The Savaging of the Minor Leagues
Baseball's farm system returns, stripped of teams and traditions
Sports Biblio Reader, 6.6.21
Also in This Issue: Why Baseball Isn’t Fun Any More; Revisiting Lou Gehrig’s Death; Frank Viola and Ron Darling; Coach K; Marv Albert; Tanking in the NBA; Letters to a Young Athlete; The LeBron James of NBA Agents; Five Sneakers That Changed the Game; Remembering Lee Evans, Mike Marshall, Jim Klobuchar, Rick Bonnell and David Foot
After being sidelined in 2020, minor league baseball teams are playing once again, but they’ve been banged-up and brutalized by their MLB overlords in an exploitative move during the COVID-19 shutdowns.
Even The Economist weighed on the plight of the minors, noting the reduction of 42 teams and ever-tighter MLB control of the 102 clubs still taking the field:
“This has cast a shadow over the recent return of live baseball to the many small towns where the minor-league teams tend to be based.
“Major League Baseball has helped most of the teams it has cut loose join independent leagues. But their prospects remain uncertain. Of the 202 teams that have played in such leagues over the past 30 years, almost half folded within four years.”
To call this a tragedy, as is done in the headline, is to be kind.
Among those forced to find new affiliations are the Burlington Bees in Iowa, formerly of the Midwest League, one of several circuits renamed, in this case High-A Central, in minor-league reorganization.
As Bees writer John Bohnenkamp writes, the young men suiting up for home games at Community Field are in the Prospect League, a summer circuit for college players, much like the vaunted Cape Cod League.
The Batavia Muckdogs, one of the original teams in the New York-Penn League, also was booted to the amateur ranks. At The Spectator, Bill Kauffman, a former team official, groused that “minor league baseball as a quasi-independent entity has been abolished, and its relicts are locked into the fetid antechambers of Major League Baseball.”
The Muckdogs also have landed in a summer college league, noting that they’re no longer community-owned “but the new proprietors hail from Elmira, New York, hometown of Mark Twain’s wife Livy. This is a good sign, since reports of our death, like Twain’s, were greatly exaggerated.”
Kauffman, a fierce small-town localist and humorist in his own right, and author of the 2004 collection “Dispatches from the Muckdog Gazette,” is optimistic that “there is life after major league-affiliated baseball, just as there will be life after the welcome and deserved collapse of the American Empire.”
Players who had to hustle like the lockdown-affected working class have returned to a minor league set-up with paltry post-game meals a few steps down from elementary school cafeteria fare.
What a far cry from a time when the minors were an especially vital part of the fabric of small-town American life, before the effects of television, rampant suburbanization and the centralization of life embodied by MLB’s top-down corporate overhaul.
In the newly published “The Best Little Baseball Town in the World,” minor league baseball historian Gaylon White writes about the quirky Crowley Millers, which played in a small town in Louisiana before big crowds of fans hungry for community connection in the years after World War II.
Life was good in the Class C Evangeline League for a while, but when TV antennas sprung up across town in the early 1950s, the team’s fate was sealed, as Nick Diunte writes:
“Crowley hoped a working agreement with the Kansas City Athletics would boost their fortunes; however, a major league affiliation could not save the ship from sinking. As teams dropped out of the league mid-season, and fans stopped showing up to the ballpark, professional baseball in Crowley became extinct after 1957. A community that once funded its development could no longer save its beloved team from financial ruin.
It’s a story that’s being repeated once again, but with many more places threatened by a devastating inside job, courtesy of Major League Baseball:
“Places like Crowley were prime examples of how a community could embrace a team and make their rough and tumble stars small-town heroes for generations to come. Fans spent their money at the ballpark and patronized local businesses throughout the entire season. How many towns will fall deeper into oblivion without a minor league team to draw attention during the long hot summers?”
A Few Good Reads
At The Atlantic, Devin Gordon, author of a new book about the New York Mets, ruminates about the latest controversy about Major League Baseball’s unwritten rules. With his team up 16-4 against the Twins, rookie Yermin Mercedes of the White Sox cracked a homer on a 3-0 pitch with a position player on the mound. That led to White Sox manager Tony LaRussa to publicly denounce his own player, prompting Gordon on a rant against the dugout guru, bemoaning “how alarmingly not fun baseball has become” and even bringing up LaRussa’s DUI arrest last fall:
“These crises always seem to coincide with pitchers nosing ahead of hitters, followed by a nosedive in offense. Despite what the purists and baseball lifers and respect-for-the-gamers would have you believe, though, MLB has responded with drastic changes every time. And now it’s time to do it again. Modern baseball has lots of problems—too many strikeouts, too few runs, too little action on the basepaths—but all these problems are symptoms of the same root cause: Major League Baseball is afraid of fun. When you’re a humorless corporation with no capacity to distinguish between fun and controversy, between a charisma machine and a giant prick, they all look like time bombs. Stir in the game’s historical insistence on modesty, on keeping your head down and doing your job, even though this isn’t an oil rig, and before long, your sport turns into a snooze.”
