A friend of mine said on Facebook Wednesday:

Yeah yeah we got the Mallards. They even have a mascot that endears to me intimately. But they’re a Cape Cod team. There’s no reason we can’t have a Brewers farm team–at the very least an A-team but why not the AAA-team?

We sure would go to a lot more games if it was a Brewers farm team.

Those outside the Madison area may not realize that Madison does have a minor league team, the Mallards, part of the independent (that is, unaffiliated with Major League Baseball) Northwoods League. The Mallards and their other Northwoods brethren use college players, and their season runs from late May through August.

I pointed out (after which he said, “I love how you always break things down to gravel”; I’m not sure what he meant by that) that while there are Class A teams near Madison, the obvious problem is that the Brewers already have a Class A affiliate, the Wisconsin Timber Rattlers, based in the Fox Cities. The Midwest League Rattlers, which have only been a Brewers affiliate since 2009, are the former Appleton Foxes, which had a long and distinguished history. The Foxes became the Timber Rattlers in 1995, the year they moved into Fox Cities Stadium, which hosts the WIAA spring baseball championships and the NCAA Division III College World Series.

There have been several minor league teams in Madison, over three eras, the last of which started in 1982. Before that, the Madison Senators played in the Wisconsin-Illinois League from 1907 to 1914, as a Class D (then the lowest level of the minors) team for three years and a Class C team the remaining five years. (The league’s other teams, depending on the year, included the Appleton Papermakers, Eau Claire Tigers, Fond du Lac Webfoots, Green Bay Orphans and Bays, La Crosse Badgers, Marinette-Menominee Twins, Oshkosh Indians, Racine Belles, Wausau Lumberjacks, Aurora (Ill.) Blues, Freeport (Ill.) Pretzels and Rockford Wolverines and Wolves.)

Minor league ball returned to Madison in 1940 when the Blues joined the Class B Illinois-Indiana-Iowa League, with the opponents the Cedar Rapids Raiders, Clinton (Ill.) Giants, Decatur (Ill.) Commodores, Evansville (Ind.) Bees, Moline Plow Boys, Springfield (Ill.) Browns and Waterloo (Iowa) Hawks. The Blues were a Cubs affiliate in their final year, 1942.

Forty years later, the Class A Midwest League’s Madison Muskies arrived and were initially a hit beyond all expectations. The Muskies were an affiliate of the Oakland Athletics, and the Muskies had several players who would end up with the great A’s teams of the late 1980s, including Jose Canseco, Terry Steinbach and Walt Weiss, or with other teams, including outfielder Luis Polonia and pitcher Tim Belcher (who opened the 1988 World Series for the Dodgers against the A’s in what you should know as the Kirk Gibson Game). Warner Park, a high school diamond, underwent in-season expansion projects to accommodate the crush of interest. The Muskies ended up losing the Midwest League championship to Appleton, but were unquestionably the league’s biggest hit, and maybe the biggest hit in all of minor league baseball. (That was in the same year the Brewers got to the World Series, so arguably 1982 was the zenith of baseball in the state of Wisconsin, among the Brewers, Foxes and Muskies.)

Unfortunately for the Muskies, the first year was their best year. As with nearly all minor league teams, sometimes the Muskies were good; sometimes they weren’t. Warner Park was never significantly improved, which posed a problem when the minors became popular and better stadiums started to be built. The Muskies changed owners, and the new owners moved the franchise to Grand Rapids, Mich., to become the West Michigan Whitecaps. The one-season replacement was the Madison Hatters, a Cardinals minor league team formerly located in Springfield, Ill., but they were at Warner Park for just 1994 before they moved to Battle Creek, Mich. (They are now in Midland, Mich., and called the Great Lakes Loons. Really.)

Madison’s first independent minor league team was the Black Wolf, which played in the Northern League at Warner Park from 1996 to 2000. (Jimmy Buffett — yes, that Jimmy Buffett — was a minority owner.) After five seasons, the Black Wolf moved to Lincoln, Neb., to become the Saltdogs.

Exit the Black Wolf, but enter Steve Schmidt, owner of The Shoe Box in Black Earth. Schmidt played baseball at Madison Area Technical College (which has one of the best junior-college baseball programs in the country, though most Madisonians probably don’t know that). Schmidt hit upon the idea of a short-season team, which conveniently eliminated the problem of playing baseball in April and May before tens of fans. The Mallards have been successful on the field (two league titles) and seem to be successful enough off the field.

