How I learned to stop worrying and love the Augusta GreenJackets

If you're interested in watching low-stakes baseball, you've got more than one choice.

Note: This is more meandering and less analysis-focused than the typical fare here. This definitely doesn’t mark a permanent shift as to what I’ll write, but I might do this occasionally to get baseball thoughts off my chest if it’s received well.

Act one: The problem of irrelevance

At the end of next season, we’re headed towards another lockout. One of the key issues at the bargaining table will likely be the increasingly stark divide between baseball’s haves and have-nots. The owners will propose a salary cap and perhaps offer a salary floor as a concession. The players will almost certainly rebuff any suggestion of a limitation on teams’ ability to spend beyond the current luxury tax system. Reports covering the lockout will remind us that owners are rich, that virtually all of them can spend more on payroll than they actually do, and that if an owner can’t spend enough money to keep a competitive team on the field, he should simply sell the very desirable asset to someone who can.

All of that is true. While a cap/floor system would bring the rich teams and the poor teams closer together in spending power, so would the poor teams simply spending more money. You won’t find any sympathy for owners here.

But the biggest losers of an unequal financial playing field aren’t the owners, who of course have much more in common with each other than they do with anyone sitting in the bleachers at their games. The biggest losers are the have-nots’ fanbases. For most people, fandom carries an allegiance totally unheard of when it comes to other recreational expenditures. If your favorite restaurant serves you rancid food, it won’t be your favorite restaurant any more. But fandom comes with rules, and one that’s commonly observed is that you can’t switch fandom from your team to another because your team sucks and the other team is good.

That’s tough, because some baseball teams systemically, predictably suck. Every season, about a third of Major League Baseball teams have stopped playing meaningful baseball (assuming they were ever playing it) by the start of July. By July 1 of last year, 11 teams faced playoff odds of less than 10 percent. The year before, it was 9 teams. The year before that, it was 12 teams. These are teams that, barring a miracle, are playing out the string - teams that, expanded playoff notwithstanding, are almost certainly going to be left out in the cold come October. Bad teams exist in every sport. But in the NFL, for example, there’s no natural force that causes bad teams to persist in being bad; the Chiefs made one conference championship between 1969 and 2018 before embarking on a dynastic run, and the Jaguars’ and Lions’ long runs of poor play were the result of extreme incompetence. In Major League Baseball, on the other hand, certain teams are consigned to long-term irrelevance, save for an everything-goes-right season here or there. The Pirates are irrelevant this year, as they were last year, as they were the year before that, and so on. As a result, Pirates fans haven’t watched a September game that held any meaning in nearly a decade.

In this context, I am blessed to be a Braves fan. I am particularly fortunate that the time in my life when I fell in love with baseball was June 2019. The start of Braves history as I knew it was Brian McCann walking off the Phillies with a wounded duck to left field that Jay Bruce inexplicably chose not to dive for (having kept the game alive for Philadelphia with a nifty one-handed catch off a bounce moments before). What followed were six consecutive postseason appearances and a World Series win in the first 162-game season I ever watched.

And even the 2025 Braves, flawed as they are, are not a truly irrelevant team. Their playoff odds hover in the mid-20s - this is significantly better than the state of the July 2021 Braves, for the record - and they feature a roster of players to whom the team has made long-term commitments. This is not a team of Chase d’Arnauds and Preston Tuckers. I don’t think they’ll make the playoffs, but I also wouldn’t bet a lot of money against them.

Yet with the exception of some storylines - Acuña’s magnificence, Strider’s return, the Schwellenbach-Fuentes youth movement in the rotation - this is not a particularly fun team to watch. And there’s a lot of season left.

Act two: The choice I’ve made

You probably feel the same way about watching this team as I do. And as we’ve established, you probably don’t feel like ditching your Braves fandom - even just for the season - and becoming a fan of the (shudder) Dodgers or the (shudder) Phillies or whichever team you think is playing the best brand of baseball. After all, some of what makes the high points great is knowing that you were there in the low points. As much as the 2021 World Series brought me joy, I think having suffered through the rebuild in earnest would have heightened that feeling.

Your second option - which involves no infidelity - is to simply disengage. Instead of watching the games, you check the scores afterwards. Instead of reading this Substack religiously, you find it in you to temper your consumption a bit. But you’re left with less baseball to watch - or, at least, baseball you’re invested in.

That brings me to the Augusta GreenJackets. And the Columbus Clingstones, and the Gwinnett Stripers, and the Florida Complex League and Dominican Summer League Braves, actually (although FCL and DSL games aren’t televised). As I’ve lost interest in the major league Braves this year, I’ve increasingly used my MLB.tv subscription to catch bits of the Braves’ minor league affiliates.

In some ways, the product is indisputably worse. This evening’s Gwinnett Stripers game began with a rendition of the national anthem that included three key changes. A lot of pitchers run large differentials between their ERAs and peripherals because the defenses are so poor. The camera crews won’t win any Emmys and with the exception of Triple-A, there’s no Statcast feed to follow along with as the game progresses.

But a baseball purist will find a lot to love about televised minor league games. There are no ads between innings; if the broadcast shows anything, it’s the zany promos that the home team is running. Want to watch two people face each other, spin around 10 times with their eyes closed, and then race each other? It’s there for the taking. Old-school plays like the hit-and-run remain in vogue. And old-ish, big-ish names pop up. Who knew David Fletcher and Joey Gallo were pitchers now?

And unlike watching, say, a Diamondbacks-Padres game - a slickly produced spectacle with top talent that holds no meaning to you - watch enough Braves minor league games and you’ll start to feel an allegiance towards certain players. You’ll root for Ethan Workinger, the former undrafted free agent who is Columbus’ second-best hitter. (Yes, this says as much about Columbus’ offense as it does about Workinger.) You’ll get excited when Cam Caminiti makes his debut in Rome. At lunch, you’ll check the box score of the 11:00am DSL game to see if Diego Tornes has gotten another extra-base hit. You’ll root for them not because you’re a Clingstones or Stripers or GreenJackets fan - you won’t really care whether they win or lose - but because you might be seeing a glimpse of the future. And occasionally, like with Didier Fuentes, the future will come sooner than you had thought.

Well, maybe you won’t feel any of these things. Maybe rooting for prospects and tuning into bad baseball in search of saving graces isn’t your thing. Maybe when the Braves aren’t playing well, you’d rather read a book or go out with friends than find other baseball to watch.

But if the refrain of a losing team’s fanbase is, “There’s always next year,” then watching grainy footage of the players who might make up that team in the years to come might be the truest embodiment of that spirit.