More disrespect for Fresno. Hasn’t my hometown seen enough of this?

Fresno should be a great sports town, and it has been on occasion. The original Fresno Falcons were charter members of the Pacific Coast Hockey League, which played the highest-caliber hockey on the West Coast for four years just after World War II.

The Fresno Rockets won three women’s softball national titles in the 1950s. Mac Foster, once the No. 1 heavyweight contender, grew up in Fresno, winning his first 24 fights by knockout and taking Muhammad Ali the distance in losing a bid for the championship.

At Fresno State, the football and basketball teams dominated their conferences through much of the 1980s, winning the 1983 NIT title in basketball and going undefeated on the gridiron two years later. The softball team won a national championship in 1998, and the baseball team matched that feat a decade later.

But Fresno, the fifth-largest city in the nation’s most populous state, doesn’t have a major league sports team. It’s definitely a “small market” by big-league standards, so that’s understandable. Its population ranks ahead of several teams in the five major sports, although its metropolitan area is a bit smaller.

Sure, it might be a stretch to argue that Fresno should have, say, an NBA team. But that’s not the issue. The problem is, the city doesn’t even have a top-tier minor-league team anymore. That’s the situation as of today, with the Fresno Grizzlies baseball team being bumped all the way back from Triple-A status to the Class-A California League.

Adding insult to injury, the Cal League isn’t even High-A ball; it’s classified as “Low-A” — the bottom of the proverbial barrel.

Which is what Organized Baseball had the team over: a barrel. With the minors contracting thanks to COVID-19 and other factors, the Washington Nationals ditched their farm-team agreement with the Grizzlies and moved their Triple-A affiliation to Rochester, N.Y.

When the Colorado Rockies came along and offered a Class-A affiliation, the Grizzlies were in no position to bargain. It was either that, or leave Chukchansi Park entirely empty, which wasn’t an option. So...

Instead of playing teams like the Salt Lake Bees and Oklahoma City Dodgers, the Grizzlies will be taking on the Visalia Rawhide and Modesto Nuts. The city that fought like hell to rise above the California League, where its teams toiled for decades, is right back where it started. If its any consolation, Bakersfield doesn’t even have an affiliated team anymore: The Train Robbers play in the independent Pecos League, along with the Santa Cruz Seaweed and Martinez Sturgeon (actual team names).

But it’s just the latest ignominy for a city that deserves to be on the cusp of the big time but, instead, is at the bottom of the sports heap.

It’s not just the Grizzlies.

After Fresno State joined the Western Athletic Conference, the conference’s biggest names splintered off and formed their own conference. Fresno State was not invited. It only joined when the league’s marquee program, BYU, departed.

Hockey fans supported the Fresno Falcons for years, and the team led the league in attendance during its Pacific Coast Hockey League heyday in the 1970s. But after the team went out of business in 2008, the replacement was a junior hockey league team in a Tier III developmental league. If that sounds like it’s a long way from the NHL, it is.

You’d think Fresno would be a hotbed for futbol, but a team called the Fuego will play in not the second but the third level of U.S. soccer when it kicks off in 2021. A bit of good news: It’s getting its own soccer-specific stadium.

If it happens. I’ll believe it when I see it. Fresno has had more than its share of false starts and flameouts over the years (including a basketball team actually called the Flames, which played in a minor pro basketball league for, get this, short players).

All of which makes Fresno seem like it’s been left out, ignored, shunned... you get the picture. At least, for more than two decades, they had a Triple-A baseball team. Now they don’t even have that anymore.

Fresno deserves better.

Featured photo by Yahqqligan, Creative Commons 2.0 license. Former journalist Stephen H. Provost is the author of several books on California regional history and sports, including Highway 99, Fresno Growing Up, and A Whole Different League.