There should be professional baseball everywhere

Part 1 of "Toward a Better Baseball"

During MLB’s offseason, I will post a series of essays titled “Toward a Better Baseball.” The goal of the series is to articulate a vision for the sport for when MLB loses its monopoly power. This is Part 1.

Photo by Tim Gouw on Unsplash

Troy, New York, has suffered decades of industrial decline, its population is smaller today than it was in the 1880s, and Major League Baseball loves picking on it. A fledgling National League folded the hometown Trojans in 1882 to establish a new team down the Hudson River. (Lucky you, Giants fans.) Almost 150 years later, MLB conducted a hostile takeover of the minor leagues and flicked Troy’s Single-A team, the Tri-City Valleycats, out of affiliated baseball like they were lint on a designer suit. 

MLB was able to do this because it owns the sport in the United States and it owns the sport in the United States because in 1922 the Supreme Court said they do. This unique monopoly has allowed the league to skirt labor laws, impose television blackouts, a…