Liberate The Minor-League Cities!
More than 60 years ago, my parents and other townspeople in the small factory city of Auburn, New York, went down to the local ballpark and removed rocks from the field so the town could have a baseball team in the Class A New York-Pennsylvania League. Since then, major-league affiliations have come and gone — Yankees, Mets, Twins, Astros, Nationals — as have stars ranging from Ed Kranepool to Jerry Koosman to Rick Dempsey to Anthony Rendon. But unlike the factories, the team has stuck around for six decades.
In the ’60s, when Auburn was a great farm team for the then-terrible Mets, the famous New York sportswriter Jerry Izenberg, wrote a piece for the Saturday Evening Post called “A Town Where The Mets Are Champs”. Soon the city created a nonprofit entity to own the team — the only such ownership arrangement in all of professional sports, to my knowledge. Auburn was such a fixture in the short-season Class-A New York-Pennsylvania League that one of the divisions was named for Leo Pinckney, the league’s longtime president and my onetime boss as the sports editor of the local newspaper, the Auburn Citizen. The town rebuilt Falcon Park in the 1990s at a cost of $3 million, and the team was renamed the Doubledays because Abner, like me, grew up in Auburn. The team is a local institution.
