Ben Hill does it for money.

A comparative season preview.

Traveling to see minor league baseball, that is, then writing about it. WHAT?! Are you in junior freakin' high school? I would never dis' Ben Hill. For one, he is some kinda neighbor — I have chatted with him a couple of times at Brooklyn Cyclones games. (That's right; he goes to baseball games even when he's not on the clock.)

And Melvin can attest to the months or maybe years when I wondered, 'How can I get a job doing what Ben Hill does?' Arguable doppelgängers Kevin Goldstein and Jason Parks disabused me of that insane idea on the Up and In Show but for a while there, jealousy was the highest form of flattery. Really, man, grow the ef up. You read this on Baseball Byways, not some bathroom wall.

 Ben's 15th season; our 25th

Anyway, Ben has posted a season preview (which you can read in full for yourself) and it made me think I might do the same. There is some overlap, as well as some very intentional divergence.

Ems the Breaks

I attended the home opener of the Eugnne Emeralds' 70th anniversary season, sitting in the front row looking down the third base line. Eugene, Oregon, is about 45 minutes from where my stepmother and late father live/d and so it is not hard to figure how I have seen the High-A affiliate of the San Francisco Giants four times; once with the 'rents, once with Melvin, and once before on my own. However, the April 9 game was probably my last visit there.

screen capture from the City of Medford website

The Ems are owned by the venerable Elmore Sports Group (Ballpark Digest eulogy for founder Dave Elmore), which may explain in part how the team survived MLB's 2020 purge of 42 minor league franchises. (As part of the 2020 reorganization, the already diminutive Northwest League was reduced from eight teams to six and the future of the Everettt AquaSox remains uncertaain.)

In the four-plus years since the league reorganization, a bid to build a new stadium in the Lane County Fairgrounds failed to gain momentum. The proposal asked for more public dollars than the county was willing to allocate and a $15 million bond referendum put before voters by the Eugense City Council lost by a two-to-one margin. The Emeralds accept that they need to find a new home, with Medford, Oregon, most prominently in the news at this time.