WASHINGTON – Senator Tina Smith, D-Minn. appealed to the Major League Baseball commissioner, Rob Manfred, to keep a Caledonia softball bat factory open in Caledonia – rather than moving the operation to China. Smith made the same appeal to Peter Siedler, the owner of the San Diego Padres baseball club. His Siedler Equity Partnersers jointly own the Caledonia factory with MLB. The factory employs 85 people in manufacturing world-class Miken composite-five softball bats. The plant is central to Caledonia’s economy. Smith expressed outrage at the imminent China move. The move, she said, flies in the face of MLB’s status as an iconic American sports league.” Instead, she said, there needs to be long-term investments in the Caledonia plant. Smith noted that Major League teams, including the Padres, have benefited from billions in taxpayer stadium subsidies, and that MLB has long benefitted from an exemption from federal anti-trust law and from relaxed overtime rules. In exchange for these taxpayer-funded benefits and special exemptions, Smith said that Americans should be able to count on MLB not to offshore jobs to China.
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Miken. The brand-name softball bats are key in the economy of Caledonia, population 2,700, in Houston County.