MAJOR BLOGS - www.majorblogs.net - OPINION - 12.10.06 - You won't read about the biggest buzz from the Minor League side of the MLB Winter Meetings on MiLB.com. Lisa Winston wrote up the MiLB.com report on the minor league side of the MLB Winter Meetings in Orlando, FLA. I'm not sure where she was, but the biggest story of this super schmooze shindig seemed to miss her column.

We missed the winsome Ms. Winston on the Swan Hotel side of the resort. The only MiLB reporter running around was the Lone Stringer, a short, dark-haired, bespectacled man who comes and goes silently, like his faithful Indian companion, leaving behind only his silver pencil as a calling card.

Lisa's masters at BAM, or Baseball Advanced Media, an oxymoron like 'national intelligence,' would have probably nixed her coverage of the big story anyway: BAM was the big story on the minor league side of the meetings.

Talking about it would break the 11th Commandment of Own-Your-Own Journalism: Thou Shalt Not Cover Thyself.

The BAM boys, a gang of white twenty-to-thirtysomethings dressed in khakis and sporting some serious New York attitude, worked the various league meetings like Republican candidates work a red state prayer breakfast. They were everywhere, lobbying for more control of the information that you see and read about minor league baseball.

They were welcomed by league meetings and PR staff confabs with all of the warmth that one reserves for a septic tank serviceman standing on your new snow white rugs with his muddy feet and clipboard. The BAM boys were greeted that way because they are seen as the new digital arm of the MLB Baseball BORG.

You will be assimilated to MLB. Resistance is futile.

The minor leagues and MLB have always had something of a love-hate relationship. Okay, perhaps it is more of a fear-hate relationship, with a dollop of quiet, brooding loathing on the side.

Most pro leagues outside of MLB are members of the National Association of Professional Baseball Leagues (the NA, or Minor League Baseball). It is a club of porcupines. Everyone belongs, but no one wants anyone else telling them what they can do on their turf.

Minor League Baseball has absolute power, and no power at all. It can issue directives to the leagues, but the leagues' cooperation is still largely by their own will. As dependent as they are on the major leagues providing players and coaching staffs to fill their fields, none of them wants to become an extension of MLB on the public side, appearing to have no identity beyond being parts of the major league farm system. There is a lot of practical variation in the application of NA policy outside of the on-the-field rule books. Minor league baseball is a national success driven by an intensely local business model. Teams and leagues tend to know their markets best.

The Internet throws a big monkey wrench in that model. It is vast and fast. It can reach audiences of minor league fans better than almost anything else. The rise in MiLB popularity and the web go as hand-in-hand as the 19th and 20th century newspaper, newsreel, and television elevated MLB.

When BAM took over the national minor league baseball website, MiLB.com, or minorleaguebaseball.com, it did so with little fuss or fanfare. It did privately worry many minor league owners and executives, who view any MLB initiatives coming through the NA with caution, and meet internet control of the minor league information stream to fans with resistance.

At the Winter Meetings, with the strong arm of the the NA backing it, BAM has been also not-so-gently trying to standardize score reporting, lock up an inside track on news dissemination, and gobble up all of the minor league team websites, turning them into generic extensions of MiLB.com.

Would You Like Fries With Your Sports News?

Most of the leagues, and some of the teams, have moved their websites to the BAM system. Their pages seem to have a very cookie-cutter look and feel, a McDonaldsization of minor league baseball news. The one-size-fits-all designs of their websites are dozens of flavors of vanilla, all aimed at aggrandizing major league baseball in an effort to focus the millions in the growing audience for minor league baseball back on to the big leagues through their minor league clubs.

I'm going to let you in on a secret... Major League Baseball executives, you might want to leave the room, or cover your eyes. AGMs should get the sedatives ready for GMs reading this fundamental truth about minor league fans:

Most minor league fans don't care much about MLB.

There! I said it. There are probably major league GMs rolling around on their plushly carpeted office floors with rabid foam lining their mouths and bits of the screen strewn about the office.

If the New Orleans Zephyrs rep the Houston Astros one year, and the Washington Nationals the next, the fans are still Zephyrs fans, not Astros or Nationals fans. They'll follow their boys who make it to the big leagues, but they would do that whether they donned an Astros uni, or were traded to the Tibet Titans in the Upper China league.

