It’s been a slow news year in terms of official minor league baseballs. As predicted, what news we do have comes from an indy league, or more accurately, one of the MLB Partner Leagues.
The Pioneer League moved away from Rawlings as its official supplier back in 2021; a strange move for an MLB Partner considering that MLB purchased Rawlings in 2018. You’ll recall that the Atlantic League, another Partner League, also uses OT Sports baseballs.
Now the league has gone back to Rawlings for its game balls, with a bit of a twist. While the OT Sports PBL ball was a great design, from the mixed fonts on the league stamp to the multi-colored laces, the new ball resembles an official MLB ball more than the generic MiLB baseballs in use by affiliated leagues since 2021, as the Pioneer League logo has been replaced on the south panel with the MLB logo. A game-used sample is below:
This prompts a couple of questions: Why the switch? Perhaps to save money; the PBL went with OT Sports due to the high cost of Rawlings baseballs but now that MLB is providing the balls, that cost would seem to be zero; and will MLB supply the other Partner Leagues as well? There is no indication yet that that’s the case but we’re keeping an eye out. Stay tuned!
Back in late September 2023, MiLB announced a new logo. You can read the press release here.
Unlike the tweak made to it when MLB first took over in 2021 (revisit my underwhelmed reaction here), the new logo features significant changes. Instead of red, white, and blue it’s now light blue, white, and blue; the familiar MiLB right-handed batter has been replaced by MLB’s switch-hitting silhouette; and all four stars have been lined up to the right of the bat.
Word is that once minor league teams use up their supplies of last year’s balls, they’ll start using this one. The Museum has managed to acquire one, and here it is:
Note that the ink is a slightly lighter blue than the Navy blue that Rawlings has used for the past 20-odd years.
So keep an eye out for these in the wild this season. Spring Training is right around the corner, and hopefully we’ll be seeing these balls in games before too long.
A reminder that the 2nd Edition of the Collector’s Guide is now available! It has lots of updates, including this new MiLB ball. Buy it on Etsy, or drop me a message or email and I’ll let you know how to get it directly from me.
Just a quick update to wish my fellow collectors a safe and happy New Year! May your 2024 be better than your 2023.
I also wanted to announce the publication of the updated Collector’s Guide to Minor League Baseballs! The PDF version of the 2nd Edition is available now, just click the link in this paragraph or on the top or side menu to find out how to get your copy from me. It’s also available on Etsy.
All the info you need to identify and enjoy your minor league baseball collection, updated for 2024 to include MLB’s takeover of the affiliated system and brand-new baseballs for some independent leagues! Get your copy today.
From everyone here at the museum to your household we wish you a propserous and fun New Year!
“People ask me what I do in winter when there’s no baseball. I’ll tell you what I do. I stare out the window and wait for spring.” – Rogers Hornsby
Another season is in the books and here at the Museum we’re kindred spirits with the late Mr. Hornsby: just waiting for Spring. This isn’t football season nor basketball season, we consider this baseball’s off-season.
Even here in central Arizona where there’s no real winter to speak of, the days without a baseball game being played somewhere in the US still aren’t quite as bright as they are from March through November (don’t forget the Arizona Fall League!). So I thought I’d finally work on a new page that I’ve been thinking about for a while now.
Introducing Oddities, featuring a few one-of-a-kind balls that have a unique back story. These balls are reminders of the often ephemeral and volatile nature of minor league baseball, and I thought they were interesting enough to warrant their own page. It’s not complete yet, I’ll be adding a Rob Manfred Official Minor League ball with a reversed logo soon. Check out the new page if you get a chance, and if you know of other weird minor league balls drop me a line.
In the meantime, we’ll just keep an eye out for additions to the Museum and keep on countin’ down to Spring Training. Happy collecting!
MLB has scrapped the Triple-A Championship Weekend that debuted last year and revamped the MiLB post-season landscape yet again.
TRIPLE-A Instead of division winners meeting in a single playoff game, each league will name a first-half winner and a second-half winner. Those two teams will meet for a best-of-three series to be hosted by the first-half winner. The two victors will then meet for one Championship Game in Las Vegas.
DOUBLE-A, HIGH-A, SINGLE-A The lower leagues will also divide their seasons into halves, with the two half winners meeting in a best-of-three Division Series, followed by a best-of-three Championship Series. The lone exception is the Northwest League which, consisting of only six teams, will play a single, best-of-five Championship Series between the two half-season winners.
It’s nice to see post-season series again rather than single-game eliminations; too bad the Triple-A Championship is still one game. That’s about the only nice thing I have to say about it. As has become a hallmark of the MLB hostile takeover, there will be no commemorative gamers produced for these series nor for the Triple-A Championship Game. Rob Manfred continues to pay minor attention to fans of the minor leagues.
