If you cancel it, nobody will come
The cancellation of Minor League Baseball this season is official.
You may not have noticed it in amongst the big news of all of the major league, professional sports restarting their season - even, finally, Major League Baseball, despite themselves - but this week it was made official: There will be no 2020 Minor League Baseball season. This is yet another sad example of the economic and cultural devastation being wrought by the 2019 novel coronavirus, in addition to the lost lives and broken families.
Clouds at Hadlock Field, Portland, Maine, August 2013. Photo by J. Fossel.
I love sports in general, but I have a special place in my heart for Minor League Baseball, or MiLB, as it’s known. I was a longtime season-ticket holder at the Portland Sea Dogs, the AA affiliate of the Boston Red Sox, though I gave up those seats a few years ago after they ridiculously decided to expand netting to cover the entire venue. You see, I had a seat right next to the visitors’ dugout down the third base line, and it was quite a spot: players would hand balls to kids as they came running out, or stop to sign photographs. It was a very safe spot to sit, too: Most hard-hit foul balls either went farther back or farther down the field, with balls rarely popping directly in to our section. Yet, eventually they decided to cover our section with nets, too, to protect those precious ignorant souls who couldn’t put down their cell phones long enough to watch a damn baseball game.
I saw plenty of great players over the years at Hadlock Field, the high school baseball field that got transformed into a double-A park: Josh Beckett, Mike Lowell, Edgar Rentaria, Mookie Betts, Jackie Bradley Jr, Xander Bogaerts, Andrew Benintendi, Jonathan Papelbon, John Lester, and Dustin Pedroia, to name a few. All of them came through the system naturally, through the Florida Marlins and the Boston Red Sox, and many became household names at the major league level as well. When I was a season-ticket holder, I often had the chance to meet them personally at special events; local families hosted them at their residences.
Now, none of that is going to happen this year - not in Portland, nor in countless minor-league cities all over the country, after Major League Baseball made it official that there would be no MiLB season this year. ‘Build it and they will come’, we learned in Field of Dreams, perhaps the greatest sports film of all time. This year, that’s been changed into ‘Cancel it and they won’t come’. It would have been nice if Major League Baseball could have found a way to have at least a reduced minor league season in the higher echelons of the league in a few select cities, but it’s understandable that they couldn’t. Maine, the home of the Portland Sea Dogs and the headquarters of the Eastern League, would probably have been one of those cities, but the state still has a ban on gatherings of more than fifty people. That makes it barely logistically possible to even play a game, let alone have an audience, so MLB’s decision is understandable.
Still, it hurts. The thousands of opportunities that kids have across the country to build a relationship with the sport of baseball by attending minor-league games won’t happen at all this year. That’s a lost year of fandom for the future, something Major League Baseball can ill afford at the moment, at a time when they’re desperately trying to attract younger fans. Last year, 357,647 people passed through the gates at the Portland Sea Dogs: this year, exactly zero will.
It’s not just the fans that are hurt by this development: players are as well. Every year, there are thousands upon thousands of players working their way through MLB’s extensive minor leagues. Most major sports leagues don’t have anything like MLB’s network of teams; only the NHL comes even close. The NBA just has the G-League, and the NFL basically has college football as their minor league. MiLB, though, is different. Every year, there are players whose careers are made or broken by a bust out year, a flop of a season, an injury, or something else entirely. This year, none of that is going to happen: The only chance up-and-coming players will have to prove themselves is in MLB’s abbreviated spring training. That will be a much smaller set of players, one hand-chosen by the GMs of each major league team. That’s a major structural difference to the game.
It’s not just the player development and the fun of going to games that we’ll miss from Minor League Baseball, either: Like pro sports teams, minor league teams have a major economic impact on their economy. Not only do the teams have lots of employees manning the concession stands, tossing peanuts in the bleachers, cleaning the stadium, helping people to their seats, and more. Even if most teams do what the Portland Sea Dogs are doing and pay those employees anyway, there will still be a major economic impact on those cities - especially on those smaller and less prosperous than Portland. Fans that might eat out or shop while they’re in town for a game won’t be doing it now, and neither will players.
The cancellation of the Minor League Baseball season is yet another cost from the pandemic that will have a major ripple effect not only across the economy as a whole, but across the sport of baseball, both this season and for years to come. While the Sea Dogs may return, other teams will be unable to afford losing even a single season of operations, and will end up closing or relocating. This lost season may permanently alter the landscape of professional baseball in America for years to come.
Jim Fossel is a Maine native and weekly columnist for the Portland Press Herald who may be found easily on Twitter.