Baseball: This Public Trust

I’ve been tempted to write a couple of times about the current baseball lockout. I’ve had an angle in mind, but I’ve shied away, mostly because I’ve thought the total interested audience would be about six people.

Today, a lawsuit was filed in federal court in New York, the plaintiffs being four former minor league franchises which were eliminated by Major League Baseball a year ago. The lawsuit gets at something I’ve written about before, but now I feel like it’s time to really double down. And it’s very much caught up with what I was going to write about the lockout.

So here goes. I’m writing about baseball, but also about small town America, and also… well, who knows where all else this is liable to go.

Clinton, Iowa was a minor league town for decades, part of the Class A Midwest League. The pandemic wiped out the 2020 season, and then Clinton was one of the towns which lost its affiliate in MLB’s consolidation after the 2020 season.

Clinton is at the southern edge of a series of counties along the Mississippi River in Iowa, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Minnesota which politically turned most sharply in 2016. Solid Obama counties became solid Trump counties. These are the sorts of places which caused much hand-wringing for the Democrats and the major media after Trump’s election. It’s not just that they flipped, it’s that the flip was so stark, so unexpected.

I was there on Election Day 2020 to pollwatch. (I thought Iowa would be a particularly important state.) The polling place I was assigned was the Moose Lodge, an older building at the far west edge of town along U.S. Route 30. I’d never been in Clinton before, but it all felt intimately familiar to me. The Moose Lodge itself felt like being in the Ken-Rock Community Center on the south side of Rockford. That stretch of U.S. 30 felt a lot like the stretch of 11th St. that Ken-Rock sits on.

Seeing what little I saw, seeing the people stream through the polling place, I readily understood how this part of the country must have felt politically abandoned. But political abandonment is abstract. It’s not like a politician is going to say, nope, I don’t care about that place.

A month after I was in Clinton, MLB announced its contraction plan. Now, I’m not from there. I haven’t interviewed the citizenry. But I have to believe that this was a mighty blow to Clinton. This abandonment was not abstract. No, it was MLB bluntly saying that Clinton was of no use to it anymore… of no use to baseball anymore.

When a manufacturing plant closes because production is going overseas, that can totally devastate a community. This is, for example, what happened to Galesburg, Illinois when Maytag left.

But a stalwart minor league town - one which has long supported its team - being told that even baseball doesn’t need it anymore?

Oversimplified: With both football and basketball, you get noticed in high school, you go off to college, you prove yourself there, you get drafted, and the day you’re drafted, you’re in the big leagues. The college selection process and especially the pro draft are the primary means of weeding out the merely excellent players in favor of the absolute best.

Baseball has long been different, because of the minors. (Hockey, to the extent that I understand it, is similar to baseball.) Yes, a lot of people do go through college, but overwhelmingly most MLB players have not gone to college. Instead they worked their way up through the minor league system. Some guys might jump through the rungs quickly, but it’s unbelievably rare to go straight to the majors. (Since the advent of the MLB draft in 1965, only 23 players have gone to the majors without playing in the minors.)

The minors are much like the majors: You pretty much play every day. Yes, you work on your swing or your fielding before the game. But the base concept is that you play day in, day out, and that’s how you grow, and that’s also how you prove yourself.

So what you have here is a system which has long relied on the idea of signing promising young athletes to professional contracts, and then having them work through the grind of playing every day for six months, and it’s assumed that even a pretty good ballplayer is going to have to put in at least a couple of years in the minors. It’s also assumed that a lot of the guys who are signed will never pan out. When the minor league season was canceled in 2020, it impacted 160 teams - some MLB teams having more affiliates than others. For easy math, let’s just say that every team had 5 affiliates. That means at any given point in time, for every guy in the majors, there were 5 guys in the minors. How many of those never made it? A lot.

Over the last decade, MLB teams have increasingly embraced advanced analytics, and have also increasingly sought other types of competitive advantages. One such team, the Houston Astros, brought in the consulting firm McKinsey, and actually had consultants go to Europe and try to learn best practices from the top soccer teams there. Among the results of this was a determination that the minor league system was too bloated, and that more attention needed to specialized work with top prospects. The Astros eliminated one Rookie League team after 2017, and raised a lot of eyebrows in the process… because that was the year the won the World Series.

