Minor league proposal undercuts charm
Paring down draft and getting rid of teams harms sport
When the San Francisco Giants chose catcher Joey Bart second overall in the 2018 draft, fans in Keizer, Ore., knew what that meant. A decade earlier, they got an early glimpse of another firstround catcher, Buster Posey, who went on to lead the Giants to three World Series titles. Posey’s likely successor now would play in their town, too.
“They made that connection instantly, and they came from a long way to see Joey Bart play,” said Jerry Walker, who has owned the Class A Salem-Keizer Volcanoes since their inception in 1997. “Fans will travel to see future stars in the minor leagues, and our players are always accessible for autographs. Fans can do things here and get much closer to the players than they’ll ever be at a major league stadium.”
Walker, who sold his real estate company to buy into the affiliated minors in 1989, is proud of his team’s connection with the Giants. Thirteen former Volcanoes — including Posey, Tim Lincecum, Pablo Sandoval and Sergio Romo — dotted the rosters of the Giants’ recent championship teams.
“As long as we are close to break-even, we’re happy,” he said. “We’re not in this to get rich, but we’re not wealthy people where we can afford to lose $400,000 a year, either.”
Now — with no warning or explanation, he said — Walker finds the Volcanoes on the list of 42 teams Major League Baseball wants to cut loose as part of its plan to overhaul the minor leagues. The agreement between MLB and the minors expires after the 2020 season. The sides have begun negotiating, but no resolution is coming soon.
Politicians — including Sen. Bernie Sanders, a presidential candidate — have weighed in on the issue. The majors and minors have traded sharply worded statements. Commissioner Rob Manfred is exasperated, and frustration is boiling over.
The leaders of Minor League Baseball had “done damage” to their relationship with MLB, Manfred said in a news conference at the winter meetings in San Diego this month. He suggested they “move off the take-it-orleave-it, status-quo approach and come to the table and try to make a deal.”
Dan Halem, Manfred’s deputy and chief legal officer, asserts that the idea of eliminating 42 teams is fiction. A so-called “Dream League” of teams with unaffiliated players would take their place, as Halem has tried to assure concerned lawmakers.
“I have meetings, and I’m looking them in the eye and telling them we will keep baseball in their communities — literally,” Halem said in an interview at the winter meetings. “It’s not like ‘maybe.’ I’m telling them, ‘We will keep baseball in your community, and we’ll personally come, and we’ll organize it, and we’ll make sure it works.’ That’s the commitment, and when you say that to politicians, you’ve got to back it up.”
Minor League Baseball called the Dream League concept a “shell game” in a statement last week, and Walker dismissed the proposal as politics.
MLB has asserted that most minor league fans care little about the affiliation of the teams, that they come instead for the atmosphere and the entertainment value. But the affiliation — a tangible association with an MLB club, which generally pays for the farm teams’ players and coaches — accounts for almost all of a minor league franchise’s asset value. The additional operating costs of running an independent team would make the Dream League untenable for many owners.
“Even if the revenue stays flat, we contend they won’t make it because they’ve got more expenses,” Pat O’Conner, president of Minor League Baseball, said in an interview at the winter meetings. “I’ve had owners this week say, ‘I would write a check to keep baseball in this town, but I’m not going to write that big a check.’ ”
Manfred and Halem are skilled labor negotiators, and they hold much of the leverage in this situation. Technically, the leagues do not even need to have an agreement, Halem noted.
“The agreement itself imposes restrictions on our owners,” he said. “It doesn’t really give our owners any benefits because if we don’t have the agreement, they could just go out and affiliate with whatever team they wanted.”
MLB has tried to frame its proposal around progress; a new agreement would mean better facilities and more sensible travel. Cutting some affiliated teams would also help MLB offset the pay increase it is planning for minor leaguers, so they can make something closer to a living wage.
Of course, any team already could do that if it chose to, as the Toronto Blue Jays did last year. But the pay issue, and the issue of reorganizing the affiliated minors, underscores the approach MLB is taking: Prospects are serfs, and the low minors largely are irrelevant to the empire.
To league officials and data-oriented executives, there is little point in perpetuating a costly and inefficient player-development system. Under baseball’s plan, the draft would be cut to 20 rounds instead of 40, every team would have only four full-season affiliates, and prospects would skip the short-season rookie league teams to be groomed instead at each team’s training complex in an instructional setting.
“I hate to give you numbers because that’s what all our GMs do, but it’s like 3.7 percent of players after the 25th round make it,” Halem said. “So, stated in a negative, that’s 96 percent who don’t. And our idea with respect to the independent leagues — the Dream League — is to have those kids play, and if they want to do it for a year, that’s fine, but after that, they’re not likely to become a major league player.”
He added: “If they’d like to be a careerist minor league player, they should play in independent league. The affiliated minor leagues are really to develop players for the major leagues.”
To O’Conner, that is a discouraging message, one that undercuts the romantic notion of the long-shot player who makes it big, like Houston’s Jose Altuve, a superstar who signed for just $15,000; Tampa Bay’s Kevin Kiermaier, a three-time Gold Glove winner who was drafted in the 31st round; and Hall of Famer Mike Piazza, who was drafted in the 62nd round.
“It basically says if you’re not an elite athlete, we’re not even going to look at you; we’re not even going to come and watch you play,” said O’Conner, who grew up going to minor league games in Columbus, Ohio, where he watched pint-size Freddie Patek, a 22nd-round pick who became a three-time All-Star. “They’re not going to miss out on No. 1s, but when they’re talking about cutting the draft from 20th on, they’re going to miss some players.”
They might miss future managers, too. The Cardinals’ Mike Shildt, the National League manager of the year, grew up around the minors because his mother worked for a team in Charlotte, North Carolina. Shildt never played professional baseball but started working at the Cardinals’ short-season teams and ascended to the majors.
“I feel strongly about it because I may not be where I’m at without it,” Shildt said. “I got to, thankfully, cut my teeth at a lower level where a lot of people, players and staff, do just that. So if you’re eliminating that opportunity, you’re taking away some people that could be difference-makers in our sport, on or off the field.”
That is part of why this issue stings. Much of baseball’s distinctive appeal is the sheer volume of opportunity it offers to connect to the game. Every day, in nearly every corner of the country, you can find a game between players with direct ties to the majors.
If you were to start the system all over again, you might not schedule 162 games in the majors, and you might not have 160 affiliate teams in the minors. But inefficiency is part of baseball’s charm. By pushing its proposal, MLB risks hiding its product from people who are used to seeing it.
Baseball takes the same mentality in refusing to schedule a day game in the World Series for more than three decades and in allowing playoff games to be broadcast on FS1 instead of Fox. It seemingly has no qualms about alienating the fan in Iowa City who is prevented from watching six teams — Kansas City, Milwaukee, Minnesota, St. Louis and both Chicago teams — on its streaming service because of arcane blackout rules.
While major league attendance is falling, minor league attendance is rising. Yet MLB essentially told fans in 42 communities that it could do without them — or at least is willing to take that chance. It is discouraging that the league ignores the benefits of letting more people see the game.
“The short-term gain is far outweighed by the long-term complications — the loss of goodwill, the loss of fandom,” O’Conner said. “At a time when we’re trying to build the game, cutting 25 percent of your minor league system seems inconsistent with that approach.”