Minor League Baseball lost one of it’s most influential people this past Sunday. MiLB.com has reported that Hank Peters, the minor league’s sixth president, passed away at the age of 90. While he will be most remembered for his work at the big league level with the Baltimore Orioles, his work as president was monumental.
Peters worked his way up the major league system as a scout with with four big league teams starting with St. Louis. He took over as president of National Association of Professional Baseball Leagues, the governing body of the minor leagues, in 1972. This was a different time for minor league baseball. Smaller leagues were struggling and not every minor league team had a major league affiliation. That would start to change under Peters three year reign as president.
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Peters is credited with a wide array of accomplishments, but most notably, he is remembered for creating the concept of developmental contracts between the minor league circuit and Major Leagues. He is also considered as a huge contributor to saving the flailing Carolina, New York-Penn and Northwest leagues. He not only kept the smaller leagues going, he took them to a new level.
Peters started the baby steps that brought the minor leagues to prominence, starting with smaller things like the standards in which stadiums were to be kept. His work didn’t go unnoticed as he was made the General Manager of the Baltimore Orioles in 1975. In 1978, he was part of the braintrust that drafted a young shortstop named Cal Ripken, Jr. The Orioles he helped build would win an American East crown in 1979 and a World Series in 1983. In 1982, he hired a young man by the name of John Hart to manage his minor league team. Hart was named the new GM of the Atlanta Braves this season and has been hard at work reconstructing that team.
"“Hank has been the most influential individual in my professional career,” Hart said. “I’ve never known a man with more integrity, energy or passion. This is a tough time, a sad time.”"