Globalist Billionaire MLB Owner Import Players
By Joe Guzzardi
On March 17, Major League Baseball celebrated its Opening Day but, alas, not on U.S. soil. In one of its innumerable money grabs, MLB’s first games that counted in the season’s standings have been played in Mexico, Sydney, Tokyo, Seoul, and San Juan. Opening Day was once considered an informal national holiday, hopefully a sunny, spring day to eat peanuts, popcorn and Cracker Jacks while watching great baseball. The uplifting sentiment doesn’t transfer when the first game is played in the Tokyo Dome with its offerings of nori bento, sukiyaki and cod roe potato salad. The National Pastime concept, as it was once treasured, is dead and buried.
I’m fed up with MLB’s PED abuse tolerance, a federal felony, its acceptance of shifty and dishonest PED testimony to Congress, another felony, and its winking to federal authorities about known human trafficking of Cubans to a safe third country where they establish a fake identity, elude immigration officials, and then proceed to the U.S. and an MLB roster spot, innumerable felonies. Eddie Dominguez, a decorated Boston Police Department officer, FBI special task force agent, and for six years a member of MLB’s Department of Investigations wrote that, “When it comes to Cuban players, human traffickers, and all that goes with it [crimes], MLB isn’t interested.”
Looking at the facts, some could conclude that MLB has the smacking of a criminal enterprise. At the least, MLB is profoundly anti-American worker as attested to by the 30 training camps in the Dominican Republic and zero in the U.S. as well as its rush to sign high-ticket Japanese players. Remember, playing baseball is a job complete with a contract. Maybe the Japanese are better than the American kid fresh off the Texas Longhorns campus, but the college youth is just as entertaining to watch. If you doubt me, tune in to the College World Series. Still, about 40 percent of Opening Day rosters featured foreign-born players from more than a dozen international countries.
Jose Abreau, a former Chicago White Sox MVP and now a free agent, testified before Congress that on the last leg of his journey from Cuba to Haiti to Miami, he ate his fake passport. Abreau knew that customs officials would instantly identify his phony documentation and arrest him. The Cuban national received immunity in exchange for his tell-all testimony. A series of crimes helped Abreau launch his career and paved the way to earning more than $150 million with $30 million more due from the when it released him.
My vigorous resistance to baseball’s corporatization is to have made the same vow that I did in 2023— to not watch either on television or in person or to listen to a single MLB inning. Abstinence was easy. I filled my baseball cravings with local high school and NCAA games, the Independent League, the Pony League World Series and minor leagues. I’m kicking myself that I weakened in 2024, a mistake I’ll try not to make again this year. One thing I can swear to on The Bible: I will not buy a MLB ticket or waste one thin dime on its flimsy, overpriced promotional junk. If I had more years to live, I would aspire to the New York Yankees’ World Series championship shortstop and NBC broadcaster Tony Kubek’s accomplishment. In 1994, Kubek walked away from his lucrative television contract—$1.2 million annually adjusted for inflation— and has not watched one second of baseball in the three decades since. Kubek: “I hate what the game’s become, the greed, the nastiness.” Kubek, now 89, could have added hypocritical. Gambling is everywhere in baseball. Get your bets down! But contemptible, hard-hearted Commissioner Rob Manfred granted no forgiveness to one of baseball’s greatest, hardest playing, and the all-time hits leader. For his misdemeanor gambling offense 35 years ago, Pete Rose went to his grave, banned from the Hall of Fame.
No decision in baseball’s 150-plus years has fundamentally altered it for the worse than MLB’s elimination of 42 minor league affiliates before the 2021 season. Pulling out of 25% of its minor league towns would reportedly cut costs on what baseball’s suits considered an anachronistic player development system. Bring on the computers and the Ivy League geeks who know how to extract the minutia about launch angles, exit velocities and other mumbo-jumbo that traditionalists could care less about. As former All-Star and World Series champion Jayson Worth said, “the super nerds…are ruining the game. Just put the laptops out there and let them play.”
Dinosaur fans like me are living in a whole new and diminished baseball world. New York Yankees general manager Brian Cashman explains: “Bottom line is this is big business … This should be run like a Wall Street boardroom where you pursue assets. No different than if you’re in the oil industry and you want to buy some oil rigs out in the gulf.” Forbes valued the Yankees’ franchise at $8.2 billion, the wealthiest among MLB teams.