Every once in awhile we collectors will encounter a mystery item, one that can’t immediately be identified. It’s both exciting and maddening at the same time! So we have to swap our collector’s hat for a researcher’s hat. For me it’s part of the fun of this hobby, so I thought I would recount the story of my most recent aqcuisitions, two balls from the Bi-State League.
The ball on the left is from 1936, the ball on the right from 1938.
The person from whom I obtained the balls got them from her grandfather, Bob Mason, a shortstop who played in the minors from 1935-1941. In ’36 and ’37 Bob played for the Bi-State League’s Danville-Schoolfield Leafs, of Danville, Virginia. She related how Bob made sure to get teammates, and sometimes players on opposing teams, to sign balls for him. She’d already done some research to identify all of the signatures.
My first step to verify these balls, as detailed in my Collector’s Guide (which you can get here), was to check the president’s stamp and look up the president’s tenure. The ’38 ball was easy: Joseph (Joe W) Garrett was league prez from 1938-1941. For the earlier ball, however, I immediately ran into a small mystery: Jake Wells was league prez in 1936, but J.P. Wells was listed as prez for 1941. My baseball thought to be from 1936 was stamped, “J.P. Wells”.
Similar names, but they’re listed differently in the Encyclopedia of Minor League Baseball (where most of the information on this site regarding league presidents was obtained), as well as the Wikipedia page for the league.
J. Frank Wilson (1934) Dr. J.E. Taylor (1935) Jake Wells (1936) Win Clark (1937) Joseph Garrett (1938-1940) J. P. Wells (1941) Dr. T. S. Wilson (1942)
From Wikipedia’s Bi-State Leauge page
To further complicate things, “Jake Wells (1936)” was a hyperlink to another Wiki page for an early 20th Century baseball player named Jake Wells, but he died in 1927, so clearly that link was in error, he couldn’t be the same guy.
Next up: baseball-reference.com, which refers to the presidents the same way (Jake in ’36 and J.P. in ’41) and had the same erroneous hyperlink to the same, wrong, Jake Wells.
I changed tack at that point and looked up the signatures on the ball, using baseball-reference.com again, to verify that these names were players on the 1936 Danville-Schoolfield Leafs. They checked out.
Still working on the assumption that Jake and J.P. were different people (perhaps father and son, it’s happened before: see the Florida State League’s George MacDonald and George MacDonald, Jr.), my next thought was that Bob Mason had a ball from 1941 and chased down his 1936 teammates to sign it. So the next step was to validate that the ball was indeed from 1936.
I started by examining the Goldsmith logo on the north panel of both balls.
1936 ball on the left, 1938 ball on the right
Note that the logos are nearly identical except for the slightly narrower and more elongated font on the ’38 ball. Referring to the Guide again, the elongated font was introduced in the late 1930s. That alone ruled out that the ball was actually a 1941 ball, but there were more clues to check.
Next I looked at the stamping on the front panel. Typical of baseballs used by the low minor leagues in the ’30s, ’40s, and into the ’50s, these were not made specifically for the league, but they are an off-the-shelf model with the league stamp added later, in this case on the east panel. Leagues that contracted with Goldsmith were provided with its “97 League” model.
The ’36 ball has “Official League Ball” on the front panel, with “No. 97” as part of the stamp on the south panel. The ’38 ball has “Official 97 League” on the front panel, using the same stamp design that Goldsmith would use for this model well into the 1950s. This was further confirmation that not only was the ball not from 1941, but did in fact pre-date the 1938 ball.
I was now almost certain that Jake Wells and J.P. Wells were the same person, and that his president’s stamps probably used the two names interchangeably. There was no other explanation that came to mind. After several fruitless internet searches I had hit a wall, there was no more research I could do on my own. So I reached out to the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum via email, to see if their research department could help. I very quickly received a response from the Library Director, who’d done a brief search of newspaper archives and discovered one account that referred to Jake as J.P. So he was inclined to agree that the two Wells were one and the same. My baseball was a real 1936 baseball. Why the Encyclopedia has them listed differently is anybody’s guess. Wikipedia and Baseball-reference.com undoubtedly used the same sourcee that I did.
There you have it, my latest adventure in baseball dating. This was probably not as enjoyable to read as it was for me to do and to write, but I thought it might be interesting to give an example of how we collectors have to wear many hats, including those of researcher and historian.
The Frontier League (Independent MLB Partner League) has announced that President Eric Krupa has resigned effective immediately. A search will be conducted for a new league prez but no timeline was given. The official press release is here.
