Major League Baseball’s long-reported plan to cut the minor leagues to six levels – Triple A, Double A, High A, Low A, the complex leagues, and the Dominican Summer League – is now moving to the execution stage (pun intended) as MLB forces through changes across the affiliated minor leagues. They’ve excised two entire leagues from the affiliation hierarchy and broken up a third, plan to demote two High A leagues to Low A, and will split apart additional leagues to create a more geographically rational structure for each MLB team’s four full-season affiliates. It’s a boon for MLB team owners, but this is a zero-sum game on multiple levels, and many minor-league owners will be left holding a bag with a big hole in its bottom.
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The biggest losers in the shuffle are the owners of these demoted or disaffiliated minor-league franchises, who have seen a bonanza of rising sale prices in the last 20 years, but just lost the most valuable (if intangible) asset associated with each club. Affiliated minor-league teams don’t have to pay their players, or even worry about identifying and signing them, and can run skeleton front offices as a result. They may also benefit from major-league players passing through on rehab assignments, providing an attendance boost for a few games. That all goes away for franchises that are moving to independent league status (the Pioneer League) or to amateur, wood-bat summer leagues (the Appalachian League and the five franchises in the new Draft League). It’s a direct loss without any gain to balance it out. If you own one of those franchises, you’re SOL.
Multiple communities will lose pro baseball in this game of musical chairs, although the counterargument to this is that many, if not most, of the towns that are dropping to non-affiliated status or seeing their teams vanish entirely did not draw enough fans to justify keeping teams there. Minor-league franchises have moved with impunity in the last two decades, often just to chase the next publicly-funded stadium offer, and this shift is merely more of the same, but done top-down in a way that better serves the needs of player development … and opens the way for MLB team owners to capture the capital gains that have gone to minor-league owners for the last 20-odd years.
The creation of a new draft league in the northeast is the best news for me personally — it’s all about me, in case you didn’t know that already — and I think it is also generally good news for the sport, as it will make it easier to scout draft prospects against better competition, with less of the twin pressures of the calendar and the weather, in places that are generally easier to reach. There’s long been a built-in disadvantage for players in remote places in the draft unless they were in the uppermost echelon of prospects. Regional and national cross-checkers and scouting directors would find it more efficient to go to places where they could see two or three players rather than take the time to go see just one player in a far-flung location, especially a high school position player who might not see anything to hit playing another local school in an area where the caliber of play isn’t that great. The new draft league would let those players face better competition, would give cold-weather high school kids more reps in front of scouts, and would give junior college and four-year college kids the same. There’s little downside to more playing time except for the very best prospects in any draft class, whom I’d expect would skip any additional games after their scholastic years end. In a perfect world, this could even allow some players who are dealing with minor injuries or soreness to take more time off in the spring, knowing they could make up for it in June in the draft league.
The downside, of course, is for the five (soon six) affected franchises. The Trenton Thunder have long benefited from their affiliation with the Yankees, especially any time the major-league club sent a player to rehab there. They now go from pro to amateur, losing their affiliation entirely, and go from a 144-game season to a shorter, summer season, as the Yankees chose to move their Double-A affilation to nearby Somerset, New Jersey. The other four franchises named in the league were all short-season clubs in the New York-Penn League, two of which already play at stadiums on college campuses.
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There’s a bigger issue at play in the dissolution of the New York-Penn League and the promotion of the Northwest League to High A, however. Major League Baseball’s de facto takeover of the minor leagues and restructuring of its levels will streamline costs and eliminate a lot of redundancies, requiring teams to employ far fewer “org players,” who are there just to fill out rosters so that the prospects have enough teammates to play games. It eliminates a developmental step, however, that served as a useful, and perhaps critical, intermediate point between the complex leagues, which have long been populated by teenaged prospects just out of high school or in their first games in the United States after they graduated from the Dominican Summer League, and full-season ball. That’s a big leap for a lot of 19-year-olds, and we will either see the overall caliber of play in Low A drop as the league is backfilled with more teenagers, or we will see more of those teenagers struggle with the big jump from the back fields of Arizona and Florida all the way to full-season baseball.
Full-season baseball is changing as well, as Major League Baseball appears to be prepared to drop the Florida State League and the California League from High A to Low A, promoting the Northwest League from short-season A all the way up to High A, and, I presume, moving some of the Midwest and South Atlantic Leagues up to High A as well, with the Carolina League staying at its High-A level. Much of this reshuffling is about convenience for the major-league parent clubs, as teams on the West Coast had no Low-A affiliation options west of the Central time zone. They will now have Low-A (Cal League) and High-A (Northwest) teams available in Idaho, Washington, Oregon and California. This would restore full-season baseball to Vancouver, Canada’s third-largest metro area, with more people than the metro areas of five current MLB teams; and to greater Portland (the Hillsboro Hops), which has an even greater population than Vancouver’s and Denver’s. One possible hold-up in this plan is Boise, Idaho, a sizable market with an outdated stadium to which MLB might demand upgrades in order to keep the franchise there.
This shift, part of a larger move by MLB to end the historical division of the minors into autonomous leagues, involves some top-down strong-arming by the Commissioner’s Office to get some franchisees to accept league or level changes. One notable one is the demand that Fresno drop from Triple A to Low A, which would put the team within driving distance of all of its competitors. Major-league teams hated having Fresno as their Triple-A affiliate because the city, despite a population over a half-million, has a relatively small airport that mostly accommodates regional jet service, although an expansion is due to begin in 2021. Moving Fresno to the Cal League eliminates that objection, but the team’s owners and the city of Fresno are trying to fight the demotion. I don’t see how they can win the battle, however; at this point, MLB is getting whatever it wants in the realignment shuffle, and Fresno is likely better off with a Low-A team than with no team at all.
Finally, the Pioneer League’s demotion from a short-season, affiliated league to an independent league is all business sense, but it could be a death knell for baseball in at least some of those towns, unless MLB is providing some sort of subsidy for the franchises. The Pioneer League was an “advanced Rookie League,” like the Appalachian League, one step above the complexes but a step below the short-season A leagues of the Northwest and New York-Penn League, which boasted a slightly higher caliber of play. The problem the Pioneer League has had for decades is its sprawl, with driving times between cities as long as 14 hours (Colorado Springs to Missoula), a huge drawback for player development, as nobody wants their players sitting on buses for that length of time. Five of the eight teams in the Pioneer League drew at least 2,000 fans a game in 2019, and both Ogden and Rocky Mountain (located in Colorado Springs) drew 3,900 fans a game, but Great Falls and Missoula, which both failed to average 2,000 fans in 2019, are going to have a hard time surviving financially. The Billings Mustangs had been affiliated with the Reds since 1974, and the league’s demotion means that city, with just over 100,000 people, loses its connection to affiliated baseball.
Cutting ties with very small communities that didn’t consistently support the teams they had is one thing, but there is an inflection point somewhere, beyond which MLB is hurting the sport as a whole by removing pro ball from towns and cities with bigger populations, or that showed up more often for their local teams. The long-term effects on baseball’s popularity and attendance may not be evident for a generation.
(Top photo from the 2018 Eastern League All-Star Game at Trenton’s Arm & Hammer Park: Mark Brown / Getty Images)
