Memphis currently has the nicest stadium in minor league baseball. It could rival many major league clubs in all but seating capacity.
yaboynate
7 years ago
Oh snap! We almost lost Detroit!
..this time.
emh1969
7 years ago
Wonder how something like this would change the incentives around tanking? Would teams do everything they can to avoid dropping into the minors? Or would prefer a higher draft pick? (of course, if they’re no longer in the major leagues, do they still get to participate in the MLB draft????)
You know, I was thinking that it might be good for baseball even if tanking continued: a tanking team would just drop out of the league for a couple years, rather than diluting the quality of MLB play.
If a team like Lehigh Valley were called up, they may be terrible now, but presumably as prospects matured, they’d improve.
The way relegation/promotion works is that those promoted teams get a much bigger media contract (those are negotiated by league) – and so they spend money buying player contracts of teams being relegated or other teams in the minor leagues whose players are becoming too skilled/expensive for their own contention window
What it would mostly change is player scouting, buying/selling player contracts, marketing minors teams, taxpayer extortion with threats of relocation. IOW – it would change everything about baseball in this country. Mostly for the better since each of those changes would increase competition and actual competition is as good for sports as it is for markets.
Course the owners will oppose it. And they can all afford to buy enough congresscritters and journalists to oppose it. So we can be sold about the dangerous communism/terrorism/veganism that this road will lead to.
The Orioles managed to win one less than replacement-level baseline. So, yes they could easily be as good as the Orioles.
Earl of EMember since 2020
7 years ago
Why stop at relegation?
1. Introduce the yellow and red card system. (If a player is red carded then the team has to play with one less player on the field.)
2. After 12 innings go to a shootout format (e.g., home run derby).
3. All players wear shorts.
If a pitch comes within one foot of the batter, the batter drops to the ground like he’s been shot by a cannon and flops around for 2 full minutes while screaming in agony.
Top players should be required to date brooding, chain smoking Eastern European models, have sponsorship deals with Rolex and Hugo Boss, have $1000 haircuts and, in general, just appear like extras from Zoolander.
mad1908
7 years ago
Just Stop. There are no minor leagues in baseball. They are dependent farm systems. In fact it’s just adult travel ball that the parent team pays for instead of your parents. That’s why they don’t get paid shit and never will.
Spot on. The only way relegation can work is if all the teams in the minors are 100% independent entities. Thanks to Branch Rickey every minor league club, with the exception of the few in independent leagues, is fully dependent on the parent club for on-field talent. From the MLB club point of view it is a brilliant way to manage costs and control available replacement talent.
Deacon DrakeMember since 2017
7 years ago
YYYYYYYYYYYYEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS!!!! Gimmie some relegation chaos.
Hey Bob! You want to make some compelling TV? Take those bottom 4 teams and have them duke it out with the ultimate loser getting relegated… could be single elimination or best of x. Then, put those top minor league teams in a 4 team bracket and winner gets promoted for a season of hell. Rando cities like Fresno, El Paso, get the opportunity to see some MLB action live.
Sure, it will never work because some owners will litigate themselves bankrupt before putting a competitive team on the field, but we can dream…
Relegation won’t work in baseball, but why not make it a playoff for draft position?
TheGarrettCooperFanClub
7 years ago
notgraphs?
emh1969
7 years ago
Actually if baseball were to do something like this, I assume they’d base it on playoff results rather than regular season record. Which would give you Memphis, Fresno, Durham, and Scranton/Wilkes-Barre
Paul G.Member since 2016
7 years ago
Woohoo! Bring back syndicate baseball!
At least Baltimore would know how that feels, at least in a historical memory sort of way.
Paul G.Member since 2016
7 years ago
The question is whether the Yankees could stack their franchise as such that their AAA and AA team end up in the major leagues. Or better yet, get the Tampa team to the majors and outdraw the Rays. There would be a franchise for every Steinbrenner and a Steinbrenner for every franchise.
Slappytheclown
7 years ago
I’ve actually thrown this idea out but at the Major League level only, obviously. So, have a Major League ‘A’ league and Major League ‘B’ League or whatever you want to call them. 16 teams each league, two movers each year?
– Would the B League get the Top 16 draft picks?
– Would we see free agents take less money to be on an A League team?
