Minor league baseball hasn’t been able to take the field in more than a year because of the coronavirus pandemic.
When it finally returns, it will look a whole lot leaner.
That’s not an encouraging development for a sport that desperately needs to develop new fans at the grassroots level.
In a classic game of hardball, Major League Baseball essentially forced its will on the game’s crucial developmental levels, eliminating highly sought affiliations with 43 franchises — about a quarter of its sprawling minor league system.
D-Day came Wednesday, with MLB teams extending invitations to a lucky group of 120 teams — four for each of the 30 big league franchises — while barely seeming to care about teams that were left in the dust.
The Tri-City ValleyCats, for instance, learned their disappointing fate from a chart posted on the Baseball America website.
Rick Murphy, president and part-owner of the Troy, New York-based franchise, had no idea why his team in the now-defunct New York-Penn League failed to make the cut.
“It’s disappointing and surprising at the same time,” Murphy told the Times Union. “I think operationally, we did everything you could expect. We hit all the metrics.”
The ValleyCats were a short-season affiliate of the Houston Astros for 18 seasons, winning three league championships and drawing more than 4,000 fans per game for 11 straight seasons from 2008-18.
In their most recent season, Tri-City had the third-highest attendance in the 14-team league, averaging more than 3,869. The only two teams that were higher, Brooklyn and Hudson Valley, both survived with moves to a new league.
“You look at the facility, the attendance, you look at the fan base, you look at the geography,” Murphy said, pointing to a metropolitan area of more than 1.1 million residents that includes the nearby cities of Albany and Schenectady. “You look at the market size and what we’ve been able to do for the last 18 years, and you would think it would have put us in a good position to be part of the 120.”
Tri-City wasn’t the only team that had cause to gripe.
The Lexington Legends, long one of the better-drawing clubs in the Class A South Atlantic League, were cast aside in the contraction.
Ditto for the Kane County Cougars, a Class A Midwest League team based in the Chicago suburbs for nearly three decades. Despite ranking in the top three in attendance every year but one over their long history, the Cougars didn’t get the call from the big leagues.
Now, they’ll have to carry on as an independent franchise in one of the “affiliated leagues” that MLB is partnering with to supposedly help find landing spots for at least some of the spurned teams.