Lou Gehrig died 80 years ago this week, and Mike Vaccaro includes the odd tale of how the Yankees found out about his passing in “1941: The Greatest Year in Sports,” his 2008 book;
It’s been 40 years since future Big League pitchers and Mets teammates Frank Viola and Ron Darling famously dueled during a St. John’s-Yale NCAA tournament game that’s one of the more memorable contests in college baseball annals. “Just that one simple game made us intertwined for life,” Darling said;
Duke basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski announced the 2021-22 season will be his last, and he’s tapped his former player and current assistant, Jon Scheyer, to succeed him. Coach K, who’s 74, said he’s retiring primarily for family reasons, but the accelerated changes in college basketball—especially the dizzying rate of transfers—are hard to ignore. At the News & Observer in Raleigh, Luke DeCock writes that Krzyzewski’s departure has been long in the making. At The Ringer, Michael Baumann breaks down a 47-year Hall of Fame coaching resume, including 42 in Durham, that yielded 12 Final Four trips, five NCAA titles and a men’s Division I record 1,170 wins;
Two new timely NBA books were published toward the end of the regular season: “BubbleBall,” by Ben Golliver, an NBA writer for The Washington Post, about the league’s truncated season of isolation in 2020 prompted by COVID-19 protocols. Review here in the The Post and interview here on the NBA on ESPN YouTube channel;
Jake Fischer, an NBA freelancer with bylines at Bleacher Report, has just published “Built to Lose: How the NBA’s Tanking Era Changed the League Forever,” focusing on the Philadelphia 76ers. They packed recent drafts and now have the best record in the Eastern Conference and boast the likely NBA MVP in Joel Embiid. Author interview here with Liberty Ballers, a Sixers fan blog on SB Nation;
Broadcast legend Marv Albert is retiring at the end of the NBA playoffs, more specifically the TNT portion that continues through the semifinals. Albert, who will soon turn 80, first called a New York Knicks game in 1963, near the start of a 55-year career. The Knicks didn’t pay a tribute before calling his last game in Madison Square Garden last week, when the Hawks wrapped up an Eastern Conference first-round series, continuing a long-standing feud between Albert and James Dolan, owner of the New York franchise;
Former NBA star and 2021 basketball Hall of Fame inductee Chris Bosh is the author of a new memoir, “Letters to a Young Athlete,” recounting his journey that included the shortening of his career due to injury. He discusses the book with Ebony and explains why the late Kobe Bryant is his favorite basketball writer;
LeBron James’ agent might be just as transformational a figure in the business of basketball as his client, writes Isaac Chotiner at The New Yorker. Rich Paul has negotiated nearly $9 billion in deals in less than a decade representing James, Lakers teammate Anthony Davis and young NBA stars Ben Simmons and Trae Young;
The London Design Museum has begun an exhibition of basketball sneakers that changed the game, including the famous Air Jordan that debuted in 1984. The global sneaker market, now valued at $70 billion, is reflected in a recent sale of a Kanye West sneaker by Sotheby’s for nearly $2 million. “Sneakers Unboxed” continues through Oct. 24.
Passings
Lee Evans, 74, raised his fist on the medal stand at the 1968 Olympics after winning gold in the 400-meter run in Mexico City, protesting racial injustice in a gesture that had two other American stars, John Carlos and Tommie Smith, sent back home early. Evans was later part of a U.S. 1,600-meter relay team that walked out of the stadium with gold medals, raising fists and wearing berets in support of the Black Panthers. Remembrance here from Dave Zirin; Frank Murphy’s 2006 book about Evans in Mexico City is here;
Mike Marshall, 78, was the first relief pitcher the Cy Young Award with the Los Angeles Dodgers in 1974, striking out 143 batters that season and during one stretch appearing in 13 consecutive games;
Jim Klobuchar, 93, was a longtime sports columnist for the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, and was the father of current U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar. He was remembered as “Minnesota’s Hemingway” for travel adventures, including long-distance bicycle rides and climbing the Matterhorn and Mount Kiliminjaro;
Rick Bonnell, 63, was a sportswriter at the Charlotte Observer for 33 years who primarily covered the Hornets. His career spanned that of Michael Jordan, whom he wrote about for more than 30 years, as a high school and college standout in North Carolina before becoming an NBA legend and Hornets owner, and who was among those paying tribute;
David Foot, 92, was dubbed “The Bard of the West Country” as a cricket, theater and feature writer for a number of English newspapers. He was a prolific author of cricket books and novels, and spurned the chance to work on Fleet Street to specialize in coverage of county cricket in the Bristol area.
The Sports Biblio Reader e-mail newsletter is delivered on Sunday. You can subscribe here and search recent archives. The full archives for Sports Biblio Digest can be found here. This is issue No. 243, published June 6, 2021.
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