– If divisions go away, travel could get brutal for West Coast teams
MikeSMember since 2020
7 years ago
Does that mean Philadelphia loses all the prospects in AAA? If they are in danger of that late in the year, do they start sending guys down to AA? Do the Orioles become a Phillies farm team? How does service time work?
evilsquirrel13
7 years ago
AL Central teams are going to love making three trips to Fresno next year!
60% of them are going to be in the Pacific Coast League anyway.
Cordane61273Member since 2020
7 years ago
There are so many aspects that would have to be considered. Current ML teams would have to pare down to just a 35 or 40-man full roster, along with player loans to lower divisions to give prospects a chance to play. The draft would have to stay to prevent exploding salaries for top-end amateur talent, but it would be much-reduced to make up for the smaller organizational rosters and to give the lower divisions a chance at real talent. Does the “A” Division get reduced to a more manageable number? How do you handle relegation to get you there? How do you transition farm clubs to independent operations? How do you police the possibility of feeder clubs working for current ML franchises? Sales of players between teams directly affecting the involved players (see Earl Averill), etc.
It’s a fascinating premise, one that I’ve written on before. I’d like to see a serious, thorough discussion on a site like this of how to make it work.
In Europe soccer clubs have farm systems just as we do in baseball. There are U23, U18, U16 leauges where they develop talent as well as loaning players to independent lower level organizations. Even the independent lower organizations have farm systems. It WOULD work but the powers that be would never let it happen.
Mac
7 years ago
This is a table and not a graph. #BringBackNotGraphs
evilsquirrel13
7 years ago
If this existed, I’d assume there’d be a tiebreaker game if two MLB teams tied for the fourth worst record. Miami finished a half game under Detroit by virtue of a late season cancellation, so in this theoretical world, their game against Pittsburgh gets made up and then if the Fish win, they play a Game 163 against the Tigers for the right to stay in the Bigs. Team Entropy would be much more fun when you have it working on both ends of the standings…
Johnston
7 years ago
Relegation? Please don’t give baseball any more stupid ideas
johnMember since 2017
7 years ago
It’s a wonderful dream but the issue of dependency on MLB makes it moot. I do recall the era of more limited farm agreements in the 60’s whereby Hawaii in the PCL, for example, also had players on its roster that were contracted directly to them. Thus
they carried Carlos Bernier, Stan Palys, and other vets who were MLB worthy but had no place to play in MLB…they’d be considered AAAA today. As an aside, don’t assume
Baltimore would necessarily make it back to MLB. Leeds, for example, is still trying to get back to the top level after relegation in the EPL.
nickpuntoforhof
7 years ago
Carson, i want you to relegate me like one of your french girls
Cool, the Padres almost got replaced by their farm team, El Paso! Ha!
trevise-en
7 years ago
This could never happened. (at least not for a long time.) The difference between infrastructure and competitive abilities would never allow for it.
Greg GoldenMember since 2016
7 years ago
This is a concept upon which this reader might potentially become fixated
Adam SMember since 2016
7 years ago
I know you’re running a business and I have an older model phone, but this post is completely unreadable on mobile for me. The pop up ad covers the graphic and there’s no way to dismiss it.
Dave TMember since 2016
7 years ago
This can be an interesting aside as a little joke, but it’s (1) nonsensical in terms of MLB structure (minor league teams don’t have their own players, they simply have players whose contractual rights are held by MLB teams) and (2) a path-dependent historical oddity in soccer that no modern sports league would implement unless it already has it due to tradition.
On the latter point, the idea of promotion and relegation originated decades ago when the revenue differential between the worst first-division teams and the best second-division teams was far less than it is today. The modern era of two directly related phenomenon – widespread broadcast availability of the best leagues’ games and big media rights deals for the “major league” of a sport – has dramatically changed that equation.
It’s silly to consider it as a practical idea. The idea would be wholly opposed by all sorts of constituencies within major league baseball: existing MLB owners, politicians in cities with current MLB teams, broadcast partners (including RSN’s), and almost certainly the MLBPA.
On the last point, the MLBPA has no interest in putting any franchises at risk of bankruptcy, which is what would happen in practice if any existing MLB team was relegated. The MLBPA was also pretty quickly figure out that whatever theoretical positive spending impact there might be from teams spending to avoid relegation would be offset by a variety of impacts: teams facing a real prospect of relegation would hesitate to enter into meaningful long-term contract guarantees, annual firesales from relegated teams would likely have a negative impact on the free agent market, and the overall business impact of relegation would almost certainly be lower total MLB revenue (which doesn’t help the MLBPA).
