Leaving Las Vegas

September 15, 2001

You think of Las Vegas, you don't think of baseball. You think of gambling. Therein lies a minor tale of Baseball's failure to market itself, and doing disservice to its fans.

The great minds that run baseball use and abuse minor league baseball for the benefit of the Majors in a myriad of ways, far too numerous to account for in this humble column. I would like to note the occasion of what may be the last AAA "World Series" to be played in that humble small market city, Las Vegas, Nevada, however, as an example of how Major League Baseball is not particularly interested in Baseball, and thereby manage to screw the fans in yet another way.

The minors were once simply "small market" baseball. The quality of baseball in some minor leagues was at least as high as that of the lesser major league teams up through the 1950s. In the late 1940s, there were nearly ten times as many towns and cities with organized professional baseball as there are now, despite the recent renaissance of the minors. The Pacific Coast League, as late as the 1950s, threatened to break through to "major league" status in quality and attendance, until a combination of restraining monopolistic agreements and the majors moving into the West Coast ended any possibility of the marketplace determining where and when baseball would be played.

The decline of the viability of small market/minor league baseball was thanks to the coming of the almighty television dollar, which favored national conglomerations of broadcasts in major markets, particularly as the country urbanized. I'm not going to get weepy about the passing of small town America and the predominance of Wal-Mart over Old Man Henderson's Neighborhood Hardware Store -- thus is the tide of society.

I'm going to simply observe that a lot of the "big market" vs. "small market" nonsense going on in the Majors today is a product of the lack of a free market. Since the "markets" were defined by the majors fifty years ago, as you may have noticed, the population of the country has shifted. If teams could move anywhere they wanted, the market would eventually divide itself up into 30 teams of "medium size". There'd probably be three or four teams in the New York area, dividing that market up so that, say, Montreal might be more or less "equal".

Major League Baseball's control over the minors via the National Agreement in various forms is a monopoly's more or less natural inclination to try to have exclusive control of their product. The "raw ingredients" that go into their product -- young baseball players -- are also the raw ingredients of minor league teams. Every player in the minors actually works for -- or "is property of", as they like to say -- a specific major league team. It's impossible for an affiliated minor league team to hire its own players, and thus have control over its own destiny on the field of play. It's roughly akin to the old system of the movie studios dictating what movies could play in a local theatre.

The flipside of Baseball's monopoly is their continuing exclusive lock on "territorial rights" among both major and minor leagues. You're probably familiar with this concept: each Major League franchise has a territory spelled out for it, kind of like a mob syndicate, and no other Major League or affiliated Minor League franchise can come into its territory. The Majors have only recently begun to lighten up on these rules when they perceived they were losing some money to unaffiliated minor leagues that occasionally broached into the majors' territory.

In any event, this distorts the marketplace for the minors by pre-determining what is and is not a minor league city. So a city like Buffalo, which draws twice as many fans to its games as Montreal, is a "minor league" city because otherwise it would impede on Blue Jay, Indian, and Yankee/Met territory. A team can't realistically move out of a subsidiary market like Oakland to where the money-and-fans are, in San Jose, because that would infringe on the Giants' territory, so San Jose has to content itself with class A ball or making the drive up to San Francisco.

The real blow to real fans in "minor league" cities, of course, is that their games are totally meaningless. Once upon a time, there were pennant races in the minors, when the league championship in a minor league was a genuine contest of the best teams that could be assembled, and where the fans that had followed the team all year could root for their heros to the end. Nowadays, most AAA teams are eviscerated by call-ups of their best players to the majors. Some Major League teams out of contention would at least try to leave their AAA rosters intact for the minor league post-season, but a team at the Major League level in need of a player for a "real" game is going to call that player up -- especially if he's a pitcher -- and the AAA or even AA team's strength be damned.

Call me old-fashioned, but I think the vague possibility that a single game is meaningful in the context of a six-month-long season is one of the appeals of following an organized sport. The "schedule", after all, is what makes it organized.

The "Triple A World Series", in case you haven't heard of it, is an innovation of sort from Organized Baseball of three years' standing. (There were previous attempts at having a "Little World Series" in previous years, by the way, so it's basically more a revival of an old idea than an innovation.) It's a five-game championship series between the victors of the International League playoffs and the Pacific Coast League playoffs (the two-team format having been made possible by the disbandment of the 120-year old American Association in the interests of cost-cutting, but that's another story.) This year's AAA World Series starts September 18th.

You'd think this would be a nice reward for minor league fans who follow their teams all year, but it's not. The Triple-A World Series is played at a "neutral" site, Las Vegas, at least neutral in years in which the Las Vegas Stars don't make it all the way. This was part of the marketing genius of this event. Organized Baseball figured, hey, let's make this big event at a party city and try to get some extra television bucks (which, by the way, go to Major League Baseball via their ESPN contract, not the Minors). And it's not a bad idea to try to capitalize on the recent popularity of minor league baseball as a family entertainment to try to broaden baseball's audience.

Great idea on paper: total flop in reality. Because nobody across the country can follow minor league baseball at any level except the local one during the season, there being no national broadcasts of the minors all year save the AA and AAA All-Star teams, there's no natural audience. The games start at 9 PM eastern time or later, which ensures that their television audience is virtually nil by 2 or 3 in the a.m. Why should you, as a baseball fan, tune in in the first place when you know half the good players on either team have been transported to the majors, anyway? It's like paying to see a Broadway show with a cast made up entirely of understudies.

What's more, there's not even enough interest to fill the ballpark. The average attendance at AAA World Series games has been hovering around 4000, and that includes a lot of phantoms created by comp tickets. That's an off-night in a high-A ballpark. That's no knock on the citizens of Las Vegas: they've got other stuff to do late nights in September, and they support their own AAA franchise well enough during the regular season. Why should they care about two teams they probably haven't seen all year? [more]

From the Archives
September 15, 2001

Leaving Las Vegas

Archives Index

From the Archives September 15, 2001

Leaving Las Vegas

Archives Index

From the Archives
September 15, 2001