Untangling a Minor League Mess, Part II
Earlier this week, we discussed the principal bone of contention between Major League Baseball and Minor League Baseball regarding MLB’s proposed contraction plan. MLB wishes to, among other things, transfer more control and money away from minor league baseball and eliminate short-season baseball. While they have tried to make their case that the measure is not a cost-saving one, that case isn’t particularly persuasive, as discussed in Part I of this series.
But while contraction is a cost-saving measure, that doesn’t mean major league teams don’t have a more efficient way of producing good major league players than in the current system, and that argument deserves to be assessed on its own merits. David Laurila recently talked to some MLB executives who explained some of their thoughts on the potential changes, and in a piece at FiveThirtyEight, Travis Sawchik laid out the potential benefits of fewer minor league teams while including keeping the level of competition higher, preventing teams from preying on players with little chance of reaching the majors and putting players closer to spring training sites where the quality of facilities is better and the coaching is more concentrated. (It’s worth noting that MLB hasn’t actually done a very good job of making that argument.)
The following is from an MLB response to MiLB detailing MLB’s objectives in contracting the minor leagues:
We have provided MiLB our Clubs’ reasoning for the elimination of short-season baseball numerous times, and “creative solutions” to retain baseball in every community, but MiLB’s public messaging has consistently been that MLB desires to restructure short-season baseball for “cost savings objectives.” While we recognize that such messaging may play well publicly, it is absolutely not true. MLB has three objectives that affect short-season baseball, none of which is premised on cost savings. First, as we have previously explained, our Clubs believe that the First Year Player Draft has too many rounds (40 compared with 7 for the NFL and NHL), with hundreds of players drafted each year that have an extremely low chance of making the Major Leagues (only 18% of all drafted players reach the Major Leagues for at least one day; 8% accumulate 3 years of service; and those figures fall to 5% and l%, respectively, for players drafted after the 25th round). Players who choose not to attend college because they are selected in the draft, or leave college after their junior year, often do not complete their education after being released.
Second, MLB desires to move the draft later into the summer, preferably after the completion of the College World Series, so MLB Clubs do not draft players in the middle of the NCAA playoffs.
Third, under current player development philosophy, many Clubs prefer to rest recently drafted players as much as possible since they just completed a full season of high school or college baseball and utilize their Spring Training complex to orient them into professional baseball.
Whether MiLB agrees with these objectives or not, these are decisions that MLB, in consultation with the Players Association, has the right to make to develop elite baseball players into Major League players. Our player development objectives impact short-season baseball in two distinct ways. First, with the draft moved to early July, MLB Clubs would not have players to send to short-season teams until late July or early August, making the operation of a short-season league unfeasible. Second, with the number of rounds of the draft reduced, MLB Clubs will not sign a sufficient number of players to staff short-season teams.
First, MLB doesn’t actually address the cost-savings criticism in their objectives. MLB wants to shorten the draft, and the explanation they provide is that only one in 20 players after the 25th round makes it to the majors, with players forgoing an education to chase a 5% shot at playing in the big leagues. (We could dispute whether a 5% shot at the majors is actually that bad given the potential payoff.) However, the player demographics in those rounds don’t really support MLB’s “education” contention. Half of the players drafted in the latter rounds are either college seniors or from a junior college. Many of the high schoolers or college juniors taken in the draft’s latter rounds don’t end up signing contracts and return to school, and those that do often receive six-figure bonuses, indicating that clubs actually have quite a bit of confidence in these players’ abilities.
This is certainly an effort to streamline the minors and make them more efficient by removing those players who have the least chance at a successful pro career, but efficiencies is just a buzzword for cost-savings when the players MLB teams are concerned about spend most of their time at the spring training complex and almost no time in short-season leagues before moving up to full-season A-ball. MLB wants to codify what teams are already doing in practice, and eliminate what they see as wasteful spending. The lack of a real chance at the majors also conflicts with their own statement in the next paragraph where they discuss developing “elite baseball players.” MLB isn’t being altruistic toward the players with little shot at the majors. They simply don’t want to spend their own resources on developing players who probably won’t see the big leagues.