Promotion and relegation is used widely in Europe, not just for soccer, and including for sports whose league structure was formed way after soccer’s was. It is used even for sports like basketball, or indeed baseball, that have American roots.
European baseball leagues have trivial media rights revenue and attendance by the standard of U.S professional sports leagues (or the big-time European soccer leagues) and are not a relevant comparison.
As for European basketball, the origins of these leagues still generally go back to before media rights were a big revenue generator for top-tier sports leagues (1960’s or earlier for the basketball leagues in Spain, Turkey, Italy, and Israel, for example). In the case of the Spanish ACB, the promotion/relegation system seems to have broken down in recent years with the majority of teams eligible for promotion not actually doing so due to the financial requirements of promotion.
It’s also probably not an accident that the KHL has done a good job of expanding and establishing itself as what’s widely considered the second highest quality hockey league in the world (after the NHL) without a promotion / relegation system.
What you’d really need for viable promotion / relegation in U.S. professional sports – particularly as a new idea that would upend the economic model of the current leagues for both owners and players – is a lower division of teams at least some of whom have historically developed a fanbase / revenue that can rival at least the lesser teams at the highest level of the sport. The North American minor leagues of baseball, hockey, and basketball don’t at all fit that bill by any standard of revenue (total revenue, media revenue, attendance revenue). You’d need something like professional minor leagues that have attendance and viewership on par with big-time college football and basketball, which obviously isn’t the case.
And, look at the team values, revenue, top overall salaries, and payroll budgets for any of the European leagues except soccer (and to some extent the KHL), and it’s almost impossible to see why U.S. team owners or players’ union would think that they want to emulate leagues that (other than soccer) all have dramatically lower team revenue, team values, and player salaries.
So, if you need a comparably big revenue stream for the minor leagues for Promotion/Relegation to work, then there’s an obvious sport where it would work in the USA.
For last year: the Browns, Giants, Colts, and Texans would have needed to find a university to claim their professionals are students at; and Clemson, Alabama, Oklahoma, and Georgia would have all been able to play in the NFL this year and could openly pay their athletes.
I wouldn’t expect any of the promoted teams to do all that well, but it would be worth a shot.
At least we have the nicest stadium in minor league ball!
Memphis currently has the nicest stadium in minor league baseball. It could rival many major league clubs in all but seating capacity.
Oh snap! We almost lost Detroit!
..this time.
Wonder how something like this would change the incentives around tanking? Would teams do everything they can to avoid dropping into the minors? Or would prefer a higher draft pick? (of course, if they’re no longer in the major leagues, do they still get to participate in the MLB draft????)
You know, I was thinking that it might be good for baseball even if tanking continued: a tanking team would just drop out of the league for a couple years, rather than diluting the quality of MLB play.
If a team like Lehigh Valley were called up, they may be terrible now, but presumably as prospects matured, they’d improve.
The way relegation/promotion works is that those promoted teams get a much bigger media contract (those are negotiated by league) – and so they spend money buying player contracts of teams being relegated or other teams in the minor leagues whose players are becoming too skilled/expensive for their own contention window
Or you’re Wolves and you get all the good Portuguese players not named Ronaldo and you ball out
When you’re in the West Midlands, the most effective player recruitment tool you have is being friends with Jorge Mendes.
What it would mostly change is player scouting, buying/selling player contracts, marketing minors teams, taxpayer extortion with threats of relocation. IOW – it would change everything about baseball in this country. Mostly for the better since each of those changes would increase competition and actual competition is as good for sports as it is for markets.
Course the owners will oppose it. And they can all afford to buy enough congresscritters and journalists to oppose it. So we can be sold about the dangerous communism/terrorism/veganism that this road will lead to.
It would incentivize a team with a strong upper minors to call up their prospects earlier so that they don’t lose an entire affiliate.
Could a top triple-A team beat the current Marlins/Orioles (I think KC and CWS would be alright)?
#bringbacknotgraphs
The Orioles managed to win one less than replacement-level baseline. So, yes they could easily be as good as the Orioles.
Why stop at relegation?
1. Introduce the yellow and red card system. (If a player is red carded then the team has to play with one less player on the field.)
2. After 12 innings go to a shootout format (e.g., home run derby).
3. All players wear shorts.
If a pitch comes within one foot of the batter, the batter drops to the ground like he’s been shot by a cannon and flops around for 2 full minutes while screaming in agony.
