What’s lost when minor league baseball leaves
Elmira, N.Y., is an old manufacturing town by the Chemung River, where Dunn Field sits on its banks. What does minor league baseball mean to a town like that?
“Quite frankly, it means everything,” Chalk said. “When a team leaves, you lose some of your identity as a community, and you never get it back.”
The dismantling of the minor leagues ate at me this past week, even if I couldn’t quite place why. The workforce has been criminally underpaid, and if fewer players and teams means wages can increase, there’s some good in that. Fewer than 1 in 10 minor leaguers ever reach the majors, a stat that’s always used to amplify how hard it is to become a big leaguer but could also demonstrate that minor league systems were bloated. Things evolve, right? The whittling down of minor league teams affiliated with major league clubs from 160 to 120 — maybe it’s just a market correction?
Then I called Jim Hendry, and we talked about the summer of 1994, the summer he managed the Elmira Pioneers.
“I loved everything about that summer,” Hendry said. “I loved the feel of the town, the rinky-dink little office I had in the clubhouse, faxing the reports in every night, the quaintness of it. Everyone treated us great. It felt like baseball meant something there.”
Hendry is 65, and he has held almost every job in baseball — college coach at Creighton, minor league manager in the Florida Marlins chain, farm and scouting director, general manager of the Chicago Cubs, and for nine years an assistant to New York Yankees General Manager Brian Cashman.
A baseball lifer, a baseball character. Hendry has forgotten more baseball than I can remember. Yet he recalls everything about that summer of ’94 — not just the players he managed, but the postgame beers at Bernie Murray’s, the bar all of five minutes from the park; the steaks at Moretti’s on an off night; the morning golf at Elmira Country Club before an evening game; the farmhouse he shared with his hitting coach; the beat writer from one of the local papers — who happened to be me.
“We just had a great time,” he said.
Indeed we did. Elmira’s story resonated with me this week because during the 1995 season — a year after Hendry moved elsewhere in the fledgling Marlins’ organization — the owner of the Pioneers, a very nice man named Clyde Smoll, grew restless. In the early 1990s, Smoll, the son of a former big league pitcher by the same name, had grown frustrated with the longtime parent club Boston Red Sox, who prioritized player development over fielding winning minor league clubs. In 1993, Smoll left the Red Sox for the expansion Marlins, who had zero Q rating in Upstate New York. By 1995, the Pioneers ranked 13th in the 14-team New York-Penn League in attendance.
Elmira had a baseball history that dated back to 1885. Dunn Field had hosted minor league ball since 1920. Smoll decided to move his team to Lowell, Mass.
“I was infuriated,” Chalk said.
What was stripped from Elmira became a boon for Lowell. The team was nicknamed the Spinners, an homage to the city’s deep textile history. The club reestablished its affiliation with the Red Sox and built a park on the Merrimack River just more than 30 miles from Fenway Park. Jacoby Ellsbury, Kevin Youkilis, Mookie Betts, Jackie Bradley Jr. — generations of future Red Sox mainstays made stops in Lowell en route to Boston.
“It was immediately woven into the fabric of our city, as it is in so many of our communities across the country,” said Rep. Lori Trahan (D-Mass.), a Lowell native who now represents her home district in Congress. “Psychologically, it creates a new mind-set in a community. It brings families together. Lowell is a gritty, working-class city, but people connected at the park, and they did so in an affordable way. It delivers for the local economy. That neighborhood has been transformed.”
And then this week, the New York-Penn League was essentially dissolved. Lowell was left without a major league affiliation. From 2000 to 2010, the Spinners sold out more than 400 straight home games. As a teenager, Trahan’s little sister served as the mascot, the “Canaligator.” There are memories there. Yet with the Red Sox gone, Lowell is now Elmira.
“The connection with the Red Sox,” Trahan said, “it’s the whole ballgame, really.”
For me, the minor league history of Elmira and Lowell — two old industrial towns separated by more than 350 miles — are wholly intertwined. That season with Hendry and his mediocre Pioneers was my first covering pro ball at any level. This week, the memories roared back.
One night, Hendry had an argument with an umpire who — he felt, and felt rather strongly — had missed a call on the bases. He charged out of the dugout to argue. The ump turned his back and walked toward the outfield. Hendry followed. He was ejected — one of seven times he was tossed that summer.
The next night, when Hendry brought the lineup card out to home plate, the crew chief asked if he had calmed down. Hendry turned to the ump who had tossed him and said, “You know what you should do? Before you make any call, think about it for a second — and then do the opposite of what you were going to call.”
Before the game even started, he was tossed again. Sitting in the press box, I had no idea what had happened.
I never get sick of those stories, and over the years I’ve made Hendry repeat them every time we cross paths. Maybe because that kind of stuff doesn’t happen at the increasingly corporate, dominated-by-replay MLB level. Maybe because they make me wistful about a summer when I had no idea what I was doing, just learning on the job. One thing I discovered over those three months: Go to a ballpark for one night — any ballpark, at any level — and you never know what you might see.
“Think about the context we were living in,” Trahan said. “We were in the middle of impeachment proceedings. I’m brand-new, a freshman. It took me days — not weeks — to get over 100 members of Congress — equally split between Democrats and Republicans — to join together on this.
“That’s when I knew: This isn’t special to just Lowell. It shows the effect that these teams have on all of our communities.”
It’s worth wondering about what the impact could be not just on those communities. Fewer access points at the minor league level could mean less interest in the major league product.
This week, the Red Sox and the Massachusetts Congressional delegation pledged to work on a solution to bring affiliated ball back to Lowell beyond 2021. There are no guarantees. That never happened in Elmira, and it still stings.
As Smoll laid the groundwork for the move, he kept things quiet. Some of us who worked at the paper in nearby Corning tried to ferret out the story. I still remember my hands trembling as I dialed the home number of Paul Tsongas, the former U.S. senator from Massachusetts and a Lowell native who helped broker the deal. Tsongas confirmed the impending move. I was immediately thrilled, and then almost as immediately saddened.
The Pioneers were replaced by an independent league team the next summer. Now, a collegiate league entry called the Pioneers plays its home games at Dunn Field — frequently to large crowds. But for the longtime PA announcer, it’s not the same.
Chalk remembers seeing a 17-year-old playing shortstop for visiting Newark and thinking, “That guy’s a big leaguer.” Robin Yount won two MVP awards and is in the Hall of Fame. Chalk remembers longtime Pioneers manager Dick Berardino assessing a teenage third baseman — not much power, fair fielder, hit only .263, might not make it. Boggs won five batting titles and collected 3,010 big league hits en route to Cooperstown. Chalk remembers a young outfielder struggling at the plate, worried about his future in the game, and telling him what he had heard the coaches saying: “They love your swing.” Mike Greenwell made two all-star games and hit .303 over 12 big league seasons.
Those are memories in Elmira, with no new ones to make. What might happen in Lowell — and the towns just like it?
“The best way to kill major league baseball,” Chalk said, “is to kill minor league baseball.”
Minor League Baseball wasn’t killed this week, just wounded. Maybe — maybe — that won’t hurt baseball as a whole. But as I think back on the summer of 1994 in a city that hasn’t had a major league affiliation in a quarter-century, I can’t help but feel for the towns that lost something — a status, a pride — they’ll most likely never get back.
