“We had a great season, and we had a blast doing it,” [Missoula PaddleHeads] owner Peter Davis says. “You really were hamstrung as an affiliated team … yes, we loved being an independent team.”
“I was wrong,” says Jeff Katofsky, the owner of the now-independent Northern Colorado Owlz and a vocal critic last year. “I thought fans cared more about affiliation than they actually do. … I’m encouraged. I would’ve told you it was going to be a s— show, and it wasn’t.”
“The first initial reaction was ‘change is bad, change is bad, I want status quo,'” says Andy Shea, the CEO of two teams that lost affiliation. “Now that I’ve realized it, the quality of baseball is better, the name recognition is better, and there’s still that autonomy that we have.”
12 comments on “ESPN: Minor-league downsizing working out okay for team owners, there’s no one else we should ask, right?”
Yeah, when I saw this article, a few red flags popped up in my head. For one, the article barely focused on the teams that did not retain affiliation, nor ended up in any league. The owner of the Jackson Generals, who was part of a very litigious and messy separation from the ballpark in Jackson, Tennessee all because his team lost affiliation also owned the Florida Fire Frogs (remember them?), which disappeared into the ether as nobody bothered communicating on their fate. But, even though the Fire Frogs were, by all accounts, a net positive for the league to get rid of (attendance averaged in the hundreds nightly, team rarely was competitive, and many venue problems abound for the club), most teams that were eliminated had practically no safety net whatsoever upon being thrown out into the cold. Teams like the Charlotte (Florida) Stone Crabs and the Lancaster JetHawks were so far away from the other independent leagues that there was no way they could join, and in Lancaster’s case, they were not going to humor the Pecos League’s flea market atmosphere and frugal spending, so folding was the only option, meaning all of the money they invested for years was for naught. ESPN decided to focus instead on the teams that managed to luck out and just casually bring up that not everyone was fortunate.
Meanwhile, to the teams that were able to join the independent leagues… independent teams come and go all the time. The Atlantic League is notorious, as stated on this blog, for enticing gullible communities to build ballparks (and nice ballparks at that) with the promise of economic gains if they come in, and the team folds after a few years, leaving the city with a ballpark they can’t use. Other leagues, like the American Association, have to contend with owners who either struggle to make money or don’t bother paying the bills, which affect the bottom line, and cause chaos every couple of years. Right now, the league is pretty centralized in the upper Midwest… except for Cleburne, who sit as an outlier after all the other teams in the area have long since folded, which makes me wonder how long they can last without potential expansion. There were many teams in that area, but almost all of them folded within a few years due to lack of fan interest or financial support.
Local support is excellent, but it all ties into being able to consistently deliver on fan engagement and properly manage finances, which is harder on the independent level than affiliated ball. Ironic, given independent ball came into existence thanks to the 1992 PBA MLB enforced on MiLB that demanded leagues and teams modernize facilities, thus driving up costs. When leagues end up isolating teams, this can drive up travel costs.
And, of course, there’s the whole player aspect, given players don’t get paid much and have to be careful with finances, especially if you’re one of the poor bastards assigned to a traveling team like the Houston Apollos last season in the American Association or the Frontier Greys this year in the Frontier League (where you’re paid even LESS than the league average, always on the road, always playing as the road team, and rarely having access to quality equipment or even meals). For many, the sacrifice is just to see if they can get back into affiliated minors, where pay can be a bit higher, and resources may be more manageable… depending on the team you end up with. But who cares about the players when we need to focus on the plight of ownership?
Aside from the “never ask a surgeon if you need an operation” angle, this sort of “update” is entirely predictable. In fact, it is an integral part of our society.
Almost no-one writes books about the racing driver, actor or athlete who mortgaged their house, left home at 15 to find fame, or went all in on their skiing or football career only to wash out and end up broke, homeless or working on a walmart loading dock with badly damaged knees or a major head injury. Their futures are dire.
And if such biographies are written, they rarely sell in number.
Our success stories are the exception rather than the rule… yet we still force feed their preposterous narrative to schoolchildren in vast numbers.
This is not only evident in the entertainment industries… ask any new crop of low level managers and supervisors in the corporation of your choice what they see as the future. They all know that of the 300 hired that year only a handful will still be with the company in 5 years time; and that those 300 together with the 1000 retained over the last decade or so all have their eyes on the same 3 vice presidents’ positions.
