Pro Baseball is not Just MLB Anymore

I noticed that the "Pro Baseball" group qualifies this as MLB or Major League Baseball for those of you who are from outside the country or who live under a rock anywhere in continental North America.   To the well-intentioned fan who set up the space I say "Congratulations!" You have responded well to the many invested decades of MLB telling you what to think.  It's the dirty little secret that MLB and the companies who pay them millions in licensing rights and access rights, like ESPN and Fox don't want you to know: Professional baseball is changing.

To set the record straight, "professional baseball," the playing of the game as a full-time career for the season for pay, includes MLB, the leagues of Minor League Baseball (MiLB), and the independent leagues like the Atlantic League, the Canadian-American League (CAN-AM), the Northern League, the American Association, and the Golden Baseball League.

Minor league and independent baseball are growing while MLB is shrinking.  Over the last decade, MiLB reports numbers that have gone from around 33 million at the beginning of the 21st century to around 43 million today.  The independents, barely on life support in the 1970s, are mushrooming today. Major League spin merchants like to lay this off on the building of new parks and the entertainment value of the sideshow products of the minors, like the kids areas and the Blues Brothers.

The truth is that millions of Americans in small to medium markets are becoming bigger players in the world economy without having to move to the "big city."  Companies make their headquarters around the country in Bellevue, Round Rock, and Omaha. They want quality live professional sports, not watching the majors on TV, and they pay to see it.  

That has been coupled with the disaster that is the MLB player contract system. Yes, the players were oppressed by the owners for far too long, but the pendulum of payroll has swung too far in the players favor. The green cap  keeps players of talent equal or greater to overpaid 40 man rosters stuck on the farm. The upshot is that you see a much higher quality of game at the Triple-A level and even the Double-A because the depth charts of many organizations are pretty blocked up.

Let's dispell some further common baseball myths: Being "major league" does not necessarily mean that you are a shred better than a lot of guys playing at the other levels of the game. Santa Claus will be real before there is truly a shortage of pitchers, and quality players.   

Minor League and Indy Baseball Are Lesser-Lights of the Game:  Minor League baseball, the farm system of developmental talent, is full of players of talent equal to, or sometimes better than major league players on the 40 man roster. The green-cap prevents other talented players from moving up, so players stuck on the farm play a higher quality of game.  Also, minor leagues encourage, for practice sake, complete games, base-stealing and other higher-risk aspects of the sport that are more shunned at the major league level. Produce or perish is alive and well in the minors. 

Independent baseball is not the amateur hour.  Most fans still work with the old MLB-induced chestnut that indy baseball means being in Siberia, and the games suck. Yet in 2006, the number one draft pick in the June amateur baseball draft was not an amateur. Luke Hochevar was playing for the Fort Worth Cats in the American Association when he was drafted in the June. Why? Scott Boras has pull. He stuck his client in indy pro ball to keep him pitching after the Dodgers wouldn't pay what the super-agent wanted for his client in an earlier draft.  Increasingly, independent baseball is being used by players to move to preferable career tracks.  Not doing well in your system? Don't want to wait for free agency? Get cut, and move the indies. You have a redemption season or two there, and you are back in play, hopefully with a club where you can ride higher on the depth chart.  For the fan, indy baseball provides all of the excitement at a fraction of the price. Don't tell fans of the St. Paul Saints or the Kansas City T-Bones that their players are dogs. Indy baseball fans come to watch the game and have fun, and maybe thumb their noses at the baseball establishment at MLB a bit. 

Pitcher Shortage: The lack of quality pitching is not due to a shortage of the species, but to money, and how they are recruited and handled.  We have a lot more specialty pitchers than we used to.

Before free agency and pitch counts, you had starters, and everyone else. If your arm couldn't take you the distance you were a reliever. There was no such thing as a closer.  That meant fewer slots overall for pitchers.

In the modern system, hurlers are specialized from birth.  Several are taught to complete games in the minors, but it's like the oxygen masks on an aircraft: No one expects them to use it.  

Even with the expanded rosters of pitchers in specialty roles, we don't have a pitching shortage.  MLB recruits players from places that, a couple of decades ago, our baseball owners, managers, and scouts would have turned their noses up at.  We have players from Australia, the United Kingdom, and New Zealand. Pitchers like Dice-K get insane amounts of money today. Two decades ago a major league scout would have written up the entire Japanese baseball industry as nice, but not "major league."  If we could restore the game of baseball to the inner cities, we would get scads more African-American, Latino and Asian-American players as well.

Baseball needs to recruit deeper into places that it doesn't and expect more from the athletes that it pays.  The "science" of baseball, sabremetrics and pitch counts, belong on the scrap-heap of bad ideas.

