“It’s a historic day for baseball,” booms the announcer’s voice as my ticket is scanned. I'm at LECOM Park in Bradenton on March 14, the first day of Major League Baseball's Spring Breakout. LECOM Park is named for the Lake Erie College of Osteopathic Medicine, which seems like a strange sponsorship at first. But this is the winter home of the Pittsburgh Pirates, and in the six decades the Pirates have played here, so many western Pennsylvanians have moved in that LECOM opened a Bradenton campus. Today, the Pirates are hosting the Baltimore Orioles and 6,913 paying customers in the first game of a doubleheader. It’s historic because the second game is the debut of Spring Breakout, in which the top prospects from the Pirates and Orioles farm systems will play against one another.

My son, Will, is the vice president of strategy and insights for Major League Baseball, and he has been working with other staffers to make Spring Breakout happen. Fans of professional baseball sometimes refer to games as “the show,” and one reason is that even though a great deal of effort goes into planning them, nobody knows what’s going to happen after the umpire cries, “Play ball!” That’s why I’m here today.

Spring Breakout is an experiment that took months to set up. There are 30 Major League Baseball teams, and each of them supports four minor league teams ranked from low-A to high-A, AA and AAA. To pull off Spring Breakout, each organization had to agree to the idea, identify the players most likely to become future stars and send those prospects to spring training camps in Florida and Arizona, a process that took many meetings and phone calls. The goal is to bring more attention to the 120 minor league clubs that are scattered around the country and make more baseball fans. I’m shadowing Will and his co-workers as they watch the first of 16 televised Spring Breakout games. We’re waiting for baseball magic to happen.

I was 10 in 1969, the first year the Pirates played here. I remember the old stadium’s thin, rusty steel frame below splintery wooden bench seats, and I have a vague recollection of peeling paint and a sunburn. I came back in the mid-1990s with Will when he was also about 10, and we came once in the summer to see the minor-league Bradenton Marauders, too. I have no memory of those games, but Will remembers them clearly. That’s how it goes.

Professional baseball has been played in the Bradenton park since 1923, and the place has received a major upgrade during the LECOM Park era. Now, it’s a mass of concrete on two levels, with a boulevard-style food court, a jumbotron scoreboard, a professional announcer and an exquisitely manicured playing surface. Many of the ushers, vendors and security people are volunteers. A staffer who must be on the edge of heatstroke roams the stands in a full-bodied costume of foam rubber and fake fur that makes him look like The Pirate Parrot.  Many fans are wearing Pirates merch, and one couple parades about in full pirate drag. They don’t call it “the show” for nothing.

After spring training, this is also the home field for the Marauders of the Florida State League, which occupies the lowest level of the minor league farm system. Some minor league stadiums are small, but most Florida State League stadiums are fully show-worthy, because major league teams play here during spring training.

The major-league Pirates lose to the Orioles 5-2 in a pitcher’s duel that goes quickly. The Spring Breakout game won’t start for 90 minutes, tickets don’t allow re-entry and those of us who came to see the results of the experiment watch the stands empty out with some anxiety. But there’s an autograph session scheduled for the break, so fans can meet some of the top prospects. Maybe some people are waiting there.

I walk down to the food court and see a line of fans that must be 100 yards long. At the end of it are stairs leading up to the bleachers that offer a good view of the players and fans at the signing table. Will and a co-worker stand on the landing, and both of them look happy. Will is tracking several dozen tasks on his phone and is submerged in texts and calls. Several Spring Breakout games are happening over the next few days in several locations. Almost everything is going well, he says, but the signing table offers proof for the eyes.

I overhear Will talking to Terry Johnson, whose 19-year-old son, Termarr, is the Pirates’ top-ranked hitting prospect. “I can’t believe this,” Terry says. “Termarr was up at 6 a.m. I told him to go back to sleep but he couldn’t, he is so wired up.” Will smiles broadly. The stadium is now almost full and the players are excited. It’s working.

The road to the majors is long and difficult. Last year, 614 amateurs were drafted, almost all of them from high school and college teams. Top draft picks can get a lot of money (the Pirates gave Termarr Johnson a signing bonus of $7.2 million), but the vast majority of amateurs are never drafted, and most of those who are drafted are paid far less.