Additionally, reducing the number of rounds in the draft would make the second and third points moot. It doesn’t matter when the draft is or what teams prefer to do with drafted players in the summer if they’ve already decided they don’t want to have enough players to field short-season teams in the first place. It’s also worth noting, despite their mootness, that the second and third points actually directly conflict with each other. Leaving players to their own training programs, the influence of non-MLB coaches, and more pre-draft showcases for an additional month after the vast majority of potential draftees have finished their seasons runs counter to the goal of resting draftees and neglects a potentially important developmental period for newly drafted baseball players as they embark on a pro career. MLB’s concerns about playing conditions and access to good clubhouses as well as training and nutrition programs ring hollow when they reveal they have no regard for these players’ futures in baseball because they don’t think they have one.
There might be an argument that MLB should stop preying on these players’ unrealistic dreams, but that also comes up short when one considers that MLB has acted as the predator by using its lobbying money to get laws passed that deny minor leaguers a living wage or fair pay for all their work.
Eliminating short-season baseball also somehow makes the Save America’s Pastime Act even worse than when it was passed as part of a massive spending bill in 2018. When the legislation was originally proposed, it came on the heels of a still-pending lawsuit to provide minor leaguers with overtime pay. From MiLB’s press release on the law suit:
This suit threatens baseball’s decades-old player development system with an unprecedented cost increase, which would jeopardize the skills-enhancement role of the minor leagues and the existence of Minor League Baseball itself. As a result of this lawsuit filed on behalf of thousands of current and former players, many cities would be in jeopardy of losing their Minor League Baseball teams, resulting in the elimination of tens of thousands of jobs nationwide, shuttering tax-payer funded ballparks and creating a void in affordable family-friendly entertainment.
The law, which had the full support of MiLB at the time, doesn’t appear to have stopped MLB from putting cities in jeopardy of losing their teams, nor has it protected jobs. When the bill was passed, Rob Manfred claimed that it was a good thing, as it would result in a raise for some players. But even if we were to believe that assertion, under MLB’s proposal, most of the players who would “benefit” from the legislation might have their teams taken away entirely. When politicians decry MLB’s proposal (and perhaps attempt to pass legislation to prevent it), there will be some voices who wish politics would stay out of baseball. But it was MLB who asked politicians to help them; it was MLB who invited politics into its sport. It’s only reasonable for those same politicians to remain involved when they feel they’ve been lied to.
Ultimately, removing the short-season leagues wouldn’t change much regarding how MLB handles elite prospects. Those leagues are filled with good players who probably won’t make the majors, playing mostly extraneous baseball, and it only costs MLB teams $400,000 per year to pay those players. The real question is whether such a league should exist. While MLB touts an alternative indy league that would receive some MLB assistance, when these leagues only draw 75,000 fans per season and charge $7 per ticket, spending nearly $400,000 on players isn’t feasible; most teams would simply die. If the short-season leagues are to remain viable, major league teams need to foot the bill for player costs and provide those players.
There’s a business argument to be made based on the fact that the value teams recoup in developing one average baseball player from these ranks probably pays for about 10 years worth of team salaries. To say that paying these players bonuses under $10,000 each and then spending less on an entire team than a minimum-salaried player makes it nearly impossible for major league clubs to “lose” money on these leagues when big leaguers are the lifeblood a $10 billion per year industry. There’s also the argument that providing access to cheap, in-person baseball for current and potential fans is an important part of keeping and creating new customers.
