The Vanishing Towns

“Full many a flower is born to blush unseen, And waste its sweetness on the desert air.” — from Casey at the Bat, adapted in Bull Durham

Baseball doesn’t disappear all at once. It fades. It slips out of small places a little at a time until one day the lights don’t turn on and the field starts to grow weeds. That’s what happened in 2020 when Major League Baseball cut more than forty minor league teams. On paper it was called contraction. In reality it was abandonment.

I felt the change co…