Yet they all believe they are the ones. I am not surprised that MiLB owners share some of the same delusions.
That said, I believed at the time that some (a small minority) of the minor league teams that were forcibly unaffiliated could survive and thrive. If given the choice between running under MLB’s watchful eye or running and independent team, I know which one I’d prefer.
The smaller (and mostly non viable) markets will not survive. But there area some markets presently unserved by MLB or it’s affiliates that can thrive.
The modern stories are:
* he turned his selfies into NFTs and made $1.6 million in a week
* she’s making $70,000 a month on OnlyFans
* their dance went viral on TikTok and now they’re worth $800,000
All of this backed up with pictures from Instagram…
What a bunch of lies slapped together by ESPN. They scratch nowhere near the surface of what’s going on with MLB’s deliberate takeover of the minor leagues.
I’ve been tempted recently to start writing an e-book about this very topic. The MLB Partner Leagues (Independent Leagues who have special ties to MLB) are at the heart of this nonsense. They’re playing this game of Limbo where they balance between still being Indy Leagues while also saying they get unique perks from MLB. “We’re not affiliated with MLB, but we work with them.”
By signing on to work with MLB (funny how they never expand on what the extent of their working relationships are…) these Partner Leagues are under this delusion that they actually benefit from MLB’s help, but all the while they sacrifice all the integral components of what made them successful to begin with and they let MLB manipulate how they function (such as implementing stupid rules changes like the sudden death extra inning).
“True” Independent League Baseball as we knew it in the 1990’s is pretty much dead, and we have MLB to thank for that because they wanted to acquire all the successful Indy teams and call them their own. (see St. Paul Saints, Somerset Patriots, etc.) The only real Indy Leagues left alive are (in my opinion) the Pecos League and the United Shore Professional Baseball League. Don’t get me started on the Empire League; that league won’t last much longer.
Rob Manfred and the ultra greedy MLB owners wanted to have it their way, so congrats to them on raiding and ruining baseball for the sake of chasing those extra dollars. I’m sure all the 100,000+ summer collegiate baseball leagues more than make up for what Independent League Baseball brought to the table (here’s a hint; they don’t… another lie) Ship away those minor league baseball jobs overseas to Europe, Asia or Antarctica so you could pat yourselves on the backs and say you “made progress”. More like MLB is destroying the game, if you want me to be brutally honest.
In summary, I simply see the game of baseball as a dying sport, and the signs are obvious. Yes, the owners and players will make their money, but at the expense of losing the trust of the fans and whatever credibility they had left. You see, the ones who always lose out in the end are the fans. They have to pay more at the gate just to see one game, let alone be season ticket holders. They have to sacrifice in order to have a team. This sport is surrounded by the lies from the pits of Hell.
Good. I’m getting off my soapbox now…
I agree with a lot of what you say, Steven. Long time baseball fans (many of them, anyway) are hurting at what is happening to the professional game.
But nature abhors a vacuum. Where there is significant resentment for so called “organized” baseball, but still a demand for the live sport, other options will arise. MLB will do their level best to kill those in the creche… so it’s up to fans to support those options as they appear.
I like watching baseball on tv. I pay for a few sports channels that show MLB (but not the sat package). But when I buy merchandise or attend a live game, it is almost never an MLB game. I spend my money on unaffiliated baseball wherever possible. It’s pretty much the only thing fans can do.
Manfred and the club owners may own and control MLB, but they do not own and control baseball itself.
Economics may abhor a vacuum, but there are a whole lot of entry costs for running a baseball team that don’t apply to other businesses. (For starters, you need a league to play in.) If you count the “partner leagues” as MLB-affilated, there are now no truly indy leagues anywhere near me…
@John Bladen; Other options have arose in recent years, but as I’ve hinted at in my post, North American cities are stripped of True Indy League teams and are forced to accept Summer Collegiate level baseball. It’s deliberately forced because of the broken economics surrounding baseball. Before anyone says that Summer Collegiate ball is the same as True Indy League ball, I’ll go on record right here and say that’s a clear lie. Summer Collegiate ball is not/will never be equal to True Indy League ball. It’s a big step down, and the sad part is communities are intentionally turning a blind eye to this.
Thanks for your reply, John. I just need to vent because that seems to be all I can do at this point until I see MLB’s dictatorship implode on itself.
