MT240 Unit 10 Sport and Society Paper Example

Fifty-Eight Years and a Letter From New York: A Unit 10 Sport and Society Paper on Losing a Minor League Club

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Purdue University Global

MT240: Sport in Society

Unit 10 Sport and Society Paper

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

The river city, its ballpark, club, attendance and budget figures are composite and illustrative; the facts about the 2020 to 2021 reorganization of the minor leagues come from public reporting; the sources cited are real.

Introduction

In February 2021 the city of Calder Falls, a composite river town of about 46,000 people in the Appalachian Mountains, learned that its baseball club would no longer be a minor league affiliate of any major league team. The club had held an affiliation since 1963. Five years earlier the city had spent $9.2 million of public money renovating its ballpark, largely to meet facility standards that the minor leagues' governing agreement required. The club survived, but in a development league for amateur players with no tie to a major league organization, and its attendance fell by more than a third.

Local explanations blamed the market. The town was small, its population was aging, and its ballpark sat on a floodplain at the edge of downtown. This paper argues that those explanations miss the cause. Calder Falls lost its affiliate because the body that governs minor league baseball changed, and the new arrangement gave one party the power to decide which towns would keep professional baseball. Coakley (2021) argues that sport is shaped by who holds power to define its rules and distribute its resources, and the reorganization of the minor leagues is a clear case of that power shifting.

The paper first sets out the background, then examines the case through four themes from the course: money, power, identity and labor. A counterargument section takes seriously the case that the changes improved baseball for the players who remained, and the conclusion considers what the case shows about sport and society more broadly.

Background

For most of the twentieth century, relations between the major and minor leagues were governed by a negotiated agreement, renewed every several years, between Major League Baseball and the National Association of Professional Baseball Leagues, the minor leagues' own governing body. The last version, the Professional Baseball Agreement, expired in September 2020. Rather than renew it, Major League Baseball took over the administration of the minor leagues, reduced the number of affiliated clubs from about 160 to 120, and offered the remaining clubs ten-year licenses setting out facility, travel and operating standards. Clubs left out were offered places in new or converted leagues: an independent partner league, a league for players eligible for the draft, or a summer league for college players.

Calder Falls was one of the clubs left out. Its league, a short-season circuit for players in their first professional summers, was converted into a summer league for college players. The club kept its name, its ballpark and its staff, but its players became amateurs on summer break and it lost the major league partner that had paid player salaries and coaching.

Money

The reorganization saved the major league organizations money, while the town carried costs it could not recover. Under the old agreement, each major league team paid the salaries of the players and coaches it assigned to its affiliates. Fewer affiliates meant fewer players and staff to pay, and consolidating clubs closer to major league organizations reduced travel costs.

The town's costs were already sunk. Calder Falls had financed the 2016 renovation with a twenty-year bond, and in 2021 it still owed about [$6.4 million]. Its annual payment, about [$590,000], had been justified by the economic activity a professional club was expected to bring downtown. Economists have long doubted such claims. Bradbury et al. (2023), reviewing decades of research on sports facilities and local economies, found little evidence that teams or stadiums produce meaningful local growth, and Agha (2013) found that minor league baseball shows only modest, inconsistent effects on local income. Calder Falls, in other words, may have overpaid for its ballpark even when it had an affiliate. But the renovation also bought the town something it could not price: a guarantee, as it believed, that professional baseball would stay.

The town paid for standards it did not set and lost the club anyway.

Power

The decisive change was in who governed. Under the old agreement, minor league clubs bargained collectively with the major leagues, and while the major leagues held more power, the minors could negotiate terms and threaten to walk away. Under the new arrangement, Major League Baseball issued licenses, set the standards, and decided which clubs would receive them. The minor league clubs no longer had a governing body of their own that could negotiate on their behalf.