Increasingly MLB teams, looking for whatever advantages they could come by, were looking at analytics, looking at the latest best practices, and seeing a lot of the same things. More money spent on analytics, more money spent on advanced machinery… where can you cut from? Well, maybe you don’t need that half-season A team. Maybe you don’t need two Rookie teams. Hey, what did the Astros just figure out? Can we do that too? Hey, how can we better unify what we’re doing at all levels of the organization?

Then the pandemic hit, the 2020 minor league season was canceled, major league teams lost all of the revenue from having fans actually at games… Contracting the minors was the right solution and this was the right time to do it. So they did it.

It was, arguably, the right thing for the individual Major League Baseball franchises.

It was absolutely the wrong thing for baseball.

It is admittedly difficult to make the argument that, in isolation, a bus full of 19 year olds traveling from Utica to Burlington to play their next game in the New York - Penn Short Season A League is some sort of cherished American nugget that we all can’t live without. If losing that isn’t going to hurt the competitive balance of MLB then most people aren’t going to notice anything missing.

My argument then is necessarily cumulative and non-quantitative. What contraction does is it removes the major league system from broad swaths of America. This map is from a FanGraphs article that goes into the story much better than I could:

At first blush it doesn’t seem that bad. Blobs in the Mountain West, blobs in Appalachia, some blobs in the Northeast, a little here, a little there.

The article goes deeper though and notes that over 5 million Americans will lose nearby access to any professional baseball. That’s a lot of people. And guess what sorts of places they’re concentrated? The very same sorts of places which have lost a lot more than just baseball in the last 40 years.

One thing the map actually understates is how many other communities lost their minor league teams well before 2020. Springfield, Illinois last had minor league ball in 1993. Rockford last had minor league ball in 1999. Yes, both cities today have semi-pro teams in independent leagues. That is something, but absolutely not the same thing.

Now, I grew up without minor league ball around for a long time. The Rockford Expos debuted when I was 11, and it’s not like the lack of a minor league team somehow precluded me from being obsessed with baseball. When the Expos arrived, though, it was awesome. My cousin was 3 years younger, and he and I were into baseball, and going to a game at Marinelli Field meant seeing guys you knew would make it to the majors, it meant crazy things like our grandmother needing shade and the cheapest thing she could get was a Mets helmet so she wore a Mets helmet in the stands, it meant being part of the big time, maybe just an outpost thereof, but still, we were part of the big time and it helped supercharge our interest in the game. A boy can be obsessed, or he can be OBSESSED.

It’s bad for baseball that contraction occurred. Not just bad for “baseball in Clinton” or “baseball in Burlington” or “baseball in Salem”, it’s bad for baseball. They should want these super-obsessed kids who, like me, were never going to make it in the game. But take those key pieces away, and keep making other mistakes which can keep baseball from being cool, and… maybe in the short to medium term it’s not undermining competitiveness, or profitability, but it’s undermining something less quantitative. It’s undermining the soul of the game.

The contract between Major League Baseball and the Major League Baseball Players Association expired several weeks ago. Upon expiration, MLB “locked out” the players. This might be resolved before spring training begins, it might not be.

I’m not going to dive into the issues here. At a high level there’s a shitload of money in the game and there is disagreement between the owners and the players as to what rules ought to be in place such that the players receive whatever is “fair”.

If every MLB game is sold out, if the TV rights and worth a lot more, if there’s even more shit-tons of money to go around, then that’s good for the owners and players alike. At the highest level the owners and players have much more commonality of interest than dissimilarity of interest. Obviously, there are stark limits to that commonality, or we wouldn’t be where we’re at.

But what about what’s in the best interest of the game of baseball?

More than the other sports, baseball should be understood as more than just a game. It is, after all, the “national pastime”. When we say that, we mean baseball writ large - something people play, watch, and discuss - something that encompasses more than the sum total of leagues and players and teams and owners and bats and balls. It has a more specific meaning than, say, “politics”, but a more abstract meaning than hitting a ball with a stick might be expected to suggest.

In recent years there has been a lot of hand-wringing about “the state of the game”, by which is largely but not entirely meant Major League Baseball. People are consternated about the length of games (for good reason), about the lack of balls in play (for good reason), about how baseball is relatively unpopular with kids today (soccer is way more popular), yadda yadda Yadier Molina.