Sadly, too few of my fellow baseball afficionados adhere to my admittedly hardline stance. Imagine my delight then when I came upon investigative journalist Will Bardenwerper’s new book “Homestand, Small Town Baseball and the Fight for the Soul of America” who wrote eloquently about the consequences on communities who lose their minor league franchises. On MLB’s chopping block were working-class communities like Pulaski, Virginia; Elizabethton, Tennessee; Bluefield, West Virginia; Williamsport, Pennsylvania; and Batavia, New York. The decision by billionaire, globalist major league owners to extinguish community ball clubs, some of the few remaining places where people could still find happiness and connection, for affordable prices as they had for generations, merely to save the equivalent of one major league minimum salary per franchise, $760,000, struck Bardenwerper as emblematic of so much of what was wrong with today’s America. Stadium workers lose their jobs, local restaurants and coffee shops struggle to stay afloat, and senior citizens lose a hallowed ballpark gathering place. But since the communities and their workers are blue-collar, globalists like MLB’s principals don’t care enough about small-town America’s fate to reconsider the damning effect their money-grubbing strategy will have.
The minor leagues’ contraction accelerated its ownership evolution from local mom and pop owners to private equity financiers who have been circling the teams that have thus far escaped MLB’s scythe. In just a few years, one enterprise, Diamond Baseball Holdings (DBH), has gobbled up a staggering 41 of the remaining 120 clubs. DBH is, in other words, a baseball holding company—just like the conglomerates on the Big Board.
Bardenwerper’s book focuses on Batavia, New York and its’ Muckdogs. Batavia is a small city on the Rust Belt’s periphery but for over a century, Batavia had enjoyed something special, a minor league ball club. Locals treasured being part of a direct pipeline from their cozy ballparks to the grand cathedrals of the game like Fenway Park and Wrigley Field. Just as importantly, they had a place to come together and enjoy the company of friends and neighbors, at affordable prices, on warm summer nights. Industries and factories may have left, but baseball did not.
Minor league professional baseball in Batavia dated back to the 1897 establishment of the Batavia Giants. The old railroad town had featured the New York-Penn League team almost continuously since its establishment in 1939. The Muckdogs, one of the teams disaffiliated in 2021, had been central to the life of the town for decades. For communities like Batavia, the local minor league ballpark meant cheerful shouts from kids playing catch in the shade of the bleachers, exuberant teenagers roaming about just as their parents had decades before, and grandparents bundled up to protect from the summer night’s chill.
While the value of such happiness couldn’t be neatly quantified on an MLB spreadsheet — perhaps because happiness like that cannot be measured and marketed — the inefficiencies within the system or, in the words of potentate Manfred, the “stuff around the edges” that could be “cleaned up” to create “some economic flexibility that we can use.”
The small city in western New York between Rochester and Buffalo, Batavia was once full of heavy industry but has always been surrounded by fertile farmland, the local “mucklands” that inspired the team’s name. Prosperous in the first half of the twentieth century, Batavia began to struggle economically when the New York State Thruway bypassed Main Street, leading to the gradual death of many local businesses, as passing travelers no longer even knew they were there. Urban renewal projects, in which many of the historic old buildings along Main Street were bulldozed to make room for modern, brutalist style constructions, ravaged the once stately downtown. This was followed by the exit of much of its remaining industry in the 1980s and 90s.
Minor league baseball in Batavia was special in part because of what had been, at least on paper, its very ordinariness. The Muckdogs didn’t enjoy the highest attendance of the clubs that had been eliminated, nor had it been on the cutting edge of wacky baseball promotions like the Savannah Bananas.
In the wake of MLB’s cuts, Batavia refused to surrender baseball, rallying behind the creation of a new Muckdogs club, made up of amateur players competing in a summer collegiate league. With an extraordinary effort and much sacrifice from many people, driven by a community that would not allow its baseball team to disappear, Batavia survived. Pleasant summer evenings at the ballpark once seemed timeless but MLB’s craven decision put them on the endangered list. Through the vigorous efforts of its vibrant community, the crack of the bat will still be heard during the summer of 2025. Muckdogs fans of all ages will gather on warm summer evenings to overlook the tenderly manicured Dwyer Stadium.
The elitest billionaires are a mighty foe. But their fat bankrolls are not big enough to prevent Batavia’s dedicated fans from watching their beloved Muckdogs.
Joe Guzzardi is a Society for American Baseball Research member. Contact him at guzzjoe@yahoo.com
Will Bardenwerper served in Iraq as an Airborne Ranger-qualified infantry officer and was awarded a Combat Infantryman Badge and a Bronze Star. He has contributed to the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other major publications. Before working in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, he earned a B.A. from Princeton University and an M.A. from Johns Hopkins University.
Buy “Homestand, Small Town Baseball and the Fight for the Soul of America” here. Mr. Bardenwerper’s other books are here.