This shift explains Calder Falls' loss better than its market does. Attendance research has found that minor league crowds depend on population, income, promotions and the quality of the ballpark (Gitter & Rhoads, 2010), and Calder Falls' attendance of about 142,000 in 2019 was average for its league. Several clubs with smaller crowds kept their affiliations because they were closer to major league organizations' spring training sites or other affiliates, which reduced travel. The decision turned on the major league organizations' logistics, not on whether Calder Falls supported its team.

Long (2013) shows that public subsidies for sports facilities often leave cities bearing risk while teams and leagues keep control. Calder Falls is a small-scale case of the same pattern. The city held the bond, but it had no seat at the table where its club's future was decided.

Identity

For fifty-eight years the club was part of how Calder Falls described itself. Players who went on to the major leagues were remembered in a display at the ballpark entrance, families had held season tickets for three generations, and the club's annual fireworks game was the largest public gathering in town. Coakley (2021) notes that sports teams often provide a sense of community belonging that persists even when the economic case for them is weak.

The development league kept the games but changed their meaning. Fans could no longer say that the players on the field might someday play in the major leagues for the parent club, and the link to a national institution was gone. Attendance fell to about 88,000 by 2022, a decline of more than a third. The decline suggests that what residents valued was not baseball alone but professional baseball, and the connection to a larger world it represented.

Labor

The reorganization also changed the work of minor league players. The number of affiliated clubs fell by about a quarter, and in 2021 Major League Baseball shortened its amateur draft from forty rounds to twenty. Fewer clubs and fewer draft picks meant fewer paid positions for young players. Players who would have spent a summer in Calder Falls as professionals, earning low but real wages, now played there as unpaid college athletes or not at all.

Those who remained professional saw improvements. Major league organizations began providing housing for minor league players in 2022, and in 2023 minor league players, newly represented by a union, ratified their first collective bargaining agreement, which roughly doubled minimum salaries. The labor picture is therefore mixed: fewer jobs, but better ones.

Counterargument

A reasonable case can be made that the reorganization improved minor league baseball. Many facilities had been in poor condition, travel was exhausting, and pay was so low that players had sued over wage violations. The new standards required better clubhouses, lighting and training rooms, and concentrating players in fewer clubs closer to their parent organizations made higher pay and better conditions affordable. From the players' point of view, fewer but better jobs may have been an improvement.

This paper accepts that the changes helped the players who remained. But the improvements did not require that one party gain the power to decide alone. Facility standards and higher pay could have been negotiated under a renewed agreement, as earlier agreements had raised standards before. The question is not whether the outcome was better for some players but who decided, and on whose terms. Calder Falls had paid to meet the standards of the previous agreement and still lost its place when the rules changed.

Conclusion

Calder Falls did not lose its affiliated club because it failed as a market. It lost the club because the governance of minor league baseball changed from a negotiated agreement to a system of licenses issued by one party, which then chose clubs on the basis of its own costs. The town's public investment, made in good faith to meet the old standards, bought it no voice in the new arrangement.

The case reaches beyond baseball. Sport often presents itself as a matter of merit and demand, where the best players and most devoted fans are rewarded. But the rules that decide who plays where, and which towns get professional sport, are written by organizations with their own interests. When those organizations change the rules, communities that have invested money and identity in sport may find they had less control than they believed.

References

Agha, N. (2013). The economic impact of stadiums and teams: The case of minor league baseball. Journal of Sports Economics, 14(3), 227-252. https://doi.org/10.1177/1527002511422939

Bradbury, J. C., Coates, D., & Humphreys, B. R. (2023). The impact of professional sports franchises and venues on local economies: A comprehensive survey. Journal of Economic Surveys, 37(4), 1389-1431. https://doi.org/10.1111/joes.12533

Coakley, J. (2021). Sports in society: Issues and controversies (13th ed.). McGraw-Hill.

Gitter, S. R., & Rhoads, T. A. (2010). Determinants of minor league baseball attendance. Journal of Sports Economics, 11(6), 614-628. https://doi.org/10.1177/1527002509359758

Long, J. G. (2013). Public/private partnerships for major league sports facilities. Routledge.