There is a city in Vermont called Burlington. Population around 45,000. For 26 years, from 1994 to 2020, Burlington had a minor league baseball team called the Vermont Lake Monsters. They played at Centennial Field, which is the oldest operating baseball park in the country. The park opened in 1906. It has wooden grandstands. It smells like old wood and popcorn and summer evenings in a way that no modern stadium can replicate. The Lake Monsters averaged a few thousand fans a game, which for a city of 45,000 is a genuinely impressive number.
In 2020, MLB contracted the minor leagues and the Lake Monsters lost their affiliation. They still exist, playing in an independent league, but the connection to professional baseball is gone. The pipeline of future major leaguers coming through Burlington, the annual ritual of watching kids who might someday play in Fenway or Yankee Stadium taking their first professional swings at a park built over a century ago, that is done.
Burlington is one of 40 cities that lost professional affiliated baseball in 2020. Most of them have not gotten it back. Most of them will not.
How the contraction actually happened
MLB has had some form of a minor league system since the late 1800s. By 2019 there were 160 affiliated minor league teams spread across four levels: Triple-A, Double-A, High-A, and Low-A. The relationship between MLB and the minor leagues was governed by a Professional Baseball Agreement that was renegotiated periodically. In 2020, with that agreement expiring and the pandemic providing cover for difficult decisions, MLB restructured everything.
The new structure cut from 160 to 120 teams. Triple-A went from 30 teams to 30 teams, same. Double-A went from 30 to 30, same. High-A went from roughly 30 to 30, same. Low-A went from 30 to 30, but the old Short-Season A and Rookie Advanced levels were eliminated, and the teams that had played in those leagues either moved up or disappeared.
What MLB called this publicly was a modernization of the player development system. Streamlined. More efficient. Better facilities. Players closer to the major leagues getting better coaching and better resources. All of that is technically true. None of it is why they did it.
What was actually going on
MLB teams fund the minor league system. They pay for player salaries, travel, equipment, coaches, and facilities upgrades. The minor league teams themselves are locally owned businesses that pay for the stadiums and the operational costs of running a team. But the parent club bears the player development expense, and that expense had been growing.
The 2018 Save America's Pastime Act, a rider attached to a federal spending bill that most legislators did not notice until it was signed, explicitly exempted minor league baseball from federal minimum wage requirements. Minor league players were making as little as $1,100 a month. Even at those wages, with 160 teams and hundreds of players per organization, the costs added up.
The contraction reduced the number of players each organization needed to carry through their system. Fewer teams meant fewer roster spots meant fewer players to pay. It also meant MLB teams could better concentrate their high-end coaching and facility resources on fewer players, which genuinely does improve player development at the upper levels. The motivation was cost reduction. The side effect was improved player development at higher levels. MLB emphasized the side effect and quietly enjoyed the cost reduction.
"Small cities that had professional baseball for a hundred years woke up and it was just gone. MLB called it modernization. The people in those cities called it something else."
What minor league baseball actually meant to those cities
I want to be careful not to be purely sentimental here because I think sentimentality lets MLB off the hook too easily. The loss of minor league teams was not just sad. It was economically meaningful to the communities that lost them.
A minor league baseball team is, among other things, a summer entertainment option in smaller markets that do not have major professional sports. It is a reason for people to go downtown on a Tuesday night in July. It is a place where families can afford to take their kids to a professional game, because minor league tickets cost a fraction of major league prices and the experience, the atmosphere, the connection to the game, is genuinely good.
It is also a feeder for the next generation of baseball fans. The kid who grows up going to Low-A games in his hometown is more likely to become a lifelong baseball fan than the kid who only ever watches on television. Minor league baseball was MLB's best grassroots fan development tool, and they contracted it to save money on player development.
The cities that lost teams did not get a check. They did not get a mitigation payment or a community benefit fund. They got a press release about modernization and a website where they could look up which nearby affiliated team they might drive to instead. Burlington is a long drive from anywhere with affiliated baseball now.
What the minor leagues look like now
The 120 remaining affiliated teams play in better facilities than many of the 160 used to. MLB instituted facility standards that required teams to upgrade or face losing their affiliations. Some old parks got renovations. Some cities built new stadiums. The playing conditions and clubhouse quality at most affiliated parks improved meaningfully between 2020 and today.
Player salaries also improved after a legal settlement and subsequent collective bargaining. Minor leaguers now make more than they did in 2019. The minimum went up substantially. Some higher-level players make real salaries now. These are genuine improvements to a system that was genuinely exploitative for a very long time.
The 40 cities that lost their teams are not interested in any of this. Their parks sit vacant or have been converted to other uses. Their summer ritual is gone. The kids in those cities are growing up without the thing that made baseball feel accessible and personal and local in a way that watching ESPN never will.
The thing about baseball and small cities
Baseball is the only major American sport with deep roots in small-market communities. The NFL has 32 teams in 32 major markets. The NBA has 30. The NHL has 32. Minor league baseball had 160 teams in 160 communities, many of them mid-sized or smaller cities that would never qualify for a major professional franchise.
That reach was not an accident of history. It was part of what baseball was. The sport grew up in a pre-television era when the way you connected with a team was by going to see them play. Minor league teams existed in small cities because those cities wanted professional baseball and were willing to support it, and because the major league system needed places to develop players. The interests aligned. The relationship lasted over a century.
When MLB contracted the minor leagues, they were not just cutting costs. They were cutting the roots that connected the sport to communities that would never be covered by major league teams. The calculation was probably rational from a pure business standpoint. Forty teams worth of player development costs are real money. The communities that lost those teams are not MLB's direct customers anyway.
But rational and right are not the same thing. The sport that claims to be America's pastime decided that 40 communities' worth of that pastime was not worth the expense. And now those communities have something they cannot get back: the summer before, when professional baseball was local and affordable and theirs.
Centennial Field in Burlington still stands. Still smells like old wood and summer evenings. The Lake Monsters still play there in an independent league, still draw a few thousand fans on a good night. But it is not the same thing. The kids in the stands are not watching players who might someday start at Fenway. The connection to the larger baseball world is severed.
MLB made a business decision. That is all it was to them. To Burlington it was something else entirely. And the gap between those two ways of looking at the same event is, I think, the most honest summary of what professional sports actually is and has always been.