Bus rides to Cedar Rapids no longer the way things go, apparently an outfit called Diamond Baseball Holdings thinks there's gold in those bus rides!
It's on The Athletic so it's paywalled but here's a snippet.
WAPPINGERS FALLS, N.Y. — The artificial turf at Heritage Financial Park is new. So is the right-field wall that opens wide enough for an 18-wheeler to haul concert equipment onto the field. The party deck is sponsored by a brewery that’s 10 miles away, giant windows have been installed around the corporate event space overlooking left field, and the renovated home clubhouse, where the Hudson Valley Renegades dress before games, has two indoor batting cages flanked by state-of-the-art data and motion-capture technology.
This is Class-A baseball in 2024. Quirky and local, but also big business that’s booming. Minor-league attendance is up and approaching pre-pandemic levels, new ballparks are being built, and existing franchises are selling at what are believed to be record prices. These are not the wooden bleachers and potholed infields of old.
At the center of this transformation is Diamond Baseball Holdings, a three-year-old company that owns more than a quarter of all minor league clubs. From a ground-up franchise in Spartanburg, S.C., to long-established clubs in Louisville, Ky., and Lansing, Mich., to their most recent purchase of the Harrisburg Senators in Pennsylvania, Diamond Baseball Holdings (DBH) now owns 32 of 120 affiliates, and its founders said they are still “aggressively in acquisition mode.”
“We are agnostic to geography. We are agnostic to club affiliation,” executive chairman Pat Battle said. “If you’re one of the 120, we are interested.”