Mack – Quid Pro Quo

Good morning.

I have written about baseball since 2015. 

Before that, I was in the radio industry beginning in 1970 and rose to the position of owner-operator of radio stations in Florida and South Carolina.

I also held the position of VP for GE Capital, in charge of cleaning up the bad operations of failed radio stations they had financed and called the note in on.

All this is being mentioned here to support my claims in the past that I understand the need for an owner to create positive cash flow. Today, these owners are not only responsible to their lending institutions, but also to their own Board of Directors that THEY created. Crazy.

Moving back to baseball, I have been primarily a minor league writer. 

I understand how the game progresses from the sandlots to the majors. Other than Bryce Harper, I don’t know a domestic baseball player to go straight to the majors from High School. Joe Nuxhall? I don’t know.

This recent developments where the multi-millionaire and billionaire owners are trying to save a few bucks by terminating 40+ minor league teams would translate in my old broadcasting world as trying to increase the profitability of my radio station by changing the toilet paper from two-ply to one.

I have been to many minor league games in many minor league towns. No, they aren’t the LA Dodgers, but many are located in towns and cities that locals have no chance of seeing any organized baseball games other than watching these soon to be disposed teams. Take the Appy league alone. Every team but one will disappear.

Where are the kids that live there going to go now? Hop in their new Benz and drive to Atlanta? I don’t think so.

I’m really pissed at this and I additional feel for all the minor league writers who are paid peanuts to cover these teams. I was one of them in Savannah. I was paid only $200 a week to drive 60 miles round trip to all home games and write a weekly one-page column on the Savannah Sand Gnats.

That team was taken away from me when their Atlanta-based owners chose to move the team to Columbia and improve their bottom line.

I want you to do something tonight on the way home.

Drive to the baseball fields outside an inner city middle school and ask one of the kids there if they understand the need to improve the profit and loss sheet of, well, anything?

They are reducing the 40-man to save money. Now they are reducing amount of minor league players they can pay bad wages to.

And this isn’t designed to get their baseball operation out of the red. 

No, this is just designed to add to their money pot.

In 2020, there has to be a better way to represent the game we all love.