There’s a few Umps you could probably get awarded the free pass with.
The term pitch would become confusing!
But he gets up and shown no ill effects in time for the next pitch.
Top players should be required to date brooding, chain smoking Eastern European models, have sponsorship deals with Rolex and Hugo Boss, have $1000 haircuts and, in general, just appear like extras from Zoolander.
Just Stop. There are no minor leagues in baseball. They are dependent farm systems. In fact it’s just adult travel ball that the parent team pays for instead of your parents. That’s why they don’t get paid shit and never will.
Whoosh.
Spot on. The only way relegation can work is if all the teams in the minors are 100% independent entities. Thanks to Branch Rickey every minor league club, with the exception of the few in independent leagues, is fully dependent on the parent club for on-field talent. From the MLB club point of view it is a brilliant way to manage costs and control available replacement talent.
YYYYYYYYYYYYEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS!!!! Gimmie some relegation chaos.
Hey Bob! You want to make some compelling TV? Take those bottom 4 teams and have them duke it out with the ultimate loser getting relegated… could be single elimination or best of x. Then, put those top minor league teams in a 4 team bracket and winner gets promoted for a season of hell. Rando cities like Fresno, El Paso, get the opportunity to see some MLB action live.
Sure, it will never work because some owners will litigate themselves bankrupt before putting a competitive team on the field, but we can dream…
Relegation won’t work in baseball, but why not make it a playoff for draft position?
notgraphs?
Actually if baseball were to do something like this, I assume they’d base it on playoff results rather than regular season record. Which would give you Memphis, Fresno, Durham, and Scranton/Wilkes-Barre
Woohoo! Bring back syndicate baseball!
At least Baltimore would know how that feels, at least in a historical memory sort of way.
The question is whether the Yankees could stack their franchise as such that their AAA and AA team end up in the major leagues. Or better yet, get the Tampa team to the majors and outdraw the Rays. There would be a franchise for every Steinbrenner and a Steinbrenner for every franchise.
I’ve actually thrown this idea out but at the Major League level only, obviously. So, have a Major League ‘A’ league and Major League ‘B’ League or whatever you want to call them. 16 teams each league, two movers each year?
Oooh fun idea. So much to think about.
– Would the B League get the Top 16 draft picks?
– Would we see free agents take less money to be on an A League team?
– If divisions go away, travel could get brutal for West Coast teams
Does that mean Philadelphia loses all the prospects in AAA? If they are in danger of that late in the year, do they start sending guys down to AA? Do the Orioles become a Phillies farm team? How does service time work?
AL Central teams are going to love making three trips to Fresno next year!
60% of them are going to be in the Pacific Coast League anyway.
There are so many aspects that would have to be considered. Current ML teams would have to pare down to just a 35 or 40-man full roster, along with player loans to lower divisions to give prospects a chance to play. The draft would have to stay to prevent exploding salaries for top-end amateur talent, but it would be much-reduced to make up for the smaller organizational rosters and to give the lower divisions a chance at real talent. Does the “A” Division get reduced to a more manageable number? How do you handle relegation to get you there? How do you transition farm clubs to independent operations? How do you police the possibility of feeder clubs working for current ML franchises? Sales of players between teams directly affecting the involved players (see Earl Averill), etc.
It’s a fascinating premise, one that I’ve written on before. I’d like to see a serious, thorough discussion on a site like this of how to make it work.
In Europe soccer clubs have farm systems just as we do in baseball. There are U23, U18, U16 leauges where they develop talent as well as loaning players to independent lower level organizations. Even the independent lower organizations have farm systems. It WOULD work but the powers that be would never let it happen.
This is a table and not a graph. #BringBackNotGraphs
If this existed, I’d assume there’d be a tiebreaker game if two MLB teams tied for the fourth worst record. Miami finished a half game under Detroit by virtue of a late season cancellation, so in this theoretical world, their game against Pittsburgh gets made up and then if the Fish win, they play a Game 163 against the Tigers for the right to stay in the Bigs. Team Entropy would be much more fun when you have it working on both ends of the standings…
Relegation? Please don’t give baseball any more stupid ideas
It’s a wonderful dream but the issue of dependency on MLB makes it moot. I do recall the era of more limited farm agreements in the 60’s whereby Hawaii in the PCL, for example, also had players on its roster that were contracted directly to them. Thus
they carried Carlos Bernier, Stan Palys, and other vets who were MLB worthy but had no place to play in MLB…they’d be considered AAAA today. As an aside, don’t assume
Baltimore would necessarily make it back to MLB. Leeds, for example, is still trying to get back to the top level after relegation in the EPL.
