Member-only story
Why the Tri-Cities No Longer Have Professional Baseball
The Appalachian League will now be a college wood bat league. I take no joy in this, but I told ya so . . . .
The demise of professional baseball in the Tri-Cities should not be a surprise to anyone.
Frankly, Appalachian League franchises were generally not well run.
We liked the Appy League because it was all we knew. As I have mentioned for years, the area would have been better served by having a single AA franchise uniting the metropolitan area with players that will likely make the major leagues rather than five Rookie League franchises providing a high school, town-against-town mentality, only with players who won’t make it to the show.
But nobody else seemed to have this vision. The City of Elizabethton spent more than a million dollars in renovations for Joe O’Brien Field so the Elizabethton Twins could have a modern locker room for a season. Before the demise of the Appalachian League, the City of Kingsport was talking about a new ballpark not to lure a higher level of baseball for the area, but to give the Mets a new home.
Three local Appalachian League teams allowed Boyd Sports to take over their operation, which often had previously been run by the cities themselves on a non-profit basis, yet another indication that perhaps the long-term future for the league wasn’t good.
