A minor(s) undoing

Pitchers and catchers report this week to Florida and Arizona, which are glad tidings indeed for those of us who just finished tunneling out of our homes through what the Blob will call a "short ton" of snow instead of another "sh" word.

In other words, winter has us in its icy grip, or some other weather dude cliché.

And so it will be a welcome thing to turn on the TV some day soon and see green grass and red brickdust and blue skies, and men in shirtsleeves playing a child's game. Baseball, after all, promises spring like few other American pursuits. And I suppose that, too, is cliché.

Ditto the notion that no one can muck up a good deal like Major League Baseball.

Like all soulless corporate entities MLB craved more control over its product, and so it effectively whizzed in its groundwater. In order to gain firmer control over the minor leagues that feed it, MLB eliminated 42 minor-league clubs, some of which had been fixtures in their communities since the turn of the last century. Then it restructured what was left into six leagues, attractively graced with pseudo-names like Double-A Northeast and High-A Central.

The latter is where your Fort Wayne TinCaps will play, and maybe it will still be called the Midwest League and maybe it won't. In any case, the bump up to high A has been long overdue for one of the minors' best-run and most successful franchises, so applause, applause to Mike Nutter and his crew for that.

However ...

However, it's not the TinCaps I'm thinking of today. It's the Burlington Bees and the Clinton Lumber Kings.

The former began playing baseball in Burlington, Ia., in 1924, and had been a fixture in the Midwest League for nearly 60 years. The latter, meanwhile were born in 1954 and had been playing in the Midwest League since 1956, succeeding predecessors (the Clinton Giants and Clinton Owls) who began playing in Clinton in 1934.

Now both have been kicked downstairs to something euphemistically called the Prospect League, which is short for "college kids who aren't really prospects." They're out of the affiliate club, and those that are left were forced to surrender a measure of local control so that MLB, presumably, could more effectively homogenize the product.

"Homogenize," in this case, being short for "institute the requisite cookie-cutter corporate blandness."

This of course strikes at the heart of what has always made the minors special, which is a certain local flavor and/or quirkiness. Every team did it differently, from promotions to presentation to concessions. Hopefully MLB will still allow all this to continue, but the rhetoric doesn't make it sound that way.

Instead, Rob Manfred's released statement is a masterwork of Corporate Speak, with plenty of the usual disingenuousness and/or straight up nonsense.

"We are excited to unveil this model, which only provides a pipeline to the Majors, but continues the Minor Leagues' tradition of entertaining millions of families in hundreds of communities," Manfred's statement reads in part.

Of course, no mention is made of the fact that, under the new model, the minors will be entertaining fewer millions of families in a third fewer communities. 

But, hey. You can't mention everything, right?