A Fourth of July without baseball
Bianchi: American dream has turned into financial nightmare.
Ibarbecuet is Fourth of July weekend — a time when Minor League Baseball parks across the nation are supposed to be having a starspangled celebration of America, complete with baseball,
and beer.
Red, white and brew.
Mom, dad and the kids piling into the minivan and headed to the ballpark to watch the Daytona Tortugas, Fort Myers Mighty Mussels or Jacksonville Jumbo Shrimp.
Players wearing special patriotic uniforms covered in stars and stripes.
And, of course, the traditional fireworks show after the game.
“Fourth of July weekend is what Minor League Baseball is all about,” says Tortugas general manager Jim Jaworski. “Our sport is part of the American fabric.”
Sadly, that American fabric is torn and tattered right now. The American dream has turned into a financial nightmare for Minor League Baseball.
For the first time in history, the official announcement was made earlier this week that there will be no Minor League Baseball this summer because of the coronavirus pandemic. And in communities across the nation, a summer without Minor League Baseball is like a summer without water balloon fights, a slice of cold watermelon and body-surfing at the beach.
It’s great that Major League Baseball is planning a return for a 60-game season at the end of this month, but in many midsized cities throughout America, baseball doesn’t mean the Los Angeles Dodgers or the New York Yankees. It means the Toledo Mud Hens, Lansing Lugnuts or Montgomery Biscuits.
Minor League Baseball isn’t just a sport; it’s a nostalgia and a hope and dream. It’s young, up-and-coming players and desperate, down-and-out players all trying like crazy to make it to The Show. It is a core group of fans who not only root for their players, they know their players because they’ll probably see ’em at the bar after the game.
These fans take ownership and have a collective sense of pride and passion about their baseball teams. These teams become a way of life and quality of light in their communities. Remember in Bull Durham when the team started winning games and making a run and Annie said, “For one extraordinary June and July, the Durham Bulls began playing baseball with joy and verve and poetry.”
But what happens now that the poetry has eerily gone silent and these teams have essentially lost the ability to make money for an entire year. This isn’t Major League Baseball, where teams can play games in empty stadiums and still recoup money because of the massive revenue intake from broadcast rights. The entire revenue structure of Minor League Baseball is based upon luring fans to the ballpark for 70 games a season.
You wonder, like many small businesses
during the pandemic, if some of these teams will be like the mom-and-pop pizza joint and just shudder their doors, go bankrupt and never be heard from again.
To make matters worse, the shutdown comes in the wake of the news that leaked out last fall that Major League Baseball plans to cut the total number of affiliated teams in the minors from 160 to 120. So not only are minorleague ownership groups such as the Tortugas worried about their financial futures because of the pandemic, they are worried about being contracted out of business by Major League Baseball.
“We’ve been playing baseball at Jackie Robinson Ballpark for more than 100 years,” Jaworski says. “We remain optimistic that we will be playing next year and beyond, but nobody knows for sure.”
Meanwhile, these teams are wracking their brains to figure out a way to create some cash flow. According to Baseball America, “The Pensacola Blue Wahoos and Salem-Keizer Volcanoes have transformed their ballparks into Airbnb properties for fans to rent out overnight. Others are hosting in-park restaurants, farmers markets, drive-in movies and anything else teams can dream up to get a few drops of revenue in an otherwise arid season.”
Translation: Teams are desperately doing everything possible to try and pay the rent and stay afloat. Hundreds of minorleague players have already lost their jobs and most teams have exhausted the payroll protection loans from the government and begun laying off employees.
The Tortugas, for instance, furloughed seven members of their staff in June, including the team president. They are trying to recoup any revenue they can by hosting a variety of different community events, including an upcoming dance recital.
“We’re doing everything we possibly can to try and move forward and make the best of it, but there are obvious economic hardships when you’ve lost your major revenue stream,” Jaworski says. “And it’s even tougher because there is no rule book. None of us can say, ‘The last time this happened, this is how we handled it.’ The fact is, this has never happened before.”
It is a sad, forlorn story that hearkens back to something former baseball Commissioner A. Bartlett Giamatti once eloquently wrote about his sport: “[Baseball] breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall all alone.”
Except the blossoms never appeared in minor-league ballparks and the chill rains haven’t even come yet.
The winter loneliness has come way too early this year.
The boys of summer are filing for unemployment.
The Fourth of July fireworks have gone silent.
Email me at mbianchi@orlandosentinel.com. Hit me up on Twitter @BianchiWrites and listen to my Open Mike radio show every weekday from 6 to 9 a.m. on FM 96.9 and AM 740.
“We’ve been playing baseball at Jackie Robinson Ballpark for more than 100 years. We remain optimistic that we will be playing next year and beyond, but nobody knows for sure.” — Jim Jaworski, Daytona Tortugas GM