MAJOR BLOGS - www.majorblogs.net - 06.02.07 - The National Association of Professional Baseball Leagues, aka The "NA" aka Minor League Baseball (with caps) aka MiLB, released one of its now-rare communiqués to the outside media last week.  MiLB announced the retirement of Mike Moore. Not well touted on ESpin, you might have missed the announcement between reruns of Denny Terrio's Dance Fever and the 2007 June Draft.

Over the 16 years of Moore's tenure as the head of the NA, the member leagues have experienced unprecedented prosperity. Moore, a staunch MLB party man,  may have also done more, inadvertently, to change the game and liberate Minor League Baseball than any of his renegade crusading predecessors did over more than a century.

The story of this serendipitous salvation starts with the 105 year old National Association that he helms.

Not Your Father's National Association. Or your Grandfather's. Or Your Great Grandfather's.

The NA was formed by the "independent" leagues to fend off the National and American League's dominance of the game in 1902. For twenty years the NA brokered an uncomfortable peace between the National and American, and the rest of white independent baseball.

In 1922 the United States Supreme Court, led by then chief justice William Howard Taft, handed down a decision in Federal Baseball Club v. National League . The "major" leagues were given the only legal monopoly in the United States, by way of exemption from the Sherman Antitrust Act, which prohibited businesses or an industry from colluding to fix prices and stagnate competition in the marketplace.

The key to awarding them this power was a decision that baseball clubs were an association of members that set a common schedule, but were all independently owned and operated businesses which, in and of themselves, did not operate across state lines.

The effective monopoly it granted MLB was used with ruthless efficiency against both players and the smaller professional leagues serving towns with smaller populations and more modest incomes. MLB could dictate the terms for acquiring players from the minors, and used it to pay a fraction of fair market value for players like Ted Williams and Joe DiMaggio.

The NA has been the lynch-pin of Major League Baseball's ability to maintain its federally-approved monopoly powers. At first the owners of major league baseball wanted to extinguish any potential competition. Then they came to see the leagues of the NA as an extension of their business that preserved their power. NA clubs beat the bushes for prospects, and shaped them up into professional players.

The leagues and their member clubs lost their independence to the crushing poverty of a wrecked economy in the 1930s, during the Great Depression. Signing on to the "farm" system was a velvet slavery, an exchange of political independence for financial salvation, because the major league clubs assumed player salaries throughout.

Legally, keeping the "minor" leagues alive was  testament that competition, however minimal, within the professional game of baseball, was still technically alive.

The one rebellion to the NA system came in the late 1940s, when Pacific Coast League president Clarence "Pants" Rowland tried to form a third major league after WWII, which was summarily crushed by MLB with the relocation of the Dodgers and Giants into key PCL markets, and the elevation of the Padres and Angels to the major leagues .

Between the western uprising and  the advent of the internet, for nearly 45 years the NA was little more than a sleepy organization that held meetings that coordinated the activities of MLB and the leagues under the association's umbrella.

The Times They Are A-Chaaangin' (Harmonica)

Under Moore, the NA found a new way to build its power: The Internet. Centralized information on minor league baseball was spotty and poor.  MLB had launched MLB.com to dominate the internet for baseball content with exclusives that would bring more revenue back to baseball by essentially covering itself.

The NA's board pushed for the development of a minor league website for baseball.

The NA rebranded itself and the lower levels of the professional game as "Minor League Baseball" officially. It set up its website at www.minorleaguebaseball.com and MiLB, the "mini-me" of the MLB, was born.

The Big Bust Theory of Baseball Evolution

Moore and the minor league owners were riding a tide that was finally turning in their favor.

From free agency to the 1994 strike to the Roger Maris record bump to the disaster of steroids in the game, Major League Baseball was falling apart, and minor league baseball was growing.

While Bud Light was spinning yarns about contraction and how the game had over-expanded, the minors were exploding.

The why is very simple: The world changed. Population demographics are moving back to small and mid-sized cities and suburbs and set up shop with the internet and FEDEX, rather than live on top of each other in New York, Chicago, or LA. 

