A Bad Baseball Day
Major League Baseball's reorganization of the Minor Leagues has killed professional baseball in Western Maryland
Professional baseball’s long history in Western Maryland came to a close.
Baseball America reported that the Frederick Keys will no longer be an affiliate of the Baltimore Orioles and instead will be forced into the MLB Draft League, an amateur collegiate summer prospect league.
This comes the day after the announcement that the Hagerstown Suns would be disaffiliated as the A-ball affiliate of the Washington Nationals.
This isn’t the first time that affiliated baseball has come to an end in Western Maryland. There was a 25-year gap in professional baseball from the time the Hagerstown Packets folded in 1955 and the Rocky Mount Pines relocated to Hagerstown in 1980.
The idea that Hagerstown would be dropped from professional baseball is not that surprising; Municipal Stadium is almost 90 years old and the team has flirted with relocating to Winchester, VA, Fredericksburg, VA, and a few other locations. It’s dropping Frederick which seems illogical given, as Steve Melewski notes, the tremendous success of the Keys both on the field and at the box office.
Frederick is a growing city in a growing area. If the Keys couldn’t be an Orioles affiliate, it would make just as much sense to be an affiliate of the Nationals. However, the Nationals high-A affiliate will be in Wilmington, DE and their current high-A affiliate, Fredericksburg, will move to low-A.
Nathan Ruiz wrote about baseball in Hagerstown and Frederick back in March.
Professional baseball Western Maryland has over 100 years in history, often unknown. Various leagues at various levels have seen pro baseball teams like the Cumberland Colts, Frederick Hustlers, Frostburg Demons, Hagerstown Owls, Lonaconing Giants, Piedmont-Westernport Drybugs, and other teams grace the diamonds of the west. Professional baseball has changed over the years. Between several reorganizations of the minor leagues, that was whittled down to none teams by 1955 until Hagerstown got its team back in 1980.
Now, that’s all gone.
The current minor league reorganization is spearhead by Major League Baseball and is another one of Commissioner Rob Manfred’s bad ideas. The idea is that Major League Baseball will control the minors in an effort to reduce costs and enact greater control on player development by reducing the number of affiliated teams to 120 (four per Major League team) and by more directly controlling the relationship between the big club and the small clubs. I don’t begrudge them in principle; controlling costs and having a more direct say in player development and the player experience is not a bad idea.
The ham-handed way MLB is doing it is what’s causing a lot of the problems. So far, in addition to dropping the highly successful team in Frederick, MLB’s decisions have included:
Threatening to drop professional baseball from Fresno if ownership doesn’t accept a demotion from the AAA Pacific Coast League to the High-A California League;
Dropping the Wichita WingNuts from AAA to AA before the team even gets to play in its new AAA-quality ballpark that Wichita for the relocating New Orleans Baby Cakes specifically in an effort to have a AAA team and not a AA team;
Dropped Fredericksburg from High-A to low-A before the team even gets to play in its new High A-quality ballpark.
Switched the Pioneer League from an affiliated league to an “MLB affiliated” independent league, taking organized affiliated baseball out of eight cities in the Rocky Mountains.
Disaffiliated the Staten Island Yankees as a New York Yankees affiliate, which has resulted in a lawsuit from Staten Island Ownership.
The bedside manner in which MLB has done this leaves a lot to be desired. Especially when you consider that Fresno and Wichita, for example, are being jettisoned to lower-level leagues in favor of the St. Paul Saints and Sugar Lang Skeeters who were independent league teams that have never been affiliated with a Major League team.
One of Major League Baseball’s long-term issues has been trying to develop a new generation of fans to watch the game and buy the product. With fewer and fewer kids playing baseball, that becomes just a little harder each year. But taking affiliated ball out of cities like this makes the lift to grow new fans more difficult. Sure it’s easy for some cities, like Frederick or Staten Island, to have a connection to a big league club. But there aren’t a lot of opportunities to see current or future Major Leaguers in Great Falls, MT or Idaho Falls, ID. Disconnecting those fans from a big league team gives those fans fewer reasons for watching the big league product.
Keys management, at least publicly, sound optimistic:
I went to a Keys game in April once. It was not warm and there was almost nobody there, so that checks out.
(Not the smallest crowd I’ve seen; I saw an El Paso Diablos game in April 2004 and there might not even have been 200 people there. It gets cold at 8 PM in the desert. But I digress)
The quality of baseball can be questionable too. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve had a lot of fun going to see the Southern Maryland Blue Crabs (Atlantic League) or the Washington Wild Things (Frontier League). But independent baseball isn’t always like that. I encourage you to read “The Only Rule Is It Has to Work” to get a sense of how sparse independent ball can be.
Without a new, privately-financed stadium, Hagerstown was in trouble regardless of the massive reorganization project. But Frederick got a raw deal from Major League Baseball. And, at least for now, that brings the long history of professional baseball in Western Maryland to a sad and avoidable end.