A new Kim Kardashian-produced reality show is called “Team Moms: Baseball,” but the dads are the stars — and the villains.
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There is a moment midway through the third episode of “Team Moms: Baseball,” a new Kim Kardashian-produced reality show, when it almost seems as if the adults will remember that they are watching children play games.
There are still scenes of absurdity — such as when one child is revealed to be failing a few of his classes, and his father’s primary concern is that the poor grades make him ineligible for practice; when another dad, ejected from a youth tournament for berating the umpire, sneaks back in, beer in hand. But surely those are extremes, played up for the television audiences. Surely at some point, someone is going to take a glance at these 13- and 14-year-old boys, all floppy hair and sweeps of eye black, and offer them a childhood.
The cast has taken a spring break trip to Sedona, Arizona, from their homes outside Phoenix, and they are preparing for a kayaking excursion. By the river, a dozen tweens crowd around equipment crates, pawing through water shoes and fastening life jackets.
Except for three, who wait to see if they will be allowed to take some time off from what their father describes as their job: playing sports, to his standards. One has a tournament that weekend, another a track meet. What if they pull a muscle paddling? What if they capsize going over a Class II rapid? They could be working out instead. Their parents deliberate.
“They want to go, bad,” the dad acknowledges to the other adults. “We don’t do this stuff because it’s always practice, sports, practice, sports.” (He says this proudly.) He finally relents: His son can kayak until lunchtime. Then they’ll go to the batting cages.
Again, the children are 13 and 14.
But then there is that moment of purity, in a confessional, when another dad scoffs.
“Let’s be real,” he says. “These aren’t million-dollar athletes signing deals and going to play professional ball. We’re on spring break. Quit running your kids like it’s a damn business, and let them have some fun.”
Yes! you think. Finally. Someone gets it.
Alas, keep watching. Sixteen minutes later, that same father openly speculates that his son is soft for not playing through pain. Throughout the show, at least two other dads do the same. At one point, a child confesses to an injury, and his father instructs him not to tell the coaches. “It’s important in bracket play that when Sal gets opportunities, he steps up and makes the most of it,” the man explains to the camera. When the boy later strikes out, his dad is waiting by the backstop — not to console him but to review video.
Even the show’s most reasonable-seeming parents respond to their son’s hip injury, a product of overuse, by shuttling him to extra pitching lessons. The boy — the only legitimate college prospect of the bunch — ends up throwing three days in a row and gets shelled.
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This is the world of “Team Moms: Baseball,” which debuted on Paramount+ last week, and it’s also the world of so many young athletes. Most of the estimated 27.3 million children playing organized sports today do not attend baseball factories such as Legendary Prep Academy (Reported sticker price: $30,900 per year for daily practices and weight training, tournaments every weekend and a barber once a week.) But just about every one of those kids probably has heard a dad berate his child after a poor performance. As youth sports become more professionalized, the emotional stakes higher with every dollar spent and mile traversed, so do the expectations placed on the participants by the people who are supposed to support them when they fall short.
Surely many of those children can relate to the car ride endured by one of these boys after he fails to come up with a pop-up at second base. (It’s neither here nor there, but it was actually the shortstop’s ball.) His father spends the drive home asking him why he failed. If I had to guess, I would say it’s because he’s 14.
The titular Team Moms are not entirely innocent. “You can go kayaking every day if you want to after you become a famous athlete making millions of dollars,” one tells her children. But they are mostly engaged in the standard reality-TV fare you might expect from a show produced by a Kardashian: a deep-dive into whether one family owns or rents their suspiciously large mansion, an argument that ends when two combatants realize they share a birthday, even the classic discussion of whether someone is “there for the right reasons.” (Presumably in this case the wrong reasons would be having fun.)
The spat about real estate provides fodder for several episodes and culminates in a cease-and-desist delivered by one mother to another at an ‘80s-themed birthday party. The women — one in a neon leotard, the other in leopard print — swear so robustly that the exchange devolves into one long beep. They eventually have to be separated.
The melee ends, appropriately for this group, with one dad hoping it doesn’t affect the kids’ “brotherhood — and their performance on the field.”
Even after all that, the kids still have a chance. During the spring break debate, they look incredulous.
“Imagine leaving in the middle of kayaking to go hit,” one says. But the camera does not linger on them. Just like their baseball careers, the show is not really about the children, or even about the moms, so the camera pans back to Dad.
“I can’t wait ’til this weekend,” the father beams after compromising on the kayaking question. “When Sal makes a Gold Glove play, and then one of the other guys makes an error, and I tell him, ‘Told you you shouldn’t have went kayaking.’”
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