But there’s also the issue of a one-size-fits-all approach to developing players. While talent identification is likely better than it used to be, identifying players who will improve and succeed if given the opportunity and training remains an imperfect science, and one at which major league organizations are not equally adept. The Astros believe their system shuttering farm teams and keeping players closer to their spring training facility is the best way for them to develop prospects, but clearly not all teams build and succeed in the same way. Ten franchises, including teams with great development records like the Rays, Yankees, and Cardinals, have multiple short-season teams, and many other clubs have multiple complex-league teams in Arizona and Florida. With a proliferation of technology better able to identify a player’s strengths and weaknesses, and help with tweaks to pitches and swings, there should be more diamond in the rough stories made possible by a larger pool of talent. Limiting those opportunities over what amounts to a fifth-rounder’s signing bonus or the salaries for a few September call-ups doesn’t seem worth wrecking the current system.
Of course, as you may have guessed from this installment and the last, isn’t just those costs that’s driving MLB’s push for a weakened farm system. We’ve reached the end of the second part and have yet to address the real power consolidation that MLB is shooting for. We’ll do so next time.
Craig Edwards can be found on twitter @craigjedwards.
I’m sympathetic to the argument here but this is the second time you guys have self cited and called the self cited argument “convincing”- and the other sides unconvincing (or called the effect of a single study y’all did on closing clubs on access “clear and obvious”). This is rhetorically unacceptable, and particularly shoddy because the articles you cite don’t present a particularly analytical, quantitative argument, even though the framing is as if you are citing solid quant evidence. You’re basically doing the second semester grad student thing where you cite the paper and hope no one hunts down the paper (they always find the paper, or it turns out someone wrote it and, uh, disagrees with your interpretation). Self citing what’s essentially an opinion piece/editorial and presenting it as definitive on a website built around quantitative analysis and data driven decision-making is, well, bold.
I don’t see a single number valuing players produced by short season ball in this piece. I do see a dismissal of Sawchick’s argument essentially out of hand, and he DOES attempt to analyze the benefits of contraction, using data. I’m a partisan for streamlining development and proximity to better coaches, better nutrition, and better training. But there’s a world where heterogeneity in development works out for teams- but we don’t really have an analysis of that world here.
Given the general tenor of other arguments elsewhere, I’d say no one is convinced that a. removing minor league teams gets rid of access or b. getting rid of short seasons hurts development. Given Sawchick has argued reasonably effectively about the benefits of contraction, that side is essentially winning in a walkover. In sum, more analysis, please. Currently, I know that the minor leagues cost the MLB very little. But I need to know what the benefits are, or at least an estimate, in order to decide whether cutting these teams matters. So far, people haven’t presented much hard evidence that teams or consumers benefit from these short league teams other than squishy “access” and “development” arguments.
>Currently, I know that the minor leagues cost the MLB very little. But I need to know what the benefits are, or at least an estimate, in order to decide whether cutting these teams matters.
I come at this from an entirely different perspective. I don’t give a damn what either MLB or existing MiLB think they are entitled to or what is most profitable for them. That’s their problem.
But when they are arrogantly presuming to decide the structure of the entire adult sport in the US – and the ability of smaller towns to not be held hostage to their stadium extortion – well then they have crossed the line into what is a public concern. And their very discussion and presumptions are based on a ‘privilege’ (in the original sense of the word – private law that applies only to some) that in turn is founded on corruption.
At that point, merely allowing them to define the terms of the discussion is accepting both that corruption and privilege. It is time to kill the anti-trust exemption and to instead have a true sports governing body for baseball that is outside the control of (and initially actively hostile to – to try to offset the 100+ years of embedded anti-competition) MLB and MiLB. To reimagine a competitive sporting environment from scratch rather than to accept the limits of what those two want to discuss.
I too would like an english style 8 level pyramid, but that will not ever happen here (England is the size of Alabama, for starters, also we’re dirty communists in the US and refuse to relegate teams)
The value of relegation is extremely exaggerated. They still have a big six problem, much like MLB has.
