MLB to Small Town America: Drop Dead

Why the hell would college teams care about "developing players" if they're not going to put teams on the field?

 

How are local teams going to pay the players? Right now, the parent club does that.

 

I meant they can do drills and workouts in indoor facilities ... you know what, let's just move on before this gets sideways. We're not on the same page with my half-baked musing.

 

Is there a rule that leaders of professional sports organizations have to be dumber than a box of rocks? Now I know where Brian France landed, apparently as personal assistant to Rob Manfred.

Not only does this look ridiculous on its face, but consider this nice bit of trivia: the number of teams who be eliminated is 42 (does that number ring a bell?), including Daytona Beach, where JACKIE ROBINSON first broke Organized Baseball's color barrier. Could Manfred and the rich men pulling his puppet strings be any more tone deaf? Well, it is the "Houston plan," so my question is moot.

"You can either host summer collegiate wood bat or we'll give you a Dream League team!" Boy, howdy! I can imagine that's going over well with ownership in the towns on the chopping block, like Chattanooga and Erie.

If I'm in a congressional district about to lose a team, I'm immediately gathering all the other members of Congress in the same boat and proposing to not only close the loophole in the Fair Wages Act that Manfred lobbied for and got, but end the long-standing antitrust exemption. You want to play ball, Mr. Manfred? Here's one, high and tight. Lobby this.

Fixing what's not broken. A hallmark of sports commissioners since Theodosius.

 

With this following up the Taubman affair and electronic sign-stealing accusations, the Astros are sure making a push to be the most-hated organization in baseball.

 

If you have Netflix, check out "The Battered Bastards of Baseball," about actor Bing Russell (Kurt's dad) running the Portland Mavericks in the late '70s.

Back in the '90s there were always one or two independent teams playing in an affiliated league (I remember High Desert and Bakersfield, at different times, with that designation in the Cal League) before they tightened up the classifications so every team had an affiliate.

 

If some of the local teams can't attract enough fans or sell enough advertising to pay the players, and the parent clubs don't think those local teams provide them enough benefits to make it worth their while to pay the players, what's the justification for having those local teams? Just nostalgia/tradition? Who are you going to force to subsidize local teams, and why? Not local taxpayers, I hope. The parent clubs, in return for their wage law and antitrust law exemptions? Maybe, but why not just scrap those exemptions too?

I don't get the belief that small cities have a right to have professional baseball teams if not enough people want to pay for them to make them economically viable. Lots of sports leagues develop their players lots of different ways, and the way it's being done now isn't the only way.

Also, I wonder if there's an age difference in reaction to this plan. I suspect that those of us who grew up outside of big cities and who had one MLB game a week available on TV are more attached to the idea of minor league teams than are fans under the age of 40 or so.

 

If it's not viable then it's not viable. Find a city where it will be.
The Pittsburgh Pirates did not need an affiliate in Hawaii for as many years as they had one.

 

First of probably 117 to follow.

 

Fifteen of these teams drew fewer than 1,500 fans per game. And that's most likely based on creative accounting. I've been to a nearby Single-A team's games in suburban Cleveland where they announce a couple thousand fans when it's no more than 300. That team is not on the chopping block.

Meanwhile, about 5% of players drafted in 2010 and 2011 have made The Show.

So why should MLB spend all this money on teams that aren't developing players in places where people aren't showing up for the games?

 

Nostalgia is a big reason why a lot of fans are up in arms (and yes, the fan base skews way older). Way before I was even born there weren't just A, AA and AAA, the farm system went down to Class B, C and D and it seems every other county had a farm team. But these were all tiny towns and tiny parks with no media megaphone (certainly no social media) and no multi-million bond issues or tax abatements in place, so they had no say.

 

In the little region of New Gilead I call home, we have an extremely successful full season class A team. But back in the early 1980s, there were four teams ranging from Rookie to Double A. Technically, all four have folded with single a coming back to replace the AA team. Two of them played in glorified high school stadiums, the third was in a wooden relic (that while nostalgic) was a dump and the fourth was a bowl whose outfield fence was just billboards.

I hear some of the old timers bemoan the loss of those “old days,” but there was no reason for that many teams in a small area of maybe 750,000 people at the time.