The Spring Breakout players are the cream of each team’s farm system, but some of them may never make it to the majors. Prospects typically spend several years in the minors under the tutelage of coaches, and even those who excel in the minors must still wait for a call-up. Sometimes, even if they’re doing everything well, that call never comes.

Most minor-league ballplayers are college-aged, and many are still teenagers. They are saying no to colleges and jobs so they can do what they love, but they aren’t getting rich. The minimum salary ranges from $20,000 a year for rookies to $46,000 for AAA, and the average signing bonus is about $20,000. These guys are like struggling young actors, playing their hearts out for a chance at a big break. Spring Breakout is their first taste of major-league attention, and they are loving it.

MLB officials have focused on improving the minor leagues over the last few years. One reason is to improve conditions for players, who joined the baseball union last year. (In 2022, the minimum annual salary for a single-A ballplayer was $4,800.) Another is to improve the minor league parks as testing sites. LECOM Park’s dimensions are not identical to those of PNC Park in Pittsburgh, but it is 400 feet to the center-field fence in each stadium, and the outfield grass in Bradenton is so perfect that the guy sitting next to me asks if it’s fake.

The Spring Breakout game proceeds steadily thanks to the pitch clock, an innovation introduced to the majors last year after it was tested in the minors. At one point, the pitcher calls time, walks over to the coach and hands him his cap. There’s an earpiece attached that needs to be adjusted. Many coaches, pitchers and catchers now use an electronic system called PitchCom instead of making encoded hand signals. Major leaguers started using the system in 2022, but it was tested in the minors first.

The marquee matchup comes in the top of the first inning, when the 2023 MLB draft’s top overall pick, Paul Skenes of the Pirates, faces the 2022 draft’s top overall pick, Jackson Holliday of the Orioles. Skenes has it all: a 102-mile-per-hour fastball, good breaking balls and change-ups, and a gift for outwitting hitters. Holliday, a left-handed slugger, gets him to a full count, but then whiffs on strike three. Holliday got a signing bonus of $8.2 million when he was a senior in high school, and he may soon be a major-league Oriole, but that probably didn’t matter much to him on his way back to the dugout. All the glory went to Skenes.

Termarr Johnson has a better day. He comes up in the bottom of the first and pokes a single down the third baseline, advances to second on another single and then advances to third on a sacrifice fly, sliding under the tag. He’s stranded there as the inning ends, but it’s a nice show of baserunning skill.

Johnson is also mediagenic. He’s wearing a two-way mic on the field so fans watching on MLB video feeds can hear perfect audio of him saying, “Whoo-ee! How are you guys liking this today?” while flashing a big grin. Later, the announcer even asks him a question while he’s playing second base. I’m skeptical about this innovation, but it does draw the video audience closer to the action.

We preview another coming attraction in the bottom of the second inning, when the umpire calls ball four and the catcher challenges it. The game pauses briefly for an automated ball-strike system, a series of high-definition cameras assisted by artificial intelligence software that determines whether the pitch was a ball or a strike. “Robo-ump” says it was a strike, and the umpire’s call is overturned. But then the umpire calls a balk on the pitcher, and a baserunner jogs in to score a run. The automated system is still being evaluated, and we may see it in MLB games soon.

To this fan, the Spring Breakout matchup looks exactly like a major league game, and that’s the point. The players spend the whole game leaning against the rails at the top of the dugout steps, watching the action, and they congratulate everybody who crosses the plate like it’s a playoff game. The Pirates win 3-1 in seven innings, but that hardly matters. Spring Breakout is a success.

The stadium is full of people enjoying various rituals, like the clowning mascot or (my favorite) eating peanuts from the shell without worrying about the mess you’re leaving on the floor. There’s also a fair amount of talking to strangers. A man grabs a foul ball and gives it to a kid he doesn’t know. Even now, when it often seems as though the nation is having a screaming family argument, there’s still a friendly vibe in the stands. I’m happy for Will, and it’s a good day for the national pastime.

Writer Brad Edmondson is a fourth-generation Floridian now living in Ithaca, New York.