Minor-league baseball, like life in general, was less regulated, less secure, more unpredictable, more exciting, and, not coincidentally, more violent than the baseball (and life) we have come to know. In Hagerstown, a guard shot at a fan for pocketing too many foul balls. In Cedar Rapids, a melee was halted only when the national anthem was played over the loudspeakers. In Havana, Pepper Martin was suspended for the season for choking an umpire. In San Bernardino, Forrest “Frosty” Kennedy went two-for-five at the plate even though both of his wrists were taped. On the previous night he had attempted suicide.
The next year total minor league attendance declined dramatically—by more than seven million. Nineteen fifty-one saw the same massive decline. By 1959 only twenty-one leagues were operating. Three years later, the minors reached their attendance nadir, having lost on the order of thirty million fans in just thirteen years. American progress had unraveled the fabric of American community, of which the vast minor league system was a manifestation. Television, Interstate highways, suburbanization, and air conditioning, among other culprits, combined to cool Americans’ ardor for sitting in the hot and humid twilight to watch teams that included nary a national celebrity. By the 1960s the average American’s life had become less local and more mediated. An entire American age of lusty communitarianism had crested.
Not until the late 1970s did the minor leagues begin to emerge from the death spiral that had gripped them just when they seemed to be at their healthiest. At about the same time there began to emerge a minor-leagues literature, consisting most typically in wistful memoirs, literary travelogues, or combinations thereof. (...)
By the time Dirk Hayhurst’s The Bullpen Gospels (2010) and Lucas Mann’s Class A (2013) were published, the minor leagues were once again riding high. There were no longer nearly so many teams as in the 1940s (and earlier), but the attendance record of 1949 was eclipsed in 2004, and in 2019 the 176 minor league clubs that were formally affiliated with Major League Baseball drew about 41.5 million fans. There were no longer so many weird statistical accomplishments, nor so many colorful nicknames, nor so many oddball characters, nor so much uniqueness, period, but by the 2000s the minor leagues were nevertheless once again great fun—much more fun than MLB.
Not only that, but much like the local high school, the county fair, or the fire company, minor league teams, at least at their lower levels, functioned as core community institutions, and at a time when such institutions were sorely needed. Teams networked local residents, allowed for regular but informal interactions, showcased community organizations and initiatives and businesses, offered entry-level and part-time jobs for local youth, and provided something for the community to collectively support and rally around that was utterly apolitical and noncontroversial.
Then Major League Baseball did what Major League Baseball can be reliably expected to do: it acted with gobsmacking stupidity. Having blithely canceled the 2020 minor league season—but not, of course, the MLB season—due to purported COVID concerns, in 2021 MLB announced that in the name of efficiency it was reducing the number of minor league affiliates by more than 25 percent, down to 120. Forty-two towns, mostly out-of-the-way, working-class sorts of places, would lose their baseball teams. These were “some of the few remaining places where people could still find happiness and connection, for affordable prices, as they had for generations,” Will Bardenwerper reminds us, and now they would be extinguished, “merely to save the equivalent of one major league minimum salary.”
by Jeremy Beer, Front Porch Republic | Read more:
Image: uncredited
