WASHINGTON — Last week, the website SmartAsset published a list of America’s Best Minor League Baseball Towns. Unfortunately, the criteria used to comprise this list — as well as some of the glaring errors within it — rendered the entire exercise essentially useless.
As a former minor league public relations director at two different levels of the game with two different organizations, I was very interested in the methodology used to determine such a ranking. SmartAsset used a combination of metrics based on standard of living in the city that the team calls home, along with one intended to determine the “best baseball experience.”
I don’t have a problem with the standard of living formula. To be a good place to watch minor league baseball, a town should also be a good place to live, or else it’s hardly worth the sacrifice. But SmartAsset has it weighted four-to-one against the actual baseball qualities. This is clearly far too high.
I would have liked to weigh SmartAsset’s findings for standard of living into my rankings, perhaps at a one-to-two ratio, but they only list the top 25, not the entire rating for each city.
More disconcertingly, they have the Potomac Nationals listed in Alexandria, Virginia, rather than Woodbridge. This cheapened the P-Nats second-place finish, and made me want to try the whole, painstaking exercise again.
For my rankings, I’m focusing entirely on the baseball aspect. Also, I used much different metrics than those used by SmartAsset used to determine “which cities had enjoyed the best baseball experience.” Those were as follows:
1. 2014 regular season winning percentage
2. Stadium experience, according to stadiumjourney.com, which based their ratings from one game attended
3. A measure of points added for each level BELOW Triple-A that a team plays at
Yep, you read that right. Wholly ignoring the promotional calendar and in-game entertainment, they published a (comprehensive, mind you) rating of minor league baseball experience based on one year of winning and included a completely arbitrary — and arguably upside down — added value system for no apparent reason, nor explanation given.
I’ve aimed to fix my baseball ratings to ensure they actually reflect something tangible about the team in question. I’ve taken each of the four full season levels of Minor League Baseball, from Triple-A down to Low-A, and rated teams with a variety of scores, then weighted the entire exercise to get a sliding scale up to a perfect 100 rating.
Methodology
Attendance is a good measure of not only the popularity of a team, but also the in-game experience you’ll get when you attend. I’ve given each team a score based on its general attendance rank within its level (30 for best, 1 for worst), but to compensate for the wildly varying size of each market, I’ve balanced that with an inverse market size metric. For instance, the Dayton Dragons kill it at the High-A level when it comes to attendance. Of course, they’re a far larger market than Dunedin, so they ought to. This helps normalize gross attendance numbers with the relative number of people in each market.
Next, I’ve used the same stadium ratings from stadiumjourney.com, averaging the site rating with the user rating for each ballpark.
Now let’s look at a key element left out of these rankings. As any fan of minor league ball will tell you, the full experience extends far beyond the field. So I’ve added an additional five points for every MiLBy Award for promotions that each team has been nominated for since 2011, when the category was created. This will help the teams that go the extra mile stand out for their efforts.
Winning percentage is fine, but with constant player movement in the minor leagues, one year tells you absolutely nothing. Instead, I took an aggregate winning percentage over the past 10 years, averaged with each team’s winning percentage over the last three seasons. This should give us a good range of short-to-medium range success from which to determine if the product on the field is a good draw.
I have multiplied each team’s raw score by the sum of these winning percentages. That will allow the scores to fluctuate up or down to the degree over .500 that the team has played over these two sample sizes.
I considered adding extra legacy points for franchises that have been around for a long time, but this is about which team is best to watch right now. Finally, I took the highest overall score (97.88) and normalized it up to 100, which involves multiplying by a factor of 1.02166. I then multiplied every other score by the same factor to give us our final scores.
Results
Lo and behold, what did we find? Hilariously, the P-Nats didn’t suffer at all, actually jumping up and grabbing the No. 1 spot, thanks to strong attendance, added points for MiLBY nominations and a strong short and medium term winning percentage. Portland, Maine, which finished first on the SmartAsset list, still cracked the top 10, placing seventh.
There was a good mix from all four levels, with no less than four from each in the top 20. In all, 14 of the 120 teams finished with a grade of 90 or higher, while 35 of them cleared 80. Check out the slideshow above to the right to see the full list, as well as breakdowns by class level.
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