HOW A FRANCHISE WAS BUILT

FOUNDING EDITOR

One of baseball’s redeeming qualities is that it is trapped in a time warp. Basically, the fundamentals of the sport today are the same as they were 50 years ago. Even 100 years ago.

That truism hardly applies, though, when the game is viewed through a Baseball America prism.

At a time of reflection as we mark the occasion of BA’s 40th anniversary, it’s relatively safe to say that baseball in 1981, in our first year of publication, was hardly the same stable entity we’d always come to expect, just as it wasn’t in 2020, in our 40th year, either.

Between the pandemic that brought