It’s No Minor Deal to Them

So it goes in baseball contraction talks: Attorneys representing millionaire players meet with attorneys representing multimillionaire owners as high-salaried front-office managers hold their collective breath.

But all the talk of eliminating teams--most likely the Minnesota Twins and Montreal Expos--has mostly ignored the plight of hundreds of powerless lower-tiered players and employees from their minor league affiliates who might be out of jobs.

In the minors, scouts are lucky to be paid $40,000 a year to find full-season Class-A players willing to accept $950 a month. And while some triple-A general managers annually pull in six-figure salaries, their numbers are dwarfed by minimum wage-earning workers.

Workers like Willie Church, who, since the team moved there in 1974, has been a groundskeeper for the Twins’ rookie league affiliate in Elizabethton, Tenn. He worked the field while his wife, Linda, worked for the club in souvenir sales. His daughters, Amy, Susan and Rebecca, spent their teenage years selling concessions at the park.

But next spring the family isn’t certain what it will be doing. Elizabethton, which plays in the Appalachian League, is among minor league franchises likely to fold if their parent clubs are eliminated.

“I do this for the love of the game, so to see the Twins leave here would be a big change in my life,” said Church, who works for the club in the off hours from his job as a middle-school teacher.

Church has watched and befriended the likes of Kirby Puckett, Kent Hrbek and Gary Gaetti as they came through his little town. This year, he was happy to meet catcher Joe Mauer, the first pick of the June amateur draft.

“I could go to other parks and watch games,” Church said. “It just wouldn’t be the same.”

Above the rookie league level, the concern is more for the future.

Major league baseball and the National Assn. Of Professional Baseball Leagues reached an agreement before the 1998 season on a 10-year contract that provides 160 player-development contracts to the association’s member teams. A clause allows the agreement to be revisited after the 2003 season.

“No one will go away in the next two years, we know that,” said Pat O’Conner, chief operating officer and vice president of administration for the association. But if big league teams are contracted, each of their minor league teams above rookie ball--the Twins and Expos each have four--might be at risk.

O’Conner predicted that major league baseball will designate affected minor league teams as co-ops, and stock those franchises with players from several different organizations. That situation, which would likely last only through 2003, brings its own set of problems.

Top prospects are rarely assigned to co-ops because a major league team has less control over a player’s career if the manager and coaches aren’t directly connected to the parent big-league club. In a normal minor league situation, an individual player’s development is the priority over the team’s win-loss record. With co-ops, that often is not the case.

The addition of contraction co-ops would also create a scramble for roster spots in a field in which competition is already fierce.

“It’s just real nerve-racking not knowing,” said Greg Blum, a third baseman from Chino who spent last season with the Expos’ high Class-A Jupiter (Fla.) affiliate. “Not only do I not know where I’ll be going to spring training, I don’t know if I’ll be going to spring training.”

Among Expo and Twin minor league players, Blum, 23, considers himself lucky.

Although he says he hasn’t been contacted by anyone within the Expos’ organization since baseball’s owners voted for contraction, he at least has a personal hotline for second-hand information.

His brother, Geoff, is a big-league utility player with the Expos. Geoff’s agent has been keeping both brothers abreast of any news.

“I’m still young. I think I could hook on with another team, but there will be a lot of guys trying to do the same thing,” Blum said. “My teammates are thinking and asking and wondering about the same things I am.

“For now, all I’m doing is waiting around. There’s not a lot to do about it but pray it works out.”

One local scout’s position is only slightly less tenuous.

John Leavitt’s responsibilities as a Twins’ scout run the gamut. Along with evaluating high school and college players in six Southern California counties, he scouts the Class-A California League and the Angels and Dodgers.

It’s a nice fit for the Garden Grove resident who formerly served as pitching coach at Anaheim Canyon High and Cypress College before working his way up the ranks from his first scouting stint, in Kansas, Missouri, Oklahoma and Arkansas.

Leavitt can’t help but believe his career is vulnerable, but he said he has been comforted by a pair of telephone conversations with Twin General Manager Terry Ryan.

“He said, ‘Don’t be alarmed, we’ll take this as it comes, just keep doing the same things you always do and expect to play next year,”’ Leavitt said.

In the minors, concern trickles down from triple-A to A, although some franchises are more stable than others even if they lose player development contracts.

That’s the case for the Twins’ triple-A Pacific Coast League affiliate in Edmonton, which remains confident. Gary Tater, Edmonton’s manager of baseball information, said that franchise is well positioned for survival because it is among the league’s most profitable organizations. Already the Tacoma franchise is for sale, and Tucson has been struggling at the turnstiles.

As for the Elizabethton Twins, Appalachian League President Lee Landers said that team is among the 10 that are part of the 2002 league schedule he will release later this month. But he’s also ready to adjust.

“Clubs have called in the past asking about coming into the league, and I guarantee you I have them on my mind right now,” Landers said.

That’s not good news for groundskeeper Church and the many like him across the country.

Church says talk of turning Elizabethton into a co-op, or forcing it to find a new parent club, would taint a rich history. In the 1987 World Series, he recalls, 22 players from the Twins and St. Louis Cardinals at one time had been assigned to Elizabethton or its nearby league rival, Johnson City.

“Our town has an allegiance to Minnesota, in that we also pride ourselves on our tight community and an ethic of hard work,” Church said. “This team is a family thing to me. I have a great baseball wife, my kids grew up around the ballpark and I grew close to several players.

“Many are wondering about this in the community and asking me, ‘Will we have baseball this summer?’

“I tell them I hope.”