For baseball, you'd have to do a whole lot more than that. Most top baseball prospects don't go to college at all - they get signed straight out of high school. Kids are getting signed for millions of dollars at age 17 or 18, and baseball is more a skill than a sport. The stakes are ridiculously high: it's a life-changing amount of money, there are only a few spots available (compared to the number of kids who play baseball), and the skill ceiling is basically nonexistent.
Worse, it's a pipelined thing. If you're not already one of the best kids in your area by the time you get to high school, you won't get any playing time, so you won't get scouted. If you aren't one of the best kids in your area by the time you get to travel-ball age, you won't get any playing time, so you won't get the experience to be able to make the high school team. If you don't get on (or fall off of) the fast track, you have absolutely no shot.
Undrafted free agents sometimes make it to the NFL, and walk-ons at the college level aren't unheard of. You can learn basketball up to an NBA level relatively late, so long as you're one of the incredibly few people with the genetics to make that an option. But baseball is so dependent on ingrained muscle-memory and top coaching that you absolutely cannot start playing baseball at a high level late and hope to compete. And as long as there's money in it at the end of the pipe, there will be competition at the beginning of the pipe.
It used to be considered acceptable to find young boys with good voices and castrate them so their voices would never change.
At some point, society decided that we weren't going to do that any more, even though it meant that the "castrato" parts in operas could no longer be properly sung (there was near-universal agreement that the purity and power of a castrato's voice could not be matched by anything else).
Now, we're not castrating these kids, but we are sending a lot of them into adulthood with physical problems (fucked-up joints, e.g.) and a socially-impoverished childhood.
Maybe accepting a slightly-lower baseline level of professional baseball skill would be a reasonable tradeoff to avoid that?
Edit: the same holds true for gymnastics, tennis, etc., of course -- any sport that requires that level of dedication from a young child. I don't mean to drag baseball in specific.
> It used to be considered acceptable to find young boys with good voices and castrate them so their voices would never change.
> At some point, society decided that we weren't going to do that any more, even though it meant that the "castrato" parts in operas could no longer be properly sung
Well, castrating kids to preserve their high voices is out, but castrating kids is very much back in.
