The challenges of covering minor-league sports

One of the most fascinating stories in sports the past month has been the emergence of the proposed plan to radically streamline Minor League Baseball. Reporting in The New York Times, Dan Barry writes that more than 40 communities would lose their teams — including several in upstate New York.

This story hits close to home. Bill Madden reported in the New York Daily News that Binghamton would lose its baseball team. (The Mets would move their Double-A team to Brooklyn and the Brooklyn Single-A franchise would move to Binghamton and fold in with the rest of the NY-Penn League.) I spent four seasons as the beat writer covering the then-Binghamton Mets, writing about Daniel Murphy and Carlos Gomez before they were big-league stars.

Minor-league sports coverage has always presented a challenge for newspapers. Because there are two possible approaches: One, as a team trying to win games and a title every season. Or two, as an organization affiliated with a major-league team — one that serves as a development arm of the big-league team. So do you cover the Rochester Amerks as a team trying to win the AHL? Or do you cover them as a Buffalo Sabres farm team existing to provide Sabres’ prospects with a chance to develop?

It’s a balancing act every writer covering minor-league sports faces.

And it’s one exacerbated by the news business.

For a lot of beat writers, it's easy to go with Option 1. You cover a team’s games — the ups and downs, the wins and losses — the same way you could cover a big-league team. That was always a point of pride: We covered the Binghamton Mets the way the New York papers covered the big-league Mets.

But … does that matter? Is that what the audience wants?

How often do you really pay close attention to how your city's minor-league team does? The last minor-league baseball or hockey game you went to, do you really remember who won? Probably not. And that’s built in to the calculus in minor-league sports. People go because it’s a fun night out, it’s relatively inexpensive, there’s cheap beer or fun for the kids. The game is often ancillary to the experience.

That bears itself out in reader analytics. I first realized this when I was blogging about the Binghamton Mets and saw that my most diehard readers and commentators were not from Vestal or Johnson City but from Connecticut and New Jersey. They were the Mets diehards who followed every prospect and wanted to know how Mike Carp was doing, what was up with Fernando Martinez.

My own research into sports journalists bears this out, too. Minor-league coverage just doesn't draw the readership numbers that major-league sports or high school sports do. Those diehards from downstate reading my Mets coverage? They're less interested in game stories and more interested in the information. Plus a feature story on a prospect's prospects. Which is the rub, because it’s hard to find time for a good feature story in a beat, but easier to get that story when you're there every day and able to build relationships.

From my dissertation:

The day-to-day coverage (one editor said) does not draw a lot of readers. But the day-to-day coverage also allows the beat reporter to find and develop feature stories on players that do get good numbers. Those stories wouldn’t be possible without the day-to-day coverage that sets the foundation for those features.

But in this age of cutdowns and cutbacks in newsrooms, beat coverage of minor-league sports is an easy cut to make.

And it’s easy to wonder, have the cutbacks to minor-league sports coverage set the table for this plan to eliminate minor-league teams? If minor-league sports are viewed solely as a development system for major-league teams that value efficiency above all else, and if the local coverage of these teams has been phased out, then it’s easier for these teams to fall out of sight, out of mind.

Maybe there's no causal link between the two. But they do come from the same place. One that values efficiency and numbers above all else.