The problem with minor league baseball competition is the MLB clubs have too much influence and control too many players. If you limited MLB clubs to 40 contracts, all they could do is either offer the extra 14-15 players to independent minor league clubs on an assignment basis, or put them in a training facility league with a few player-coaches until they’re needed on recall. Let them bid on an independent club player mid-season if they want him bad enough and force them to release a player.
teams in the championship run huge deficits, teams in the epl do not. relegation costs 90 million pounds in tv fees alone according to sky. Swissramble makes the case that the actual costs are in the hundreds of millions of pounds (average 30% drop in attendance). 9 clubs have gone out of business within 5 years of relegation.
Certainly, there’s a big club problem, but even that fluctuates (see: Leeds, Arsenal, Liverpool are back, LCFC).
Not seeing how putting teams in a position to run deficits is a preferable idea. You go from a sporting competition which was the essence of the game to off-field competition which appeals to obsessives like myself and turns off casual fans which are ultimately more important in the “supply chain”.
I misinterpreted your point- I thought you were saying that relegation was costless. IT IS NOT. It’s just way more “free market” of a solution than we use in the States, which is interesting.
I think there should be ways to keep the McCourts, the Hickses, and the Gillettes (and you know honestly the Wilpons)- owners who can’t afford their teams- out of the game, and relegation is a good one- but it also really deeply punishes the fans.
My take: at this point, relegation is around where it exists because of path-dependence and tradition. It evolved in an era well before broadcast rights were such a driver of team revenue / finances, meaning during an era when the revenue differences between top tier and second tier leagues were vastly smaller. It’s not an accident, for example, that the KHL – widely regarded as the 2nd-best pro hockey league in the world – was set up in 2008 without a relegation system.
Tying back to the original point, I’d also say that the “access” and “development” arguments that dukewinslow rightly derides as “squishy” implicitly also rely on path-dependence and tradition. Surely there’d be some at least marginal benefit for “access” and “development” to adding another 30 minor league teams in other markets, but the implicit underlying view in many of these posts at Fangraphs is that the current structure is somehow correct or optimized. The linked post from Sawchik at 538 expresses a viewpoint that’s closer to comparing with “what sort of system would we create if we started up a development system from scratch?”
I guess my big question is “how do we keep people like the Wilpons from owning teams? How do we punish people who either can’t afford or don’t want to win?” England has the useless fit and proper rule, and the quite more successful FFP rules (at least for keeping teams in business).
I don’t think it’s a big problem in baseball yet, but the Marlins sale could be the first domino in teams with indifference to fielding a good team. This is different and worse than teams like the Mets, who simply can’t afford it. The league needs a mechanism to keep undercapitalized owners out of the league, or kick them out if they lose all their money on bad parking lot debt (TWICE. IT’S HAPPENED TWICE). Otherwise they just invite vultures.
Germany limits clubs to owning TWO teams – a reserve team which can max out at the 3rd level league and the main team. Those reserve teams rarely win that 3rd level league anyway precisely because they tend to be more developmental rather than focused on ‘winning’. But promo/relegation also creates a healthy changing market for teams to buy/sell player contracts (which also means more pro/semipro contracts can get signed).
It does force the successful clubs to branch out differently. Bayern Munich (which is roughly as valuable as any non-Yankee team) has those two teams + a professional women’s team + a junior team + a senior team + they leverage their facilities ownership for other professional sports leagues. All of which really leverages them to Munich – which makes it better for taxpayers to actually invest in sports facilities – and gives them an ownership structure that is unknown now in the US outside maybe the Green Bay Packers.
The German model of team sports governance is probably a better model than the English one (which is geared more towards attracting big pockets owners). It is membership-driven (7 million Germans are indirect members of that governing body) so it can encompass the different interests of fans, athletes, munis, clubs, teams, leagues, etc. And the result is a very healthy sport – 170,000 teams as part of 25,000 clubs and probably a couple thousand of those teams at a pro or semi-pro level. Not 30 clubs deciding that 250 teams is too much
yeah I think BL is the gold standard
RB Leipzig calling for you on line Zwei…
“But when they are arrogantly presuming to decide the structure of the entire adult sport in the US – and the ability of smaller towns to not be held hostage to their stadium extortion – well then they have crossed the line into what is a public concern.”
