Quote:
Originally Posted by Eugene Church
You are right... minor league rosters stayed fairly static in the 40s and 50s... not like today... you got to know and love the local minor league players... you didn't need a scorecard to know who was on the team... you knew them up close and personal... not so today... minor league players are literally here today... and gone tomorrow.
Back in the good old days of minor league baseball... back in the 40s and 50s, the minor league teams actually tried to win games, make the playoffs and maybe the league title... not so today... nowadays, they are just used to develop players and care less about winning games.
Minor league teams in the 50s had career minor league vets year-after-year... about half the roster was minor league vets and about half of MLB farm players.
Those were the really good times of minor league baseball... I really miss the Dixie Series where the playoff winners of the Southern Association and the Texas League would play each year for the Double A title... also the Little World Series between the playoff winners of the International League and the American Association for the Triple A title.
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The minors had a big hand in that ending. They could have stayed independent, but it was hard. With MLB money they sold out, never had a real pennant race or even a real team again, but they kept afloat. They can pay the bills, mostly.
For me it's hard to not compare the minors to the structure of soccer all over the world. While the US minors essentially all gave up their independence and ambitions, the lower tiers of world soccer mostly all kept theirs. There are 3rd or 5th or 7th-tier teams in England or Germany who have had strong fan bases for a century or even going on 150 years. Great-grandfathers and grandfathers and fathers and sons all root for Sheffield Wednesday or 1860 Munich or Leyton Orient. There are teams in the soccer equivalent of AA ball drawing 20,000 fans a game. They have 32-year-olds who are good players, just not quite good enough for the top tier, and they don't get told to go away because they're too old to be a prospect. The teams all try to get promoted to the next level, and sign the best players they can afford, and nobody calls up their best player in mid-season because they need him to platoon at third base or pitch middle relief. What could have been for baseball...