What has looked inevitable for weeks finally became official yesterday..Minor League Baseball’s 2020 season is over before it began..there will be no minor league baseball played in 160 towns across the country this year.

Here are three good stories about this

First this one from the New York Times (above) It does a nice job explaining where we are and how we got here.

This next one is from Forbes last month. It provides important context to the back story behind the story of how the Major League draft went from 40 to just five rounds last month.

Finally there is this story from ESPN, which asks and answers some important questions about what this means for Minor League Baseball.

But the closing paragraph in the ESPN piece is worth highlighting here

“When the minor league season ended last summer, business was good — perhaps as good as it had ever been. Most teams were profitable, with more than 40 million fans clicking the turnstiles of minor league parks across the nation. Now we don’t know what the landscape will look like when we next see affiliated baseball at the minor league level.

We don’t, in fact, know if we will be able to recognize that landscape at all.“

ESPN

You won’t be surprised to know that I have some pretty strong feelings about this. I spent the whole day writing and I will turn it into a video tomorrow but am going to need some more time to do it justice.

Suffice it to say for now, I fully intend to continue with the Low Mileage Series this summer, in fact my resolve is even greater than it was before this news became official. But I am very worried about what 18 months without fans will do to the landscape of Minor League Baseball I fell in love with on our Excellent Adventure. I think its likely that the communities that will need minor league baseball the most in the months and years ahead, are also those at the greatest risk of losing it. I want to do everything I can with this series to try to help mitigate that risk.

More coming tomorrow…

Bill