Players are in better condition, but we don't have as many of the towering pitching careers of guys like Ryan and Drysdale. Players who went way beyond their limits to moments of awe-inspiring greatness.  There are a few old-school types, like Pedro, Smoltz, and a handful of others who would rather be pulled off the mound dead than stop pitching. The irony is that players from the pre-free agency days were in worse "conditioning" than we have now, but they make most of our best modern pitchers look like spoiled poodles.

The Four Horsemen of the Baseball Apocalypse: When you pay insane amounts of money to a few truly great talents who make up barely 6% of MLB rosters on average, you have the four horsemen of the baseball apocalypse:

First Horseman: Money.  The motto of MLB and bank robbers is largely the same: No one gets hurt.  They play the game ultra-safe, because the astronomical payouts to players requires that they stay in good health.  Ty Cobb would be fined right out of the game for his aggressive brand of base stealing, an art of the game already at historic lows. No one steals home much. Too risky. 

Money breeds caution. Caution breeds sabremetrics. A scientific game is a huge snooze.  Give me Sandy Koufax, sore and tired, pitching with command even though common sense and the numbers say otherwise.  He may not have as long a career as Roger Clemens, whose manicure doesn't set until the ink dries on his contract with the highest bidder sometime in the first three or four weeks of the season, but my evenings watching the greatness of a Hersheiser or a Valenzuela will far exceed any I have seen with most of the so-called "greats" of today, save the rare few already mentioned.

Second Horseman: Greed.  Baseball has got to find a way to send mediocre players back to the minors or out of the game to capitalize on the talent that now sits stuck on the farm behind the green cap.  Whether the guy is in a slump and makes $7 million a year, or they make "just" a few-hundred grand, no one gets sent down unless they were on a minor league contract that makes them cheap enough to administer that form of reprimand. Even if George A. Owner could work himself up to flushing the thousands of dollars of salary per week down the toilet, the Players Union would be in the ER having scads of kittens.  They protect their own, and by "their own" I don't mean ballplayers, but superstars, and all of the wannabees at the major league level who are overpaid to start with because protecting the superstars jacks up league minimum salaries to the hundreds of thousands of dollars.  They are surrounded by agents and personal managers and hangers-on who suck off the fame money and power of this very broken system.  Greed also encompasses allowing fewer and fewer people to pay more and more to see less.  

Third Horseman: Covetousness. Major League Baseball has tried to milk every last dollar out of fans,  to the point of putting more and more of its games under expensive pay-per-view programming. They even wratcheted the number of games available to the general public down again this year, focusing back on Direct-TV as their primary media outlet for coverage.  Poor kids can't afford tickets to the game or the truck for the TV-for-fee in most major league markets either.  So they don't go. They don't watch. They don't play  MLB has done more to tune out a lot of poor folks for whom the game was a staple. 

NFL Football and the NBA both have the "it" factor for minority audiences, and baseball hasn't.  

Fourth Horseman: Control.  MLB owners have become uber-control freaks, particularly about content stream in the media.  What happens on the field is theirs, and how it gets distributed in the media is theirs too.  They have seen the future is the internet, and they have worked very hard to make sure that they are their own dominant content provider for the web, or that the other content providers pay them huge access fees to put out information about baseball.  MLB's legal right to practice as a monopoly, the famed federal anti-trust exemption, gives them a lot of latitude in how they do business that football and basketball and hockey do not have. The DirecTV deal, owning a "news" source like MLB.com that is highly filtered and censored by league policy and practice are all bad. Controlling the content to the level that baseball does not allow for their to be public participation in the game that is allegedly the national pastime.  How are objections to steroids, or even the DirecTV deal, to be voiced if no one in their right mind at MLB.com is going to launch an investigative exposé into their bosses' busineses?

Baseball is changing. MLB is trying to dominate from a few select markets, when the world of baseball is expanding out from under them.  People in places like Sacramento, Memphis, Las Vegas, Jacksonville, Nashville, Austin and many other cities can make the case for being at least as big economically and in terms of population interested in baseball as Milwaukee, Baltimore, Washington DC,  or Toronto.  What makes a major league city "Major" these days?  The Florida Marlins get outseated by their Triple-A, the Albuquerque Isotopes, pretty regularly most seasons. 

Is the solution to try and force this big square peg into the round hole that the MLB people have used for generations?  Should they do as they do now, creating more costly TV packages, more control of minor league media, and force people to watch Major League TV and buy MLB licensed product? Or, is there another way that embraces this change in a positive way that can make the owners money for generations to come and bring fans back to the game?

How to do such a thing?  

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