Abner Doubleday, the supposed father of baseball, ranks up there with the Tooth Fairy, Easter Bunny and Santa Claus, unless of course you're under 12 and you can read this, in which case the rest of them are real. Doubleday is still a phony. Baseball is a centuries old extension of a children's game called Rounders.
Likewise, the notion that Major League Baseball is some sort of Divine Right sports association is a home spun creation of the MLB myth machine.
There were many leagues vying for power in the early days of baseball. Several grabbed the big powerhouse cities, and two, the National League and what became the American League, survived the dog fight as top dogs.
What is now called "Minor League Baseball" is the National Association of Professional Baseball Leagues (NABPL). It was started in 1905 during the rise of the American League, originally to keep MLB from taking over baseball (See: Band of Brothers). Instead, it was used to the opposite effect, to permanently shackle the independents that could not be extinguished.
Developmental baseball as we know it came about during the Great Depression, when teams and leagues were shuttering and robbing the great baseball machine of its prior development system, which consisted largely of stealing developing players from indy leagues for a fraction of their value, usually around $5,000.00.
MLB was able to rob from the poor to enrich the rich largely because it garnered the only Federal anti-trust exemption for a business. It allows them to run the single legalized monopoly in the United States, both to control the players and to punish any possible threat of competing leagues.
When Pants Rowland, President of the Pacific Coast League wanted to make the PCL the third major league after WWII, MLB moved teams to Los Angeles and San Francisco to crush the threat (See: Clarence Pants Rowland, PCL Hall of Fame 2005 on MLN Sports Zone).
The amateur draft is, itself, a tool of baseball's power. Even though there are more players out there that never see the draft and have major league baseball careers, the draft both stocks the farm system and simultaneously makes a commitment connection to most of the available top talent in baseball.
Pahk the Pitchah in Camden Yaahd
Boris and other agents have found a way to tweak the system. The independents have been a parking place for the careers of players bottled up by the green cap in a farm system, an opportunity to keep playing while their agents shop for a better long-term home.
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