There’s a kind of low-stakes Faustian bargain involved in being a fan of a minor league baseball team. While we receive months of summer evenings of baseball in exchange for our enthusiasm and happiness, we are essentially trading something spiritually precious for a material good that is inherently limited as to how good it can become.

After all, we are not rooting for a major league team, whose ultimate goal is to accumulate enough talent to win a World Series. We are rooting for part of the feeder system, where the ultimate goal is to develop players so they can be promoted to higher levels of baseball. This creates an ironic reality for minor league fans: the better a player performs, the less time he is likely to spend in the minor leagues overall, meaning every hit that helps your t

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