Three members of the Tufts community - Experimental College lecturer Andy Andres, and alumni Ted Tye (A '79) and Tony Massarotti (LA '89) - visited the Tufts campus last night for a panel discussion on minor league baseball.
The Ex College-sponsored event, entitled "The Minor League Revival: Baseball, Entrepreneurship and Community," was held in Barnum Hall before a small group of students and professors. Well-known baseball statistician and Boston Red Sox consultant Bill James was also in attendance.
Tye, who is the co-owner of the independent minor league team the Worcester Tornadoes, spoke about the management aspect of minor league baseball, while Massarotti, a baseball columnist for The Boston Herald, explored the minor league game from his perspective as a member of the media. Andres, the instructor of the Ex College course "Sabermetrics: The Objective Analysis of Baseball," offered insight into the statistical analysis of minor league players.
Ex College Associate Director Howard Woolf introduced the three panelists with a brief speech about the growing popularity of the minor league game, a trend that the rest of the speakers returned to throughout the night.
"When you think about the number of people going to minor league games, it's more than the NFL and NHL combined," said Tye, whose Tornadoes are expecting over one million fans in 2007. "That's a stunning figure to me."
Tye discussed in detail the process of creating an independent minor league team. The Tornadoes originated in 2005 after team organizers oversaw the construction of a 3,000-seat stadium in just nine weeks, hired former Red Sox players Rich Gedman and Bob Ojeda to run the player development department, and went about building a 22-man roster.
While the team's development was a challenge, Tye cited several factors that contributed the rapid rise in his franchise's popularity, among them low ticket prices (the average Tornadoes ticket costs $8, compared to the $46 price for a seat at Boston's Fenway Park); the convenient, safe and family-oriented nature of the minor league game; and the enthusiasm created in Massachusetts by the Red Sox.
"The Red Sox make things so much easier," said Tye, himself a season ticket holder at Fenway. "The Red Sox create baseball fans in this area."
Massarotti, who covers the Red Sox regularly in his column, spoke on the popularity of baseball in general, as he strongly believes in the ability of the game to attract fans at any level.
"Howie Long, who played in the NFL, at his Hall of Fame induction said, 'Baseball may be America's pastime, but football is its passion,'" Massarotti said. "I entirely disagree with him ... I think baseball is America's passion. It always has been, and it always will be."
Baseball, as Massarotti argued and the other speakers agreed, has an especially strong core of passionate fans in Massachusetts, where they regularly attend minor league games in Lowell, Brockton, Lynn and Worcester.
Like Tye, Massarotti specifically addressed the enthusiasm generated by the Red Sox. "The Red Sox have the highest ticket prices in baseball, and they have for some time," he said. "But they also have the longest sellout streak in the major leagues and the second longest in the history of the game. The reason they command those kinds of prices is that they can."
Andres, an avid follower of players and their statistics who is currently in his fourth semester as instructor of the baseball analysis Ex College course, discussed the spread of public interest in baseball statistics, which once only applied to players at the major league level, but are now used in the minors as well.
Andres, with some help from the audience, offered several explanations for the growing interest in minor league stats - among them the popularity of Michael Lewis' book "Moneyball" (2003), a growing interest in baseball's amateur draft, and increasing participation in fantasy baseball leagues. The Internet, Andres pointed out, has rapidly accelerated the effects of all of these factors.
"The amount of information we have at our disposal, with the Internet, has greatly improved," he said.
While minor league baseball's current level of popularity is encouraging for all parties involved, including the game's executives, writers and statisticians, Tye stressed that it is the result of an uphill battle - one that hasn't always been easy.
"It's not just, 'If you build it, they will come,'" Tye said. "That's only in the movies."