I get passionate about this topic because my community used to have a True Indy League team. That team was taken away from us in 2008, and we’ve been forced to accept Summer Collegiate ball ever since. I stopped going to my local team’s games after 2010 because I realized what kind of scam was being perpetuated.
I just think the gullibility and delusion that fills baseball leagues now are becoming way too much for me to handle. The politics of the game of baseball have become so far corrupted, and as a fan I just have to walk away and stay away from it.
It’s absolutely not going to happen overnight, but where there is a demand for something better than the intern leagues that Manfred and his band of thieves want to inflict on us, they will eventually come to be.
You don’t need ten Lamar Hunts willing to lose tens of millions a year (in today’s money) for a decade to build a new indy league. But you do need ownership with deep pockets willing to look at this as a long term build.
Most sports leagues don’t have that… they have a handful of truly rich guys and a bunch of carpetbaggers (which isn’t to suggest that there is no crossover between the two groups) that are looking to earn 20% ROI from the first day of operation.
You need owners that love the game rather than just money. I would bet it will take a decade post “MiLB krystalnacht” for prospective owners to even see what the landscape is before new indy leagues can begin to properly form.
I’ve watched my “local” team play in at least six different leagues since the mid 1990s. Some of the baseball has been good, some has been really bad. As a recovering Cub fan, this is nothing new to me…
I have long felt that the real solutions is communities that really care and are passionate about baseball organizing independent leagues of community-owned teams.
Maybe once MLB has burned the existing system to the ground extracting every last dollar, the stage will be set for something like this to emerge.
Probably just a pipe dream…
The hard part is getting a TV deal, as the UBL found out:
Morgan added that because of NCAA rules, the Coyotes would have to construct their own team-specific areas, such as dressing rooms, training facilities, etc. A source estimated to Morgan that the cost to the Coyotes for the additions would be $15 million to $20 million
https://www.sportsnet.ca/nhl/article/report-coyotes-working-deal-play-5000-seat-arena-asu/
I appreciate ‘source’ may not mean much, nor ‘estimated’. But the NCAA must have standards that need to be met and could the franchise afford it? No one is asking that and I guess we wouldn’t be able to find out but it just stuck out to me as ‘hey that sounds expensive considering they lose $30 million(USD) per annum)
If you’re losing $30m a year, what’s another $20m?
It’s kind of nuts that they didn’t just agree to pay rent in Glendale instead of this, but I guess this is all seen as loss-leader stuff for trying to land an arena in Tempe. Which would cost way more to pay off than the Coyotes are losing now, so maybe “kind of nuts” is just par for the course here.
Yeah, when I saw this article, a few red flags popped up in my head. For one, the article barely focused on the teams that did not retain affiliation, nor ended up in any league. The owner of the Jackson Generals, who was part of a very litigious and messy separation from the ballpark in Jackson, Tennessee all because his team lost affiliation also owned the Florida Fire Frogs (remember them?), which disappeared into the ether as nobody bothered communicating on their fate. But, even though the Fire Frogs were, by all accounts, a net positive for the league to get rid of (attendance averaged in the hundreds nightly, team rarely was competitive, and many venue problems abound for the club), most teams that were eliminated had practically no safety net whatsoever upon being thrown out into the cold. Teams like the Charlotte (Florida) Stone Crabs and the Lancaster JetHawks were so far away from the other independent leagues that there was no way they could join, and in Lancaster’s case, they were not going to humor the Pecos League’s flea market atmosphere and frugal spending, so folding was the only option, meaning all of the money they invested for years was for naught. ESPN decided to focus instead on the teams that managed to luck out and just casually bring up that not everyone was fortunate.
Meanwhile, to the teams that were able to join the independent leagues… independent teams come and go all the time. The Atlantic League is notorious, as stated on this blog, for enticing gullible communities to build ballparks (and nice ballparks at that) with the promise of economic gains if they come in, and the team folds after a few years, leaving the city with a ballpark they can’t use. Other leagues, like the American Association, have to contend with owners who either struggle to make money or don’t bother paying the bills, which affect the bottom line, and cause chaos every couple of years. Right now, the league is pretty centralized in the upper Midwest… except for Cleburne, who sit as an outlier after all the other teams in the area have long since folded, which makes me wonder how long they can last without potential expansion. There were many teams in that area, but almost all of them folded within a few years due to lack of fan interest or financial support.