Mr. Krupa served as Frontier League President for not quite two years, taking over ahead of the 2022 season. You’ll also recognize his name from his tenure as President of the South Atlantic League from 2008 until the Great MLB Hostile Takeover of 2021. He has accepted the position of chief operating officer with Ryan Sanders Baseball, which operates the Round Rock Express (Triple-A Pacific Coast League) and is co-owner of the San Antonio Missions (Double-A Texas League).
We’re presuming that the league will continue to use Eric Krupa balls until a replacement is named, which will most likely be after the season completes in early September. So, a new FL ball to look forward to in 2023!
Another baseball season is upon us! The month of May sees even short season leagues like the Pecos League getting underway. Normally this would be a good time to discuss upcoming special events, like All-Star Games, that in the past would’ve featured new commemorative game balls to add to the collection.
But this is 2023 and, while there will still be All-Star Games this summer, for MLB-affiliated leagues that means there are no commemoratives anymore. Even the independent (MLB Partner) Atlantic League, celebrating its 25th Anniversary this season, has not produced a special regular season ball to mark the occasion.
Once a thriving hobby, with new balls every season ranging from Opening Day/Night balls to inaugural season balls, from All-Star Games to post-season series and league championship gamers, the minor league baseball landscape for new collectibles is now all but disappeared. Barring a change in the design of the regular season baseballs, or in the case of independent leagues a change in Commissioner or President necessitating a new ball, the minor league collector’s focus has shifted to filling gaps in the collection rather than adding anything new.
Is this a bad thing? Well, not entirely. We don’t have the excitement of looking forward to new designs mid-summer at All-Star Game time, but we’re also saving money. For those of us who collect more than the special gamers, there are a huge number of historical regular season baseballs to add to our collections. That’s one of the reasons I focused my collection on minor league balls rather than major league balls, because there are so many more of them (and not everybody and his brother collect them).
But apart from new teams joining the Pecos League and the occasional new independent league design, there aren’t any new minor league baseballs to look forward to. Collectors of all kinds tend to be historians to one degree or another, that’s part of the appeal: doing the research and learning about the history of one’s collection. But now it seems that the minor league baseball collector has truly been relegated to being primarily a historian.
Hopefully this will change at some point in the future. I do like to keep this site positive but I think the biggest change to minor league baseballs that I’m looking forward to is the replacement of Rob Manfred’s signature on the MiLB ball. Perhaps someone will take the helm of Minor League Baseball with some vision and appreciation of the minor leagues beyond a way to pinch every penny until Abe screams.
If and when that happens you can bet we’ll have an announcement! Until then, keep your eyes on this site. We are always adding to the collection, either with historical balls we didn’t have, or upgraded pieces in better condition that what was there before. We’re also in the process of getting better pics of the collection.
As always, keep enjoying minor league baseball in all of its forms! Support your local team, and if you go on vacation make sure to catch a game wherever you happen to be. Major League games are awesome but it’s the minor leagues that have local flavor and flair that you can’t find anywhere else. It’s the best form of the sport, even with MLB’s recent meddling.
Sure, we’ve been enjoying 2023 for over a month now so it’s not exactly New Year’s, but I can’t leave that Christmas post up forever!
We’re not sure what’s in store for the hobby this coming season. We can expect that Atlantic League baseballs (“the Drake”) will feature the league’s 25th Anniversary logo, but that’s not been confirmed.
Sadly, we can also expect that MLB and Commissioner Rob Effing Manfred (that’s his real name, it’s on his birth certificate) won’t do squat when it comes to MiLB special event baseballs, even for All-Star Games or post-season balls. The heyday for those were in the Aughts and Tens.
We’ll have to continue to look for unique balls from the MLB Partner and independent leagues. The Pecos League is still producing balls for each team, and we have three new teams in the league in 2023.
Stay tuned and we’ll update you on any changes to the official baseballs or any commemorative gamers that might come up. In the meantime, Spring Training fires up in a couple of weeks and we’ll be back to the best part of the year, the baseball season! Strap in and enjoy!
2022 was an interesting year for minor league balls, with almost all of the interesting stuff coming from the independent leagues. The final month of the year is no exception!
The Pecos League continues to lead the pack with individualized team baseballs. Next season will see three new teams added to the circuit: the Blackwell Flycatchers, the Lancaster Sound Breakers, and the Marysville Drakes. As of this writing two of the three game balls have been produced and you can see them here.
That will wrap up this year’s news. Here’s hoping 2023 will see some fun stuff from the affiliated leagues as well. My Christmas wish for Santa is a return of All-Star Game logos!
From everyone here at the Museum we wish you and yours a very merry holiday season and a joyous new year!
-Tony Baseballs
Collecting and researching official minor league baseballs
