Minor-league baseball on TV? Would you watch?

Everything and everybody has its niche audience that will read anything about them. But that's all it is -- a niche audience.

I can get 40 people together who will read anything on the Central Penn Piranha semi-pro football team.

 

True story:

Senior year of college, I'm splitting an apartment with my sister and working a sports internship at the afternoon paper (now defunct) in Evansville.

I go out one night, cover the local independent team, head back to the office, write the story so I don't have to get up as early the next day, then head home to the apartment.

When I walk in, I find my sister on the couch with the team's starting pitcher from that night, and he's doing some relief work, if you get my drift.

Me: "What the fuck? You guys couldn't make it 10 feet farther into the bedroom?"

 

was he working from the stretch?

 

No idea. Dude popped his head up over the couch, I saw who it was and what was going on, and said what I said.

Ah, Evansville groupies...

 

It would be viable if the carriers of the MLB teams carry their farm clubs. Like I get MASN. They could do Nats and O's week in review-type shows. Maybe a game of the week, though it'd be hard to get a live game slot, and I don't imagine people are going to watch four-day-old AA games with. Maybe set it up so that, say, Norfolk and/or Columbus play a Sunday night game when the Nats and O's have afternoon games. Mix in an AA or A game too, particularly if it's a Nats vs. O's minor league game (Potomac vs. Frederick, for example). Then it could work, because you're selling viewers on watching the Orioles or Nationals of two or five years down the road, as opposed to some random Toledo-Charlotte game on ESPN Classic.

 

Anytime someone asks me what I, as an expatriate, miss about the states, I always say: going to minor league baseball games.

 

Yeah, but the appeal of going to a minor league game is having less and less to do with the baseball, and more to do with the gimmicks.