By
Minor Leagues, I mean leagues affiliated with Major League teams. But I also have a lot of other arbitrary rules
for what constitutes a good league. You
like the League to have a certain amount of its own tradition, but also not
take itself too seriously. This can be reflected in the team names, how
far away the teams are from each other, and even just what cities the teams are
in. One of the prime candidates for the
title of Best League has got to be the Midwestern League. It has a FANtastic combination of the perfect
places for baseball teams, relationships these teams can foster with their big
league clubs, and identities they can forge with their own fan bases.
A
perfect example of this can be found in the Cedar Rapids Kernels. The Minnesota Twins’ low-A farm club down in
Iowa, which a couple buddies of mine and I went down for a road trip to see,
are in my opinion doing everything right in the aforementioned categories. The name Kernels identifies well with the
area’s farming industry, but is goofy enough for the kids to enjoy. The logo itself is a baseball bat dressed in
a corn husk, wearing a baseball cap- it’s everything you want a minor league
logo to be. But besides that, they’ve
just made all the right marketing decisions.
Their field is beautiful, and as developed as any I’ve seen at that
level. And when they realized what they
had in new prospect Byron Buxton and went above and beyond their normal plan by
actually making sherseys with his name, they also made the right call.
But all
this seems very typical of the franchises in that league. There are sixteen of them, so they all have
to distinguish themselves in their own ways.
Alliteration in a name is a good place to start because it’s fun to say. The Dayton Dragons and Lansing Lugnuts both
fit this description quite well. And
most of these teams are located in reasonably-sized metro areas. They don’t have the warmest weather, but
they’re able to support a baseball team that size, especially if that team has
an exciting attraction or an identity the area can be proud of.[i] Connections to the major leagues probably
help, too. The Wisconsin TimberRattlers
are a couple hours from their big league club, the Milwaukee Brewers; same goes
for the Peoria Chiefs and theirs, the St. Louis Cardinals; nor are the Western
Michigan Whitecaps much further from the Detroit Tigers. So a lot of these fans have easy access to
the teams their favorite players will soon end up on.
The
Carolina League, on the other hand, is in my opinion a very poorly thought-out
league, which could learn a few lessons from the Midwestern League. It’s a class A Advanced league, but it
contains only eight teams, without many nearby connections to the big league
clubs, relatively speaking. Only two
teams play less than two states away from their big league affiliates, and
several are much further than that. But besides that, the names are not so much
uninspired, but rather miscalculated. I
think there’s a rule somewhere that you can’t name a team after the league they
play in, and yet the Carolina Mudcats are trying to do that.[ii] I wouldn’t call a team playing in the
American League, America! Other
questionable teams’ names include the Potomac Nationals, named not after a
city, county or state but a river. I wonder how many of their fans live on or in
said river. And finally, I originally
thought the Wilmington Blue Rocks were out of North Carolina, as there is a
major city of the same name located there, a place the league names itself
after. But nay!-they represent the city
in Delaware. If you’re keeping score at
home, that makes three out of the eight teams representing one of the two titular
states. Classic Carolina League! Also, these eight teams are spread over five
states ranging from Myrtle Beach in the Deep South, to Wilmington, well into the Mid-Atlantic region.
The
bigger reason the Carolina League has to be a poor idea for the type of sport
it’s trying to promote has to do with what they’re competing against. While I haven’t compared the types of attendance
they have to the other events to which I’m about to refer, it stands to reason,
given the scale of these respective events.
There is a limit to the amount of sports an area can handle, and I
surmise that the Carolina League is topping the area out of it. Auto racing is a much bigger deal in this
area than it is elsewhere. And despite
the small concentration of teams in this particular area, nowhere in America is
ever going to escape the influence of the NFL.
This is all without mentioning what the area might be the most well
known for: college basketball.[iii] North Carolina has enough die-hard fans for
the rest of the area, but the ACC has a strong grip now on the whole eastern
seaboard. The North Carolina-Duke
rivalry is one of the country’s best in any
sport, and Georgetown, not even an ACC member, is one of the most storied
programs in the region. Therefore, my
fixes: rename the Carolina team Raleigh, rename the Potomac team to one of the
cities or counties around there, and rename the league The Piedmont League.
[i]
Just one of these teams, the Great Lakes Loons, sins in a way to which I will
refer later, not picking a city, county or state in their name.
[ii]
And they play in Five County Stadium.
Way to assert a specific identity…
[iii]
My apologies to NASCAR and college football, both with valid complaints.
