10/09/2026
Youth baseball has become increasingly expensive, and too often families are paying more for travel, tournaments, and exposure than for actual player development.
The Patriots are built on a different philosophy: make competitive baseball accessible, keep costs reasonable, and put kids ahead of profits.
As a nonprofit, we believe baseball should be about opportunity, development, character, and community — not how much a family can afford to spend.
Our registration fees are intentionally kept affordable, averaging around $300, and our commitment goes beyond the field. We reinvest in our community, Woodlawn Little League facilities, and the next generation of players.
We’re proud to offer competitive baseball without losing sight of what youth sports should be about.
We’re the Mount Vernon Patriots. We’re here to build better baseball players and better people.
America’s national pastime, played by generations of children up and down the economic spectrum, is increasingly a sport for rich kids.
Between 2019 and 2024, average family spending on baseball jumped more than 68%, from $660 to $1,113 annually, according to the Aspen Institute’s Project Play.
That average hides the costs that sports-focused families face. Annual club fees can reach $6,000, and the cost of traveling to tournaments can potentially double or even triple that. Youth bats go for $500 and gloves for $400.
Private pitching and hitting coaches charging up to $200 an hour have become routine for children as young as 8. Sales of backyard batting cages, at costs around $25,000, are surging.
Youth sports overall is now a $40 billion-a-year industry—with private-equity investors driving much of the growth. And Name, Image and Likeness compensation is turning the talent of younger and younger athletes into moneymaking opportunities.
In baseball, the biggest corporate player is Perfect Game, which puts on nearly 10,000 tournaments, showcases and other events a year. Perfect Game doesn’t disclose its revenue, but its lawyers wrote in a court filing two years ago that a private-equity firm valued the company at “significantly” more than $100 million.
“People see a way to make money, and they’re gonna make money,” said Perfect Game founder Jerry Ford, a former college coach who sold his majority stake in the company four years ago and now runs a charitable foundation that offers free baseball programs to low-income children.
He acknowledged that for-profit baseball “grows bigger every year…I don’t know what anybody can do about it.”
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