Local support is excellent, but it all ties into being able to consistently deliver on fan engagement and properly manage finances, which is harder on the independent level than affiliated ball. Ironic, given independent ball came into existence thanks to the 1992 PBA MLB enforced on MiLB that demanded leagues and teams modernize facilities, thus driving up costs. When leagues end up isolating teams, this can drive up travel costs.
And, of course, there’s the whole player aspect, given players don’t get paid much and have to be careful with finances, especially if you’re one of the poor bastards assigned to a traveling team like the Houston Apollos last season in the American Association or the Frontier Greys this year in the Frontier League (where you’re paid even LESS than the league average, always on the road, always playing as the road team, and rarely having access to quality equipment or even meals). For many, the sacrifice is just to see if they can get back into affiliated minors, where pay can be a bit higher, and resources may be more manageable… depending on the team you end up with. But who cares about the players when we need to focus on the plight of ownership?
Aside from the “never ask a surgeon if you need an operation” angle, this sort of “update” is entirely predictable. In fact, it is an integral part of our society.
Almost no-one writes books about the racing driver, actor or athlete who mortgaged their house, left home at 15 to find fame, or went all in on their skiing or football career only to wash out and end up broke, homeless or working on a walmart loading dock with badly damaged knees or a major head injury. Their futures are dire.
And if such biographies are written, they rarely sell in number.
Our success stories are the exception rather than the rule… yet we still force feed their preposterous narrative to schoolchildren in vast numbers.
This is not only evident in the entertainment industries… ask any new crop of low level managers and supervisors in the corporation of your choice what they see as the future. They all know that of the 300 hired that year only a handful will still be with the company in 5 years time; and that those 300 together with the 1000 retained over the last decade or so all have their eyes on the same 3 vice presidents’ positions.
Yet they all believe they are the ones. I am not surprised that MiLB owners share some of the same delusions.
That said, I believed at the time that some (a small minority) of the minor league teams that were forcibly unaffiliated could survive and thrive. If given the choice between running under MLB’s watchful eye or running and independent team, I know which one I’d prefer.
The smaller (and mostly non viable) markets will not survive. But there area some markets presently unserved by MLB or it’s affiliates that can thrive.
The modern stories are:
* he turned his selfies into NFTs and made $1.6 million in a week
* she’s making $70,000 a month on OnlyFans
* their dance went viral on TikTok and now they’re worth $800,000
All of this backed up with pictures from Instagram…
What a bunch of lies slapped together by ESPN. They scratch nowhere near the surface of what’s going on with MLB’s deliberate takeover of the minor leagues.
I’ve been tempted recently to start writing an e-book about this very topic. The MLB Partner Leagues (Independent Leagues who have special ties to MLB) are at the heart of this nonsense. They’re playing this game of Limbo where they balance between still being Indy Leagues while also saying they get unique perks from MLB. “We’re not affiliated with MLB, but we work with them.”
By signing on to work with MLB (funny how they never expand on what the extent of their working relationships are…) these Partner Leagues are under this delusion that they actually benefit from MLB’s help, but all the while they sacrifice all the integral components of what made them successful to begin with and they let MLB manipulate how they function (such as implementing stupid rules changes like the sudden death extra inning).
“True” Independent League Baseball as we knew it in the 1990’s is pretty much dead, and we have MLB to thank for that because they wanted to acquire all the successful Indy teams and call them their own. (see St. Paul Saints, Somerset Patriots, etc.) The only real Indy Leagues left alive are (in my opinion) the Pecos League and the United Shore Professional Baseball League. Don’t get me started on the Empire League; that league won’t last much longer.
Rob Manfred and the ultra greedy MLB owners wanted to have it their way, so congrats to them on raiding and ruining baseball for the sake of chasing those extra dollars. I’m sure all the 100,000+ summer collegiate baseball leagues more than make up for what Independent League Baseball brought to the table (here’s a hint; they don’t… another lie) Ship away those minor league baseball jobs overseas to Europe, Asia or Antarctica so you could pat yourselves on the backs and say you “made progress”. More like MLB is destroying the game, if you want me to be brutally honest.
In summary, I simply see the game of baseball as a dying sport, and the signs are obvious. Yes, the owners and players will make their money, but at the expense of losing the trust of the fans and whatever credibility they had left. You see, the ones who always lose out in the end are the fans. They have to pay more at the gate just to see one game, let alone be season ticket holders. They have to sacrifice in order to have a team. This sport is surrounded by the lies from the pits of Hell.
