Remember when pushy sports parents were deserving objects of our collective scorn? When Marv Marinovich and Jim Pierce were bywords for abusive fatherhood, Sarah Palin made the overbearing hockey mom a global punchline, and grim stories of pushy parents assaulting officials, kids and one another grabbed headlines and trained a harsh spotlight on youth sports? Well, the rebrand is in full swing.
Team Moms: Baseball is a glossy new reality series premiering Thursday that aims to recast the pushy sports parent as something well worth coveting, a sexy black hat with a designer label. From the makers of Love Island (ITV America), for Hollywood’s most rapacious studio (Paramount Skydance), with none other than basketball mom Kim Kardashian attached as executive producer, the Paramount+ series follows a cluster of parents whose sons attend Legendary Prep Academy – a Scottsdale, Arizona baseball hothouse with an intense focus on cultivating diamond gems. Anyone coming to this expecting genuine insights on a $40bn industry that’s now under siege from private equity, swallowing ever larger chunks of hard-earned family budgets along the way, should know up front: this is a closer cousin to Bravo’s Real Housewives franchise than ESPN’s 30 for 30.
The title alone – a deliberate play on Teen Mom, MTV’s train-wreck young-mothers series – gives the game away. It makes abundantly clear that the focus of Team Moms’ eight hour-ish episodes isn’t the 13- and 14-year-olds chasing their field of dreams. It’s the middle-aged parents chasing vicarious glory, proximal clout and social validation.
The tone is reinforced at the start of the show, in an around-the-horn-style opening title sequence that punctuates family portraits with the kids’ heroic glove work before landing on baseball cards of the individual moms fanned out over home plate. Never mind that the moms are set up to be the fall guys for the real drama queens: the dads. The Kardashian-meets-Love Island alchemy is undeniable in the way Team Moms presents staggering opulence as wholly incidental: the luxury car fleets, the giga-mansions, the immaculate show kitchens that provide the backdrop for daily routines and gossip.
The kids move through this world as you’d expect of kids who essentially have baseball for a job, zombieing themselves from bed to a hot cup of coffee before shuffling off into the predawn for another shift at the ballpark salt mines. For inspiration, the kids only need look to the writing on the walls: Prefer pain. Die growing, pledge growth to the grave.
Upton Sinclair, eat your heart out. It’s a five-days-a-week grind before you even get to weekend games – many of which demand hours of commuting – or the additional baseball “tutoring” many of these families seek out in hopes of keeping their kids on a steady development curve or outpacing their peers. The same can hardly be said of the academic side of this equation, which doesn’t appear to take up more than a few hours of the training day if the players even have energy left to get it at all.
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