Joe Posnanski argued last year that Theo Epstein, savior of two franchises (Red Sox and Cubs), ought to be designated by MLB as the person in charge of representing the game of baseball. MLB proper, via Commissioner Rob Manfred, is really an agent of the owners. Pos argued that the game needed someone to advocate on its behalf, not on behalf of the owners or players, and suggested Theo as the right person. And then it did come to pass that MLB hired Theo Epstein as a consultant to “on-field matters”. That was in January. Alas, I haven’t heard or seen a peep from Theo Epstein since.

Regardless, I think Pos was on to something. His argument was based more on actual game play, about how he thinks the more thrilling play in the game is the triple, about how there should be more stolen bases, about how the shift makes a lot of sense but makes for an awful fan experience, and he is of course correct about all of these things.

I would take it farther though. Whereas Pos was talking more in terms of The Game Of Baseball, I am talking more generally and more abstractly about The National Pastime. Yes, the game play itself needs to be addressed. But I think that the nation’s relationship with the game is suffering, and while I am not arguing anything quite so crazy as that this itself causes or explains other problems in America, I do think that what ails baseball and what ails America are a common malady, and that baseball is one of the entry points for addressing the American malaise writ large.

The lawsuit filed today is based on antitrust law and case law. Without going into a lot of details, the argument goes that Major League Baseball, through its monopolistic control of professional baseball, abused its power. While only four minor league franchises signed on to the initial lawsuit, it’s not hard to imagine many more joining in. It is also telling that the law firms involved have in the past represented the MLBPA.

Major League Baseball’s antitrust exemption has long been a bizarre thing and delving into the history here… well, I shouldn’t, and I won’t. I’ll just say this: The professional baseball system today, the majors and the minors combined, is best understood as a creation of a long series of historical actions, a critical one having been the 1922 Supreme Court decision in Federal Baseball Club v. National League that Major League Baseball was exempt from the Sherman Antitrust Act.

Regardless of what the Supreme Court felt, wrote, or meant in 1922, the antitrust thing has over time been caught up with the idea that there’s something “special” about baseball within the American system. Yeah, national pastime and all that. But even something beyond that. When people say that baseball is “as American as apple pie” there is something there that goes beyond any mere Supreme Court decision or opinion poll or what-have-you.

In 2017, the Miami Marlins were sold by Jeffrey Loria to a consortium led by Bruce Sherman and prominently including Derek Jeter. In his statement at the time of sale, Loria - Jeffrey f’n Loria! - said this, which I quote, italicize, and bold, so as to give it maximum emphasis:

"Owning a sports team, like most things in life, is temporary. An owner is merely the steward of a franchise, shepherding the advancement of this public trust during his or her tenure.”

It’s a beautiful sentence, a magnificant sentiment, and whether he meant it or not, it is 100% true, and should be the manifesto for all of the owners in major professional sports.

Each franchise is a public trust, and the owner is merely a steward. I have read (though cannot find the article now) that this is a sentiment much more strongly held in England as regards soccer teams there. In America, though, such a sentiment… well, it’s not really the American way, is it? The owner is the owner. He is the boss. Sure, he can’t piss the fans off too much, but the fans aren’t really the ones in charge, now are they?

Well, it shouldn’t be that way. Furthermore, Loria’s sentiment should be taken one step further. MLB owners are individually the stewards of their franchises, advancing those individual public trusts. Collectively, though, and through the offices of the league, they are the stewards of baseball, advancing that greater, more abstract public trust. And when the best interests of the owners are in conflict with the best interests of the franchises then it is the responsibility of Major League Baseball to say, no, the good of baseball outstrips everything else. It did not merely acquire such responsibility by fiat, but was as a matter of practical import imbued with such responsibility by no less than the Supreme Court of the United States!

It is in this light, after oh so many words, that I can more directly answer my friend Chris’s question as to why the lockout pisses me off so much:

The owners are not collectively showing interest in the well-being of baseball.

What is at hand does not come off as a disagreement between the owners and the players about the monetary terms of the sport. Rather, what we seem to have is an increasingly cynical approach to the major league game itself, coupled with an increasingly cynical approach to the institution of baseball writ large.

Major League Baseball has notoriously had numerous cheapskate owners over the decades. It is hardly a news flash that owners might be trying to drive player salaries down. Their bitter opposition to the advent of free agency… the engagement in collusion… the list goes on and on. But even through all of this there remains the idea that at a base level these men were still stewards, right? Just trying to run the team? Some doing it better than others? Ahhh, get real already, if you want to believe all that.