Good. I’m getting off my soapbox now…
I agree with a lot of what you say, Steven. Long time baseball fans (many of them, anyway) are hurting at what is happening to the professional game.
But nature abhors a vacuum. Where there is significant resentment for so called “organized” baseball, but still a demand for the live sport, other options will arise. MLB will do their level best to kill those in the creche… so it’s up to fans to support those options as they appear.
I like watching baseball on tv. I pay for a few sports channels that show MLB (but not the sat package). But when I buy merchandise or attend a live game, it is almost never an MLB game. I spend my money on unaffiliated baseball wherever possible. It’s pretty much the only thing fans can do.
Manfred and the club owners may own and control MLB, but they do not own and control baseball itself.
Economics may abhor a vacuum, but there are a whole lot of entry costs for running a baseball team that don’t apply to other businesses. (For starters, you need a league to play in.) If you count the “partner leagues” as MLB-affilated, there are now no truly indy leagues anywhere near me…
@John Bladen; Other options have arose in recent years, but as I’ve hinted at in my post, North American cities are stripped of True Indy League teams and are forced to accept Summer Collegiate level baseball. It’s deliberately forced because of the broken economics surrounding baseball. Before anyone says that Summer Collegiate ball is the same as True Indy League ball, I’ll go on record right here and say that’s a clear lie. Summer Collegiate ball is not/will never be equal to True Indy League ball. It’s a big step down, and the sad part is communities are intentionally turning a blind eye to this.
Thanks for your reply, John. I just need to vent because that seems to be all I can do at this point until I see MLB’s dictatorship implode on itself.
I get passionate about this topic because my community used to have a True Indy League team. That team was taken away from us in 2008, and we’ve been forced to accept Summer Collegiate ball ever since. I stopped going to my local team’s games after 2010 because I realized what kind of scam was being perpetuated.
I just think the gullibility and delusion that fills baseball leagues now are becoming way too much for me to handle. The politics of the game of baseball have become so far corrupted, and as a fan I just have to walk away and stay away from it.
It’s absolutely not going to happen overnight, but where there is a demand for something better than the intern leagues that Manfred and his band of thieves want to inflict on us, they will eventually come to be.
You don’t need ten Lamar Hunts willing to lose tens of millions a year (in today’s money) for a decade to build a new indy league. But you do need ownership with deep pockets willing to look at this as a long term build.
Most sports leagues don’t have that… they have a handful of truly rich guys and a bunch of carpetbaggers (which isn’t to suggest that there is no crossover between the two groups) that are looking to earn 20% ROI from the first day of operation.
You need owners that love the game rather than just money. I would bet it will take a decade post “MiLB krystalnacht” for prospective owners to even see what the landscape is before new indy leagues can begin to properly form.
I’ve watched my “local” team play in at least six different leagues since the mid 1990s. Some of the baseball has been good, some has been really bad. As a recovering Cub fan, this is nothing new to me…
I have long felt that the real solutions is communities that really care and are passionate about baseball organizing independent leagues of community-owned teams.
Maybe once MLB has burned the existing system to the ground extracting every last dollar, the stage will be set for something like this to emerge.
Probably just a pipe dream…
The hard part is getting a TV deal, as the UBL found out:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Baseball_League_(proposed)
Hey Neil,
regarding the Arizona Coyotes this caught my eye:
Morgan added that because of NCAA rules, the Coyotes would have to construct their own team-specific areas, such as dressing rooms, training facilities, etc. A source estimated to Morgan that the cost to the Coyotes for the additions would be $15 million to $20 million
https://www.sportsnet.ca/nhl/article/report-coyotes-working-deal-play-5000-seat-arena-asu/
I appreciate ‘source’ may not mean much, nor ‘estimated’. But the NCAA must have standards that need to be met and could the franchise afford it? No one is asking that and I guess we wouldn’t be able to find out but it just stuck out to me as ‘hey that sounds expensive considering they lose $30 million(USD) per annum)
If you’re losing $30m a year, what’s another $20m?
It’s kind of nuts that they didn’t just agree to pay rent in Glendale instead of this, but I guess this is all seen as loss-leader stuff for trying to land an arena in Tempe. Which would cost way more to pay off than the Coyotes are losing now, so maybe “kind of nuts” is just par for the course here.