwest Teams out of 148 total teams. 2 Midwest Teams in final 8 at 16u PBR National Championship at Lakepoint 40 Midwest Teams out of 154 total teams. 2 Midwest Teams in final 4 at 17u PBR National Championship at Lakepoint 36 Midwest teams Out of 152 total Teams 1 Midwest team made championship game of the 14u Houston Super Regional NIT PG tournaments in 1 Midwest team out of 74 In this sample of highly competitive tournaments there are 824 total teams. 156 total Midwest Teams (19%). 13 Midwest teams made the final 8, Semis, or championship game. 31% of the teams that made the final 8, semis, or championship were Midwest Teams in these tournaments. That is a very large number and astonishing considering the amount(19%) of Midwest teams playing in them. Many factors could relate to this drastic increase in competitiveness. The boom of indoor facilities/training, beautiful turf complexes popping up, highly competitive tournaments, and many more variables that could be closing the gap. It is an eye-opening paradigm shift to monitor over the next few years. It can also be reiterated that as far as competition goes, TBR Tournaments match and/or exceed the quality of baseball in many of the "Perceived" top tournaments. Pound-for-pound the TBR Elite World Series is one of the top 9u-16u events in the Country every year. Comments are closed.
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