Carson, i want you to relegate me like one of your french girls
Oh là là !
#bringbacknotgraphs
Cool, the Padres almost got replaced by their farm team, El Paso! Ha!
This could never happened. (at least not for a long time.) The difference between infrastructure and competitive abilities would never allow for it.
This is a concept upon which this reader might potentially become fixated
I know you’re running a business and I have an older model phone, but this post is completely unreadable on mobile for me. The pop up ad covers the graphic and there’s no way to dismiss it.
This can be an interesting aside as a little joke, but it’s (1) nonsensical in terms of MLB structure (minor league teams don’t have their own players, they simply have players whose contractual rights are held by MLB teams) and (2) a path-dependent historical oddity in soccer that no modern sports league would implement unless it already has it due to tradition.
On the latter point, the idea of promotion and relegation originated decades ago when the revenue differential between the worst first-division teams and the best second-division teams was far less than it is today. The modern era of two directly related phenomenon – widespread broadcast availability of the best leagues’ games and big media rights deals for the “major league” of a sport – has dramatically changed that equation.
It’s silly to consider it as a practical idea. The idea would be wholly opposed by all sorts of constituencies within major league baseball: existing MLB owners, politicians in cities with current MLB teams, broadcast partners (including RSN’s), and almost certainly the MLBPA.
On the last point, the MLBPA has no interest in putting any franchises at risk of bankruptcy, which is what would happen in practice if any existing MLB team was relegated. The MLBPA was also pretty quickly figure out that whatever theoretical positive spending impact there might be from teams spending to avoid relegation would be offset by a variety of impacts: teams facing a real prospect of relegation would hesitate to enter into meaningful long-term contract guarantees, annual firesales from relegated teams would likely have a negative impact on the free agent market, and the overall business impact of relegation would almost certainly be lower total MLB revenue (which doesn’t help the MLBPA).
Promotion and relegation is used widely in Europe, not just for soccer, and including for sports whose league structure was formed way after soccer’s was. It is used even for sports like basketball, or indeed baseball, that have American roots.
European baseball leagues have trivial media rights revenue and attendance by the standard of U.S professional sports leagues (or the big-time European soccer leagues) and are not a relevant comparison.
As for European basketball, the origins of these leagues still generally go back to before media rights were a big revenue generator for top-tier sports leagues (1960’s or earlier for the basketball leagues in Spain, Turkey, Italy, and Israel, for example). In the case of the Spanish ACB, the promotion/relegation system seems to have broken down in recent years with the majority of teams eligible for promotion not actually doing so due to the financial requirements of promotion.
It’s also probably not an accident that the KHL has done a good job of expanding and establishing itself as what’s widely considered the second highest quality hockey league in the world (after the NHL) without a promotion / relegation system.
What you’d really need for viable promotion / relegation in U.S. professional sports – particularly as a new idea that would upend the economic model of the current leagues for both owners and players – is a lower division of teams at least some of whom have historically developed a fanbase / revenue that can rival at least the lesser teams at the highest level of the sport. The North American minor leagues of baseball, hockey, and basketball don’t at all fit that bill by any standard of revenue (total revenue, media revenue, attendance revenue). You’d need something like professional minor leagues that have attendance and viewership on par with big-time college football and basketball, which obviously isn’t the case.
And, look at the team values, revenue, top overall salaries, and payroll budgets for any of the European leagues except soccer (and to some extent the KHL), and it’s almost impossible to see why U.S. team owners or players’ union would think that they want to emulate leagues that (other than soccer) all have dramatically lower team revenue, team values, and player salaries.
So, if you need a comparably big revenue stream for the minor leagues for Promotion/Relegation to work, then there’s an obvious sport where it would work in the USA.
For last year: the Browns, Giants, Colts, and Texans would have needed to find a university to claim their professionals are students at; and Clemson, Alabama, Oklahoma, and Georgia would have all been able to play in the NFL this year and could openly pay their athletes.
I wouldn’t expect any of the promoted teams to do all that well, but it would be worth a shot.