Minor considerations

So here are a few things you might be hearing now, with The Season fully upon us:

"Peace on Earth, goodwill toward men."

"Merry Christmas!"

"Happy holidays!" ('Cause there really is more than just one)

"Did so!"

"Did not!"

Ah, sorry. Don't know how those last two snuck in there.

Don't know how a season of giving became a season of taking, because I haven't talked to the money-grubbers who run Major League Baseball. They are complaining, essentially, that the minor leagues are a pain in the butt that cost them too money. So they rolled out a grand plan in November to kick 42 minor-league teams (and their communities) out of the affiliate club, and the minor leagues have responded, essentially, by saying "Oh, HELL, no."

(An important sidenote: The Fort Wayne Tincaps are not one of the 42. This is because their home ballpark, Parkview Field, is one of the finest minor-league facilities in the country, and the TinCaps are one of the minors' best-run franchises. Which means they draw, and therefore obliquely give MLB a generous return on its investment.)

In any case ... 42 teams (and, don't forget, their communities) are almost a quarter of all minor league affiliates. This is not just pruning the tree, in other words. It's cutting the damn thing down and chopping it up for firewood.

It's also Major League Baseball that's doing this, which is hardly the charity case all of commissioner Rob Manfred's carrying on about the minor leagues might lead you to believe.

"We subsidize to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars every single year the operations of minor league baseball," Manfred whined at baseball's winter meetings last week, accusing MiLB's negotiations of being "unreasonable" and, essentially, no negotiations at all.

"A take-it-or-leave-it, status-quo approach," is how Manfred characterized it.

This is both "demonstrably inaccurate," according to MiLB, and aggravated poor-mouthing of the most egregious sort. Those "hundreds of millions of dollars," for instance, roughly can be translated as "all of our spare change, dammit."

This is because it's barely been a year since MLB hammered out a new TV package worth $5.1 billion. It's also barely been days since the Yankees bought the services of Gerrit Cole for $324 million over nine years, sand the Angels signed Anthony Rendon to a seven-year, $245-mill deal.

In other words: Major League Baseball is rolling in it like Scrooge McDuck.

And if you're saying here, "Mr. Blob, this sounds like that American thing of obscenely rich folk complaining about not being even more obscenely rich," you are an astute Blobophile. That's exactly what this is.

It's also disingenuous as all get out, given that Manfred's rationale for minor-league contraction was to benefit the players by providing them upgraded facilities, better pay and better travel situations. As Eric Stephen points out in the SB Nation piece, it's a curious position, given that two years ago MLB successfully lobbied Congress to include in its budget a provision that, among other things, would forbid minor leaguers from earning overtime pay no matter how many hours they worked.

Now, there is no doubt that a lot of the teams (and communities) MLB wants to axe have desperately sub-standard facilities. This is especially glaring in an era when more and more minor league facilities are going up that rival their MLB big brothers in style and ballpark amenities, albeit on a smaller scale. And, yes, you have to go no farther than the corner of Ewing and Brackenridge in downtown Fort Wayne to see that.

The place on Mount Pleasant Street in downtown Burlington, Iowa, is somewhat different.

That's where Community Ballpark sits, and a decade ago I was there to watch the TinCaps finish off the Burlington Bees to win the Midwest League championship. It was a small (capacity 3,200), spare place, if clean and neat and impeccably groomed. And when the game was over, the champagne dripped from the ancient ceiling in the tiny visitor's clubhouse.

That's about all I remember. And it comes back to me now because, as you might have guessed, Burlington is on the MLB's preliminary cut list, along with fellow Midwest League representatives Beloit, Wis. and Clinton, Ia.

Here are a few things about that, though.

The Burlington Bees have existed in some form or fashion for 130 years.

They've played in the Midwest League since 1962.

Small, neat Community Field has been their home since 1947.

I don't know what constitutes an institution these days. But 72 seasons in the same ballpark, and 57 in the same Class A league, would seem to qualify.

Also, this would seem to be the right time to remind everyone of how slavishly devoted to its history Major League Baseball has always been, often to its own detriment.

Well. Not so much anymore, apparently. Not so much anymore.