Youth Baseball: Select Baseball Costs Uniformly High?

During my interview with Mark Hyman, professional journalist and blogger (Youth Sports Parents), we talked about the cost of youth sports. Mark was looking for interesting or questionable costs associated with youth sports? I told him about the uniforms that my son donned as a 10 year old baseball player.

The U10 team Nic played on had four different color hats (cardinal, blue, gold and white), two different color pants (white and grey), three different jerseys (cardinal, blue and gold), two vest options (white and grey),  and two stirrup sock options (blue and cardinal). The jerseys were worn under the vests or without the vests. All of the uniform parts were designed to work with all the others. If my math is correct, there were 144 possible combinations. This includes wearing white pants with grey vests and vice versa which you would not expect, but the team actually wore these hideous combination once or twice. The team only played 50 games that year, so I figured that 144 uniform combinations would satisfy the questionable cost category.

Grey Pants / Cardinal Jersey

White Pants / Blue Jersey

White Pants / Gold Jersey

Grey Pants / Grey Vest

White Pants / White Vest

Cardinal Hat

White Hat

Gold Hat 

Blue Hat

Blue Stirrups

Cardinal Stirrups

The Main Point

Some teams get a bit carried away with uniforms and spirit wear. This can unnecessarily drive up the cost of youth sports for parents.