Baseball cheer exists, but it is mostly a youth, high school and college phenomenon rather than a professional one. Only a handful of professional clubs run dance or entertainment teams, and the most visible baseball performance squads today belong to independent and exhibition teams built around entertainment rather than to major league clubs. Where squads do cheer baseball and softball, the format is shaped by a sport with no clock, long gaps between action, and games that often start in daylight and finish under lights.
Who actually cheers baseball
- Youth and little league — the most common by far, usually parent-organised and informal.
- High school baseball and softball — variable by region. Softball has the stronger cheer tradition of the two, with established dugout chants.
- College — some programmes send spirit squads to baseball and softball as part of a wider athletics commitment, particularly for postseason play.
- Professional — rare. A small number of clubs run dance or entertainment teams, and the best-known baseball performance squads now belong to exhibition teams whose whole product is entertainment rather than to traditional franchises.
If you are researching this because you run a squad rather than because you are a fan, the high school and college tier is where the useful information lives.
Dugout chants are the real tradition
Softball in particular has a deep bench of call-and-response chants run from the dugout by the players themselves, not by a separate cheer squad. They are rhythmic, repetitive, often funny, and aimed at the batter or pitcher on their own team. Any squad cheering a baseball or softball game is working alongside that, not replacing it.
What that means practically: keep it short and keep it between plays. Baseball has no clock and no scheduled breaks, so the windows are innings changes and pitching changes. Long routines do not fit anywhere.
The daylight-to-darkness problem
Baseball and softball have a scheduling quirk no other sport shares to the same degree: a game that starts at 5pm in spring finishes in full darkness, and the transition happens slowly across the middle innings.
This matters for anything visual. Equipment chosen to look good at first pitch — metallic streamers, glitter, holographic film, all of which look excellent in late afternoon sun — gets progressively less effective as the light goes, and by the final innings it is doing nothing at all. Field lighting is aimed at the playing surface, not at the stands or the area down the lines where a squad stands.
It is the one sport where a squad genuinely experiences both lighting conditions in a single game, which makes it a useful test of whether equipment works on its own light or borrows someone else's.
Made by Neon Cowboys®
Light-Up LED Pom Poms
- Works at first pitch and at the final out — they make their own light
- Remote colour-changing across the whole squad
- Rechargeable, nothing trailing from the handle
- Made to order in your team colours
See also: why poms look different under floodlights and the complete pom buying guide.
Questions: info@neoncowboys.com.
