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Minor league baseball isn’t about baseball at all. It’s community. It is the ability to spend a summer evening in Anytown, U.S.A. watching a sport that is part of the fabric of America. And maybe if you were lucky, one of those prospects on the field would go on to become a star one day.

Then they would be your town’s star. Jose Canseco is still remembered in Medford, Oregon. Walla Walla, Washington still claims Tony Gwynn. But mostly, minor league baseball is root, root, root for the home team. A team to call your own.

Look, minor league baseball has never been perfect. Franchises have come and gone. Plenty of unscrupulous individuals have taken advantage of towns and fans over the decades. Despite that, America still loves the sport.
With the minors experiencing a resurgence over the past three decades, baseball’s ultimate con man got involved. Ron Manfred is doing what those old-time carnival grifters couldn’t do…destroy minor league baseball.

This series looks at how the sport went from America’s last great carnival to an opportunistic con and what looks to be the eventual big boxification of the entire system. This is how the how the minor leagues were lost.

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