When the Braves arrived in Atlanta in 1966, their top minor-league team left town, bound for Richmond.

Next year, that team will return, setting up shop in Gwinnett County.

"If you live long enough, you see everything," Bill Bartholomay, the Braves' lead owner in '66, said this past week. "That's 360 [degrees]."

The Braves are in position to move the Richmond team to Gwinnett because —- unlike every other Major League Baseball franchise —- they own their AAA affiliate.

Standard operating procedure is for major-league clubs to have player-development contracts with minor-league teams that are independently owned and operated. The big-league club provides the players, manager, coaches and trainers. The minor-league team owner runs the business, sells the tickets, operates the stadium and, yes, decides whether to relocate.

"It's the way of the baseball world, generally speaking," Braves president John Schuerholz said.

But the Braves, sticking to a course they charted decades ago, play ball differently than everyone else when it comes to minor-league operations.

The Braves own six of their seven minor-league teams. No other MLB franchise owns a majority of its minor-league affiliates. In fact, most MLB clubs own none above the rookie-league level.

Arrangement began in '65

The Braves believe their setup provides advantages in player development and business operations. As to why the Braves chose a different model than everyone else, the best person to ask is Bartholomay, the chairman of the ownership group that moved the franchise here from Milwaukee in '66 and sold it to Ted Turner a decade later.

Reached in Chicago, the 79-year-old Bartholomay recalled that team executives like the late Paul Richards and the late John Mullen advocated direct ownership of minor-league clubs as a way to improve the pipeline of players.

"The financial burden [of buying minor-league teams] wasn't as heavy as in today's world, and we had disappointing [big-league] teams at the time," Bartholomay said. "So the thought was we'd be able to expedite and possibly control the development of whatever talent we had by owning the teams.

"It made some sense to me, and as things developed after free agency came along in 1976-77, it became even more important philosophically to accelerate the development of your [home-grown] talent."

The Braves took ownership of their Class AAA team in 1965 as an offshoot of buying baseball's territorial rights to the Atlanta market.

"We worked it out with [longtime Atlanta Crackers owner] Earl Mann —- $200,000 for the territorial rights," Bartholomay recalled.

The purpose of the purchase, of course, was to bring the major-league team here. But the Crackers, for six decades an ultra-successful team in the Class AA Southern Association, became the Braves' Class AAA International League affiliate in 1965, playing in the newly constructed Atlanta Stadium (later called Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium) while the Braves played a court-ordered final year in Milwaukee.

In 1966, the Braves moved the AAA team to Richmond, where it now is playing its 43rd —- and final —- season.

Whether next year's move to Gwinnett will represent the return to the metro area of a descendant of the Crackers franchise —- or merely the arrival of a team created after the Crackers ceased to exist —- is open to interpretation.

"That is kind of a gray area," said Tim Darnell, author of a 2003 book on Crackers history.

He notes the Richmond Braves don't include the Crackers in team records, and he views the name change as delineation between the franchises. But if the Braves choose to make more of the connection, he won't quibble. "From a pure marketing standpoint, if I was the Atlanta Braves, I'd be saying the most successful minor-league team in history returns to Atlanta," Darnell said.

Exactly when the Braves took ownership of their other farm teams is undocumented in team records. Changes in ownership of minor-league teams often went unnoticed in the 1960s and '70s. Sometimes, relatively small amounts of money would change hands. Sometimes, a new owner would just agree to pay the bills. Or a league looking to expand would let a new team take root.

"It wasn't too difficult a process, as I recall," Bartholomay said. "Most minor-league teams, if they were making it at all, were making it by the skin of their teeth.

"Nowadays," he added, "minor-league teams are owned by financial consortiums and things of that kind, selling for millions of dollars."

The going rate is $10 million and up for Class AAA teams, $7.5 million and up for Class AA teams and $2.5 million to $7 million for Class A teams, according to Minor League Baseball.

In addition to their AAA team, the Braves own their Class AA team in Pearl, Miss., Class A team in Rome, advanced rookie league team in Danville, Va., and rookie teams in Lake Buena Vista, Fla., and the Dominican Republic. The only Braves farm team not owned by the club is the Class A Myrtle Beach Pelicans, owned by a group led by Pennsylvania lawyer Chuck Greenberg.

Club resists selling teams

All of the Braves' minor-league teams are profitable except Richmond, Braves executive vice president of business operations Mike Plant said.

As minor-league franchise values have soared, the Braves have resisted selling the teams and entering into typical player-development contracts.

"Because this way works for us," Schuerholz said.

The advantages, he said, are that the Braves have control over their minor leaguers' playing "environment" and can make "pure baseball decisions" without having to consider an owner's conflicting business interests. A parent club's top priority is developing players, while a minor-league owner's top priority is selling tickets.

Schuerholz recalls that when he was general manager of the Kansas City Royals, who do not own their farm teams, he'd get "late-night calls from owners of minor-league teams who were shocked and dismayed that a particular player would be taken off their club."

Said Schuerholz: "I think if every major-league club could turn back the clock to 1966 ... and be given the option of owning their own minor-league teams, they would do it."

But minor-league valuations have gotten so high that it might no longer be practical, he added.

And the traditional minor-league model used by the other 29 franchises obviously can function perfectly well, too.

When Time Warner put the Braves up for sale in late 2005, the company considered peddling the minor-league teams separately.

"I think it was mostly just a negotiating tactic," Plant said. "From our side, we were pretty adamant saying there's a lot of value —- not just monetary value but business and player-development value —- in keeping ownership of these teams in our organization."

In the end, the minor-league teams stayed part of the Atlanta franchise that was sold to Liberty Media.

And next year, the highest of those minor-league teams will play its home games 37 miles from Turner Field —- a proximity the Braves surely would not have embraced if anyone else owned the AAA club.

OWNING THE FARM

The Atlanta Braves own six of their seven minor-league teams —- a stark contrast to other MLB franchises. Farm teams owned by the Braves:

Team ................................League ............Class

Richmond Braves* ....................International......AAA

Mississippi Braves ..................Southern ..........AA

Rome Braves..........................South Atlantic ....A

Danville (Va.) Braves................Appalachian........Rookie Advanced

GCL Braves (Lake Buena Vista, Fla.)..Gulf Coast League..Rookie

San Francisco de Macoris Braves......Dominican Summer ..Rookie

Note: The Braves do not own their Carolina League (Class A) affiliate, the Myrtle Bech Pelicans.

* The Richmond team will move to Gwinnett County next year.

Source: Braves