Baseball Mows Down the Field of Dreams

Minor League Baseball has announced that it is abandoning the 2020 season entirely, marking the first time since its founding in 1901 that ballfields in rural towns across America will go dark. While the announced cause is the pandemic, there are serious undertows at work that could mean that most, if not all of the affected teams will not return.

Under the existing system, the minor league teams are affiliated with major league squads, tasked with developing the players who one day appear in their lineups and on their mounds. Baseball is unique in all the professional sports in that it provides a drawn-out apprenticeship, carefully crafting skills until a special few rise to the top of the pyramid. For almost all players, that development curve is steep and long: scouts and GMs understand that hitting a round baseball with a round bat is one of the hardest challenges in sports. Stars like Mike Trout, Mookie Betts, Christian Yelich, and Cody Bellinger all required over 2,000 minor leagues at-bats before they broke into the majors; for many players, it takes much longer than that.

Last Season

The timing of the Coronavirus could not have been worse for Minor League Baseball. Last season was one of the best in its recent history; almost all affiliated teams were profitable, never a guarantee in the difficult world of small-town baseball. The contract between MLB and MiLB expires this September, and negotiations for a new contract were contentious. In preparation for the coming fight, MLB had already announced that 42 of the 161 minor league teams would be axed, a decision that was considered a shot across the bow. The future for an additional 80 or so rookie league teams are similarly up for grabs.

Season’s Cancellation

With the announcement of the season’s cancellation, those 161 teams are on their own in terms of survival, and MLB has little or no incentive to intervene. One outcome being bandied about is for baseball to consolidate its minor leagues to only the two uppermost levels, AA and AAA, and allow the remaining teams to drift away. That would mean that some 100 stadiums in 100 small cities and towns will go empty; 100 municipalities that built and supported those facilities will be left to… well, it’s unclear what they will do.

About 3,500 - 4,000 players will suddenly be without a job, as well as tens of thousands of workers, from the staff and organizational professionals to the seasonal workers at those ballparks. Vendors and local bars and restaurants will take their own hits, with the normal trickle-down effects in those locations. Congress — if it finds the room inside the massive efforts already in front of it — will likely have a cow, justified because of the favorable exemptions given to MLB regarding labor and tax treatments in recognition of the sports economic value and cultural stature.

Lesser Degree Basketball

If it pursues that outcome, baseball will take a page from football and, to a lesser degree basketball, looking to the colleges to take over the initial stages of development. With the smaller minor league footprint, MLB will likely reduce its draft from the previous multi-day stocking up blitz to 10 or fewer rounds, restricting their picks to the cream of the crop. Late bloomers or specialists will have to find alternate routes to show their wares, and to break into the system; international players will suddenly be at a strong disadvantage, as teams will no longer have the depth to carry them from their teens.

And one beautiful, historically rich part of Americana will fade away. Baseball will be smaller, less romantic, and infinitely the poorer for it, as will we all.

Last year, 40 million fans attended minor league baseball games. For the vast majority, a seat in a minor league stadium was the closest that they would ever come to watching a hero swing a bat or throw a pitch, a dream factory for the millions of kids chomping hot dogs out of their baseball gloves, and one of the more affordable family outings in the current day. The National Pastime is as much derived from these 161 plus fields of dreams as from the mega stadium skyboxes; as we lose that romantic vision, baseball will become smaller and more intense, the opposite of its historic place in our summer culture.

Domino Effects on the Game

Past articles have already covered the domino effects on the game that are as predictable as they are numerically inevitable. Sage sportswriters will opine on how baseball has always been a business, and that MLB has every right to make as much money as it can, however, it wants to. Pro scouts will point out that the vast majority of the kids who no longer have a team to play on would have never made the majors, never signed a meaningful contract… and they’ll all have their points.

Personally, I’ll be rooting for Congress to find the time to acknowledge that baseball is, in fact, just another business, and to remove the exemptions that have stood to its great benefit. I have no insight into the financials of MLB teams — they’ve always been secretive — but I’ll wonder if the millions that MLB spends on its lobbyists will be less or more than what it would have cost to keep that minor league system intact.

For the millions of little kids who just lost their chance to marvel at the greenness of a professional baseball diamond under night lights, for the thousands of bigger kids who oiled their gloves and asked why not me? as a real announcer called out their names as they walked to the plate in one of those 100 now dark parks… for all of them, this day is more than a simple business decision. It is a loss of something meaningful, a worsening of a world that seems to take something new away every day.

The national pastime just abandoned too much of the nation, just lost too much of its past times. Like way too much of this 2020, it just sucks.