Dear Minor League Baseball League Owners:
The reckoning I have warned you about for over two years arrived this summer with the finality of an ex-wife bringing her new fiancé to divorce court. There already is no minor league baseball season because the baseball gods are angry at how MiLB has abandoned its outlaw spirit to embrace the Family Fun model that slowly bleeds the fans’ wallets. Now MiLB as we know it could disappear because the Republic is fracturing as you bicker amongst yourselves. Fortunately, I am around to clean up you mess, but the my price will not be cheap this time. Get in the car, losers, we are going to save minor league baseball. The check better not bounce this time.
Your first step is to make a sacrifice to the baseball gods. Since you guys have crashed the ambulance so badly, a symbolic gesture just will not do. Blood is going to have to flow — human blood from one of your own. I would nominate David Heller [President; Main Street Baseball Inc.] because of the of way he shit the bed in Adelanto, California a few years ago. Let’s face it; that is where the caboose began to get loose in the mountain pass as two teams not only fled the California League, but they left the MiLB family when they were purchased by Texas Rangers and the Houston Astros.. Launch him from his ferris wheel into the Iowa night so he can see what it is like to die like an aviator. Symbolically speaking of course.
Your second step is to start paying your front office employees a respectable wage. Wage suppression is not a cool thing in this changing world. The days of pittance salaries are done. You had a serious retention problem before the baseball gods released COVID. It was easy to replace good minds who left the industry with cheap labor with sports management degrees fresh out of college who are easily brainwashed with “the love of baseball” bullshit. Parents are going to be much more hesitant to send their children off to Numb Nut State to earn a degree to work in an industry that cannot keep its doors open.
If you choose to ignore this direction, please now that Jiggs Casey is out there, looking to unionize your front office staffs. Rumor has it he is using Fast Eddie for muscle, and Fast Eddie has some scores to settle with MiLB since he was tossed from San Manuel Stadium on Faith and Family Night a few years back. Bongwater is out there lurking somewhere also. You don’t want him showing up at your granddaughter’s Sweet Sixteen party.
As for negotiating with Robert Manfred’s stormtroopers, the new strategy is simple: Tell them you do want their affiliations, and you re going it alone the independent league and college wood bat route. Tell them they have been suppressing your profits with their inefficient talent pool for decades. Tell them their product is tarnished with cheats, and their One Baseball Initiative borrows heavily from doctrines of the Falange and the monarchist liberals of the Spanish Civil War. Tell them you are walking away from their corrupt game, and they are free to runs their minor leagues from their spring training stadiums because real baseball that is a swinging metaphor for FREEDOM will be played in your ballparks.
You will be bluffing of course, but it will work because they will think you are quite mad. They might huff, puff, and threaten to blow the whole house down, but they really do not have the sense to handle a curve ball like this, especially when you inform them that you have own the intellectual property of the seven inning double header. I am sure you are thinking, “Bads85, this is insanity! We could lose everything!” However, I ask you is it any crazier than your current negotiating strategy, which was firing most of your bargaining team?
Once you make Manfred’s puppets blink, demand that MLB pay to have every soft serve ice cream machine in MiLB stadium replaced to show your are not fucking around.
Your friend in baseball,
Bads85
Dead Religions 