Major League Baseball wasn't set up for that population shift.  They had to control more television and the internet just to keep up the revenue stream to feed the big salary engine, as attendance dropped and interest in the sport waned. 

Moore and the NA also owe a lot of their success to the MLBPA, the players' association. By keeping even the most mediocre of players from being sent down, those young talents stuck under the green cap improved the minor league game.

After more than a century of being the also-rans, the wannabees, clubs in the Moore era built new ballparks to greet all of these people who demanded major league-quality facilities in their small towns with the bustling business parks packed with DELLs and Microsofts and Intels. Attendance exploded more than 10 million from the late nineties into the first decade of the 21st century.

The Power Play Isn't Just for Hockey Anymore.

For the Tyrannical Thirty at MLB, their loss of attendance and the shrieking gains of the minors has been a growing concern.   Their response, as it always is to challenges of their business model or authority, is to control access to everything that is baseball even more tightly, and either own it, charge it access fees, or shut it down. 

The move on MiLB.com is busting their antitrust apart.  By way of the strong arm of MLB Advanced Media LP (BAM), an oxymoron of a name, it is very clear that MLB is controlling a vast network of players and teams across state lines, making them subject to the same regulation that companies like Subway or McDonald's face with their franchisees.

Minor League Owners Wanting Moore

Moore has played ball with MLB, aiding them in their takeover of the news business that the NA had been running by itself, because he and the board members, made up of other owners, could see the immediate financial benefits.

BAM  now runs a unified system to cover the majors and minors.  They have expanded coverage of the players that matter to MLB clubs,and reshaped the focus of  the MiLB mini-Me to look like a clone of its larger master's media.

The concept is that this brings greater revenue back to minor league owners by leveraging the "content" of baseball into the paid streams like television, and, down road, the internet where they can make more money than simply by selling seats, beer, and souvenirs.

It also brings concerns.  The shift of focus is away from the family friendly minors where 98% of the players are the local heroes to the engine that serves up a few dozen major leaguers every year. That is what MLB wants the audience to take away from the exercise, but it is not how minor league baseball got all of those fans in the first place.  As much as it is nice to see a Ryan Howard pass through, having the comfort of your Stubby Clapp or Mike Colangelo repping your club is more important, because most of these guys will be there over the next few years, particularly at the talent parking lot that is now the Triple-A.

Minor League Baseball leagues are still pretty independent. Their presidents and owners bristle when BAM issues edicts about how stats are collected, or they are not-so-gently strong-armed into moving their content into the minor league side of BAM.  They watch as major league clubs buy up a few teams here and there, and wonder if they can get squeezed out of their own organizations if MLB wants to chase the big money coming into the minor league side of the game.  

Yet none of the things that are feared to happen may come to pass.  By opening the door to content control between major and minor league baseball,  Moore, and his board members, have inadvertently created an avenue to a whole new world of the game.

2020: A Baseball Odyssey

What will be a major league team in 13 years?  What will be a minor league team?  We know that Sacramento and Memphis are major league markets for other sports. So are San Antonio, Indianapolis, and other towns.  Does Pittsburgh stay major league? How about Milwaukee?   

What happens when the minors audience may indeed be bigger than the majors?  The population shifts, and the telecommuting/lifestyle shifts all trend towards that happening by 2020.

By failing to be independent, and allowing Big Brother BAM to dominate the show on the minor league side of the Show, Moore has opened the door for the NA leagues to become even more powerful.

For no matter how much the Tyrannical Thirty would like to channel the fans of the minors into major league TV packages and get them to pay attention only to the major league parent clubs, these are home town fans who want more live sports, and weren't content with MLB to begin with.

There will come a point in time when millions of minor league fans will have to be treated less like rubes from the Styx and more like the owners of the game that they are rapidly becoming.

Baseball will morph into something new that serves all of the fans, not just the haughty ones in the creme de la creme of major league markets,and makes all of the clubs, major or MiniMe, even more money than today's broken system enjoys.

Great job, Mike!