The Weather in South Bend

An unprecedented series of events could mean big money for minor league baseball

Welcome to Warning Track Power, a weekly newsletter of baseball stories and analysis grounded in front office and scouting experiences and the personalities encountered along the way.

There’s no offseason for WTP. Year Two has begun!

This season also marks Year Two of minor league baseball in its contracted and more regulated state. Last year, minor league baseball operated with 120 teams (four per each parent organization), down from more than 160 in prior seasons, as per MLB’s wishes. Sadly, some of the towns I had enjoyed traveling to over the years lost their teams.

I always looked forward to my annual visits to the affiliates. From San Antonio to Eugene, Mobile to Reno, these adventures were far from typical business trips.

While part of the excitement was, naturally, over which prospects I’d be seeing, it was often equally exciting to learn which scouts and executives would be at the ballpark.

Five days with someone in Visalia in July makes for a special kind of bonding experience. On Thirsty Thursdays up and down the California League, I’d find myself in a fraternity of sober scouts. (Sober during the game, that is.)

In the pandemic-shortened Major League season of 2020, there was no minor league baseball. Everyone was a little thirstier on Thursday.

Cut off the revenue stream from any business, large or small, and the consequences are pretty obvious. Without massive television rights deals in place, minor league franchises — mostly owned independently of the parent club — rely on ticket sales and concessions to generate revenues.

With the lockout currently threatening the start of the Major League season, minor league baseball may find itself in a lucrative position.

The lockout directly impacts 40-man players only. Teams have been freely signing minor league free agents all winter long. This month, in fact, some teams are holding Instructional League for their young prospects.

If the lockout disrupts the start of the 2021 MLB season, minor league teams could fill a newly created void. While the bickering between billionaires and millionaires will leave Major League stadiums empty, players wearing unfamiliar logos for absurdly named teams will entertain crowds in small towns from sea to shining sea.

(In the first half of 2020, the only pro baseball to be found was in Korea. ESPN faithfully broadcast one live game from the KBO on most nights.)

The financial implications stand to be significant. Every dollar is carefully contemplated in minor league baseball.

I learned that lesson first-hand on a rainy afternoon in South Bend in 2012. I was in town to watch the D-backs low-A ball affiliate. The roster included under-the-radar prospect Ender Inciarte as well as blue-chip pitcher Archie Bradley, who was the seventh overall pick in the draft the year before.

The weather was miserable into the late afternoon, and for minor league baseball in north Indiana, that meant one thing: a dismal walk-up. When fans and players today think about walk-up, they immediately consider the music that plays as the batter heads to the plate.

For a minor league front office, walk-up is day-of-game ticket sales. On this dreary day, the South Bend front office executive responsible for the bottom line wanted to postpone the game. The math just wasn’t going to work out. Game day vendors would likely outnumber the paid attendance. Perpetually spinning soft pretzels would circle counterclockwise for nine innings, only to be marked as lost inventory after the final out of the game.

From a baseball side, though, the game needed to be played. The forecast was in our favor, and we were here to develop players, weren’t we?

Player development and minor league economics clashed that night. Ultimately, the game was played, and I think I ate a lukewarm and curiously named soft pretzel.

So, what might an ongoing lockout do for minor league baseball? If ESPN was willing to broadcast games from Korea to a desperate baseball audience in America, what kind of exposure could teams in the right time zones receive this April? Would major advertisers step up for minor league baseball?

And, perhaps, most importantly: Would MLB allow these games to be played, and could they stop it if they wanted to? The minor league season will start on time, according to front office sources.

Less than one year ago, Minor League Baseball ceased to be governed independently; the remaining 120 farm teams all signed and returned their Professional Development Licenses (PDLs) to MLB, which now oversees and directly contracts affiliated minor league ball.

Whereas previous player strikes have led to the loss of games, no lockout ever has. There’s really no precedent for this scenario, and in a landscape in which MLB has more control over the minors than it ever has before, the unknown quantities multiply.

I sure hope to be watching a full slate of big league games on March 31. If that’s not an option, though, I’ll gladly tune in one week later to watch the Quad Cities River Bandits at the South Bend Cubs — weather permitting.

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