Minor League Ball

One of the little treasures I found after moving to Sacramento from the Bay Area in 2001 was the Sacramento Rivercats minor league baseball team, the Oakland A's top level farm team. The Wall Street Journal recently wrote a good story on minor league ball's current wave of success and noted the 'Cats, who have been one of the minors' best drawing teams since coming in to the league in 2000.

It's not what the visionaries once predicted.

Back in the late '60s, when I started following the game closely, the future historians predicted that teevee would kill minor league ball. Why go all the way out to see the Toledo Mudhens when you could get the Yankees in the comfort of your very own home? One thought was that college baseball would end up being the "minor leagues", like it is for the NFL and NBA.

Not only has minor league baseball gone completely in the other direction, but often right under MLB noses. Brooklyn has a Mets farm team. There's a successful independent team in St. Paul, right next to the Twins. I read an interesting piece on how suburbs of MLB teams are some of the best places for minors because you've got an already interested fan base and corporate customers. (Heck, I get to a lot of 'Cats games through a local firm's corporate season tickets. If they aren't used for the day, they lay 'em out and let their friends grab 'em for free after noon gameday.)

The other big change, I read elsewhere , is that now most minor league teams are locally owned. The old PCL Phoenix Giants were once owned by the San Francisco Giants to just serve just as a breeding ground to fill the major league roster. The MLB Giants didn't have to care much about the quality of the food or the parking down in Phoenix. Then a local owner bought them, renamed them the Firebirds and primed the market for the MLB Arizona D'Backs.

Like the WSJ story notes, these teams are run like real businesses, in pleasant stadiums with real amenities. They've also been able to tap into some of the same urban planning which built a lot of the latest MLB parks, creating a downtown destination. Memphis, which is discussed in the article, is invoked up here in Sacramento as an example of why a new basketball arena is a marvelous jumpstart for local business.

The amenities are refreshingly simple. Local high school choirs butcher the national anthem while the school's cheerleaders jump and stomp. If the San Francisco Giants' SBC Park did have a hot dog shooter, like Raley, it would be sponsored by 3Com and shoot $6 custom German sausage. That's another thing I like about Raley Field. They stick to good beer, cheesy nachos and foot long dogs. At a (relatively) reasonable price. I admire SBC's top notch marketing. But there's something which connects you to your community about watching the a local hardware store hold a race around the bases for 7 year olds as part of the seventh inning stretch.

My good friends in Oakland are in a quandary about a new ballpark for the Athletics baseball team. I wonder if Oakland (pop. 370,000 compared to Sacramento's 425,000) is simply trying to play in the wrong league.

The Big Picture is that despite all the endless on and on about how we're all getting cocooned in our high tech entertainment dens, were are at heart and soul social creatures. We need companionship, even if we're just one of the crowd. If we build it, it turns out we will come. We have to. It's our nature.