The question my friend asks, however, is about Madison’s return to what could be called Organized Baseball. The next level up, Class AA, is unlikely due to geography. The closest AA league is the Eastern League, and by “closest” I mean the closest team is in Akron, Ohio. That leaves Class AAA, and Madison sits between its two leagues — the International League has teams in Indianapolis and Columbus, Ohio, and the Pacific Coast League has teams in Des Moines and Omaha.

As a Class AAA market, Madison would be on the small side, but with a metro area of half a million people (counting Iowa and Columbia counties) would be comparable to such markets as Durham, N.C., Scranton/Wilkes-Barre, Pa. (home of the Yankees’ top farm club), Syracuse and Toledo.

What about the Brewers on the other end of Interstate 94? As close as they are, that wouldn’t be the shortest distance between parent club and AAA affiliate. The Tacoma Rainiers are 32 minutes south of their Mariners parents, and the Gwinnett Braves are 37 minutes north of their Braves parents. Of course, Seattle and Atlanta are considerably larger than Milwaukee.

The Brewers are much more of a statewide team than they used to be, thanks to the Miller Park roof and Brewers marketing people who actually know something about marketing. (Their predecessors in the Bud and Wendy Selig era didn’t, or didn’t have any money for marketing outside Milwaukee.)

These three dangerous-looking characters are my father (on the left; I look more like my mother, the Miss Wisconsin-USA finalist, though Dad and I have the same body type, and we are the first two generations of trumpet players in the family) and two of his high school friends, from Richland Center, one of whom has season tickets. It is unlikely anyone from Richland Center, unless a diehard baseball fan, would have season tickets at Milwaukee County Stadium, given Milwaukee’s bad spring weather and distance from southwest Wisconsin. The Wednesday afternoon we were there, it was 44 degrees outside. The game drew 24,000 at Miller Park; it probably would have drawn 4,000 at County Stadium.

What obviously is a huge plus to the Brewers is a minus for competitors for the entertainment dollar. If you buy tickets for a Brewers game, wherever you are, you have absolute certainty that the game will be played. The only thing the weather will affect is the comfort level of your pregame tailgate party. To no one’s surprise, the Brewers’ attendance as a percentage of available tickets (capacity times game dates) is substantially higher than it was in the County Stadium days, even when the Brewers had good teams. (The Brewers’ attendance record in County Stadium was in 1983, 2.3 million fans, or 53 percent of capacity. The Brewers so far are averaging 76 percent of capacity, slightly better than in 2013, and the Brewers have exceeded 3 million fans, which is about 90 percent of capacity, three times since moving to Miller Park.)

The stadium question is one of the biggest hurdles. A Class AAA stadium seats about 10,000 to 15,000. There is no obvious place in Madison to put a baseball stadium other than possibly the Dane County Fairgrounds, though Dane County has never expressed interest in building a ballpark. Schmidt has done wonders with Warner Park, but Warner Park will never really meet the standard of a quality minor league ballpark. In a perfect world, a ballpark would be built close to the UW campus so the UW baseball team and the AAA team could share it, but there is no UW varsity baseball anymore. With Madison’s reputation as the City That Won’t where business is concerned, it would almost make more sense for one of Madison’s suburbs to host the team, though that is probably a nine-digit financial commitment.

The other hurdle is ownership of the team. The Brewers’ AAA affiliate is the Nashville Sounds. It’s not that Milwaukee has a historic commitment to Nashville; the Brewers are the Sounds’ sixth parent organization. But to get a team in Madison, you have to put together an ownership group. Since it’s always fun to speculate with other people’s money, some of the names being circulated as potential Milwaukee Bucks minority owners come to mind — Brewers owner Mark Attanasio, who is reportedly interested in having a part of the Bradley Center replacement, and Nashville Predators owner Craig Leipold, a Racine native. Beyond them, though, well, it’s nice to have rich people in your state, and Wisconsin has very few of them.

Some may see the distance between Madison and Milwaukee as a hurdle. Others see the failure of previous minor league teams as a sign that Madison isn’t a baseball town, or that the UW overwhelms everything else sports-wise. The former may more be a commentary on Muskies ownership (the Hatters were never intended to be in Madison more than one season) than on whether Madison would support a higher-level baseball team stocked with players who next year might be playing at Miller Park. The latter ignores the fact that baseball and UW football, basketball and hockey don’t overlap.

The key number is 700,000. That’s 10,000 spectators times 70 home games. In an area of slightly more than a half-million people, could a baseball franchise get that many ticket sales?