A Major Look at Minor Baseball

The MiLB.com website is more of a major league look at minor league ball, a fact not lost on club PR people, or the fans. Most of the people who work there look for the day that their names and mugs elevate them to the major league side of the biz. Most of what they say and write is slanted towards major league fans.

Look at Jon Mayo's recent attempt at a top fifty players. You'll note that each player is repped by their MAJOR LEAGUE club in Mayo's list of top players. Sorry Durham Bulls and Wichita Wranglers fans, but you'll have to look in the tiny fine print to find your club listed next to guys like Delmon Young or Alex Gordon. Okay, maybe Durham fans are kind of glad that Young isn't being mentioned as prominently with their club. By contrast, though, our much larger action/head photos and long bios in the annual in-depth MLN FAB50 Baseball 2006 front their minor league team of record when we picked them, then their major league club.

MLB.com and MiLB.com stories and releases still consciously or sub-consciously slight the minors. In a recent press release on the new MLB Civil Rights Game, to be played at AutoZone park, it took three paragraphs to get there and still, something was missing. Can you find it?:

"The inaugural Civil Rights Game will be played on March 31st, 2007, at AutoZone Park in Memphis, TN, home of the Triple-A Memphis Redbirds, beginning at 4:30pm CST. The game, which will be televised live on ESPN, will culminate a day of celebrating the Civil Rights Movement."

If you guessed "the Pacific Coast League," you're absolutely right! The PCL, the league in which the Memphis Redbirds play, is omitted in the release. Small omission, perhaps, but significant in the way that the minors always seem to be more of an afterthought to the MLB-centric writers of MLB.com and BAM.

How Does This Affect Joe Q. Reader?

BAM-first thinking also means that you, the reader, don't get access to as much news from a BAM-run team website rather than website created by a team outside of BAM.

The PCL website, which was great, lost access to a lot of content when they moved to BAM in 2006. Links to local news stories and other national news sources' information do not often appear in BAM-generated league and club pages.

Where some local team pages build community support through interlinking news sources, BAM sites rely largely on in-house content.

Many non-BAM sites promoted players from their clubs that were featured in the MLN FAB50 Baseball 2006 rankings on their own websites. BAM has developed Mayo's competing product, so none of the sites on their system, including ones with top ten picks, ran the story.

Gone are many links to blogs and third party fan-run chat sites that support the clubs. If it ain't built on BAM, it didn't happen.

All of which is odd when you consider how well the MLB.com website, and its MLB pressbox system are designed. The BAM boys on the minor league beat don't seem to get the fact that, just like the major league media, the minor league media, fan sites, and baseball bloggers all help sell seats.

MiLB announced at the winter meetings that they are developing a "back room" site, similar to MLB's Pressbox, for its member clubs' PR/Media people. The difference? Pressbox is used by the press. No media outlets, national or local, other than BAM, were slated to have access to the site when it was presented to the clubs at the Winter Meetings.

One league president commented: "What good does it do them to cut out any media outlet from providing news on our clubs? Any media is good business for us."

Does it Hurt When We Tug on This Hard?

In the BAM or not to BAM debate, the BAM boys would do a lot better if their technology and their manipulation of information worked well. The BAM backside is about as seamless as Frankenstein's tuchus.

From stats to website operations, minor league clubs have been guinea pigs running up the development curve of MiLB back office systems designed by MiLB to improve the flow of information.

Wrinkle Cream

There are a lot of "wrinkles" to the MILB back-office system, and the BAM stats systems, which is part of the reason why the team PR people look at the BAM boys like they were dentists prepping them for a root canal. The bigger bones of contention that were floating around the halls of the MiLB side of the 2006 Winter Meetings were:

• Suspended Games - Stats for suspended games and how they factor back into the running total statistics for a club were weak last year. A suspended game would mess up season totals. This appears to be on its way to a fix for 2007.