These four minor league franchises are arguing that MLB violated antitrust law. But let’s not stop there. The mass contraction more more than just a legal violation, it was a spiritual violation. What they did was very much in the American vein, and yet it was also fundamentally anti-American - by which I do not mean that it was in opposition to American tenets of business or in opposition to the trends of American history, but rather, most bluntly, that it was in opposition to America itself. What they did hurt America, and in so doing, they violated their collective public trust.

And what they are doing now with the lockout is they are doubling down. Instead of having simply figured most things out, which is eminently possible. Ken Rosenthal, in fact, has already resolved the majority of the sticking points by laying out what a new collective bargaining agreement could look like - his write-up is here (behind a paywall at The Athletic) - and if a sportswriter can sum things up so concisely it means that what’s going on is not just about money (even though Ken himself said it was all about money!) It’s about power, and more generally about the owners making it clear that the game belongs to them.

Well, fuck them.

Baseball doesn’t belong to them.

It belongs to us.

Yes, Major League Baseball should lose what’s left of its antitrust exemption. The 1922 Supreme Court decision is ludicrous, and has always been facially ludicrous.

But revoking antitrust is frankly meaningless today. It’s not like some upstart major league could compete with MLB today. We’re long past that point. We’re so far past that point that we need to think more clearly about where we actually are.

MLB should be recognized for what it is: a public trust, where the owners serve as the stewards of the individual franchises, but collectively and more specifically through the offices of the league as stewards of the broader public trust of lower-case major league baseball.

As a public trust, not only do they need someone like Theo Epstein to advocate for the on the field game, they need someone in the MLB offices who is empowered to advocate for the institution of baseball.

The advent of advanced analytics has redefined competition among the franchises, and it’s not like you can put that cat back in the bag. But along the way it has wreaked havoc on not only the game play, but also in how franchises conduct themselves organizationally, to the point where the logical business move was to contract numerous minor league franchises. Yet nowhere in that process was anyone intervening to speak on behalf of baseball. Nowhere in that process was anyone intervening to speak on behalf of America.

What we have seen in recent years, much more starkly than before, is how the perceived best interests of Major League Baseball are increasingly in conflict with the best interests of baseball.

How is baseball American like apple pie?

Perhaps because baseball, like America, has a way of perservering.

This is NelsonCorp Field in Clinton:

It was built as Riverview Stadium, in 1937, by the Works Progress Administration. (Public trust indeed.) It is still the home for baseball in Clinton. And baseball still plays in Clinton.

This past August, journalist Dave Hoekstra visited Clinton several days in advance of the hyped “Field of Dreams” game between the White Sox and Yankees in Dyersville, Iowa. In his beautiful piece, it is the above stadium he calls “Iowa’s Real Field of Dreams”. The semi-pro league that Clinton hosted in 2021 drew better average attendance than the Class A LumberKings drew back in 2019. The people of Clinton had been abandoned by Major League Baseball. But they had not abandoned baseball.

For as much as I’ve written here, there are so many other things I wish I could have gone into.

I don’t know what will come of the labor bargaining, I don’t know what will come of this lawsuit. I think the owners would be buffoons to let the lockout dent even a piece of the season. But, sigh, I don’t think they care. And , well,I think Rob Manfred is very much a buffoon. Or worse. As Dave Hoekstra puts it, he’s not even a baseball fan. And I think that says all you need to know about what’s wrong with the owners.

As much as I enjoy sitting down today at Comiskey and taking in a game, and as big a deal as I remember it being when I was a kid and we got to go to Wrigley… there is a voice in my mind saying that the Rockford Expos games were the most fun. And that the fun was not directly related to them being a minor league affiliate, but rather the experience of being at a game with people and hot dogs and silly promotions.

Maybe this year I should prioritize taking my boy to a Rockford Rivets game. Or even the Windy City ThunderBolts, a Frontier League team which plays in Crestwood (!?!) and whose opponents include a team actually called the Florence Y’alls.

Meanwhile, I’m going to continue my recent rash - and surprisingly inexpensive rash at that - of ordering baseball cards off of eBay to help inculcate a different angle of love of the game.

Yeah, I’m pissed at the owners. I think they’re short-sighted and I think they’re damaging the game.

But I’m not pissed at baseball.

It’s not their game.

It’s ours.