• Who Has Final Call (& How) on Official Game Scoring - Another stats issue. All game scoring is reported back to BAM. Several statisticians are not happy with the "revisions" made by BAM in their game reporting, saying that they tinker with the line-calls that are the prerogative of the official score keeper . The BAM staff in charge of the stats system respond that they only make corrections to games where reporting falls out of compliance with the rules for the scoring of a game. Media directors have asked BAM staff to use them as contact buffers on scoring disputes, and asked the national statistical gathering staff to use a little more sensitivity in their communications with the clubs' official scorers. When you say: "You see one game, and we see 146 a night," it just smacks of New York imperialism that offends the sensibilities of people with long careers scoring games out here in the Styx and the Tulies.
  

• Using Player & Game Information - BAM gathers up a lot of great information on players' stats, but wringing it back out into things of interest to fans, like how many times a batter has hit well against a particular pitcher, can be slow and time consuming. Information systems cough up pages of player data for all of the clubs with little ability to search or filter a lot of it. That means long downloads and print-outs where PR staff of a club or league has to sift through the numbers and re-crunch them themselves.

• Player Histories - The numbers crunchers continue to work on an "alumni" system that will provide a lot of rich data about past players. When it rolls out, sometime in the undefined future, it will be available to the clubs long before it makes a public appearance for fans. Sources tell us that, like all MLB properties, it will be highly proprietary information.
  
  
• "Back Office" Systems - MiLB, is requiring clubs to use their systems for storing photos of players, media guides, and other items. Clubs, MiLB, and BAM will have access to these things. Independent media and the local fishwrap have not been invited. Some leagues are jumping to the system outright in 2007. Some leagues are filing with the new system and continuing their own, until they are convinced that the BAM system is bug free.
  

• Websites - Many clubs like their websites just fine, thank you. So do their fans. It was no secret during the meetings that BAM was lobbying hard for a much higher level of compliance from the minor league clubs on moving websites to their network. "Why should I use BAM?" said one media director on condition of anonymity. "Our fans like the way our site is designed and runs. They're used to it. It has our branding and our feel, and we spent a lot of time and money getting something we like. Why should I have to change so I can look like every other club in baseball?"
  

What does all this wrangling mean to the average fan? Plenty.

MiLB.com is not going to do a hard-hitting piece on drug usage in baseball. They're hard pressed to say much about bad boys like Delmon Young who heave bats at umpires. They're just downright tongue-tied when it comes to anything involving the changes in MiLB on the web, and they go positively apoplectic when you question anything MLB, even nicely.

We're working a cool story on the PBEO Job Fair, which finds work in baseball for a lot of promising young executives and trainees. We will be following several young people at random to see where they end up. So I toss the people running the Job Fair a total softball: What percentage of applicants get minor league jobs versus major league jobs? We get the stock MLB answer: "We'll get back to you."

Typical BAM move: They're trying to move a lot of clubs off of websites built using software by InfinityProSports. We were asked by a few PR people to figure out which was the better way to do a club website, IPS or BAM. The Infinity guys were more than happy to show us their systems. Nathan Blackmon, former Ralphie Winner and now BAM advocate, said: "I would have a problem with that." He wanted to make the comparisons for them directly, in private.

Operating in the shadows is bad business. If you have a superior product, you have nothing to worry about. Heck, if you have a flawed product, but you are improving it, and that product has the clout of the NA behind it, you should have little to worry about. BAM builds walls rather than reaching across them.

They're like Daffy Duck, clutching their stats and news content like a giant pearl, muttering "I'm a happy miser" as the big shell closes in around them.



Independently run leagues, independent national and local media, with a variety of points of view, are a good thing for minor league baseball. Clubs know their markets, and their business.

You can almost hear the vibrating voice of Jim Fowler in those old school wildlife videos: "Oh no, Mr. MLB badger, don't provoke that porcupine... Ouch! Those flying quills have got to hurt more than his pride."

Where BAM or MiLB can help, the leagues will take their assistance. The minor leagues have been the ones running the baseball business right. Their markets are swelling in attendance numbers as fans return to grass roots baseball.

Rather than put out 218 flavors of vanilla, MLB might try to work with a less totalitarian business model for its news and internet operations. Maybe if they watched great operations like the Pacific Coast League and the International League, rather than trying to monopolize their communications, they might learn a thing or two about increasing attendance in their own ballparks.