Dude, that ship sailed decades ago when the minor leagues became affiliated in the 1950s. And in point of fact, with the success of Indy league baseball in recent years, smaller towns have had vastly more ability to not be “held hostage” than anytime since ~1960.
Seems to me that the “Golden” rule applies: “Thems that gots the gold, rule.”
If MLB subsidies are the only reason those leagues can exist, shouldn’t MLB decide if the return on their investment merits tbeir continued support?
It’s *their* money. They can choose how and what to spend it, be it seen as wise or not. And if one thing is clear, MLB baseball today is run more as a business than a billionaire boys’ vanity project than ever before. A lot of recent griping (FA spending, rules changes, etc) seems to emanate from that one seminal change.
Outsiders can kibbitz all they want but in the end it is still MLB’s money and their judgment that pays the bills.
Even if cost cutting were the only reason espoused, which it isn’t, they still have the final say and waving away cost cutting without considering the merits is a bit short of comprehensive. If nothing else because, unlike the short season leagues, Independent Leagues are self funding and still manage to survive and occasionally graduate players into “organized ball”.
MLB has of late gotten pretty friendly with the Atlantic League…perhaps they’re finding that kind of business relationship more to their liking?
They are, after all, looking to support an independent Dreamers’ League in lieu of the short season leagues.
Methinks there’s more to this story than just “MiLB good”, “MLB cheapskates”.
Shouldn’t we wonder why MLB wants such a big change if the money at stake is “chump change”? Maybe it’s just because effective businesses strive to reduce wasteful spending, regardless of the amount saved, but what if there actually are other, deeper reasons?
That’s the problem though,can you come up with a reason why MLB would risk the bad press and loss of fans to save chump change?The only one I can think of is that MLB wants to take over owning and running all minor league teams,just the way Branch Rickey and the Cardinals did when they started the farm system concept,until Commissioner Landis made them divest themselves of the clubs………Admittedly a far fetched idea….but is it?
Some businesses term research and development as wasteful spending,while others think of it as the life blood of new profits.The minor leagues are R & D in my mind along with a great deal of live advertising for the sport,the kind that costs big money for other businesses.
Given that MLBs financial risk on their minor league systems is minimal and short term in nature this entire plan has to be questioned as to what it’s end game is,as you have pointed out.
I think Lunhow (who started this idea) looked at it from an R&D perspective and wondered why they sign 60 amateur players every year (plus 30 scouts, plus 15 coaches, or whatever number) when they know there’s only 3 or 4 that will ever make it to the majors. (Bill Veeck and later Eddie Einhorn stated similar things before so it’s not exactly new.) Recently there were several individual teams making exclusive statcast-type data deals with individual colleges which I think was being looked at as a possible replacement for a large chunk of scouting. I don’t think those individual deals are healthy for the league, but if some teams want to use data instead of scouts, I’m fine with them trying.
And if those clubs feel 2 or 3 farm teams are all their organization needs, let them run their clubs as they see fit. The “system” we have now mostly evolved, and I think there’s a certain “planner mentality” in front offices these days that doesn’t like an un-designed system. It’s the idea that this should all be directed from the commissioner’s office and forced upon all clubs is the part I don’t like. I can certainly see where there might be some sense in a maximum number of player contracts per club, as the NHL does. Making the minor leagues more independent is a good thing IMO; where the commissioner comes in is getting agreements with those leagues about having their players poached mid-season.
To what “other, deeper reasons” are you alluding? Do you mean to say that decision-makers at MLB have some invidious purpose such as harming communities that might lose a team in the contraction? Did those communities do something to wrong MLB in a way that requires some kind of retaliation? I don’t mean this as snark. I’m legitimately not sure what, other than financial considerations, would be the driving force for a business such as MLB.
No.
That they might conceivably have actual, cold-hearted business reasons.
Maybe even stats.
I’m not taking sides, just keeping an open mind instead of knee jerk assuming MLB is cluelessly hurting people out of Scrooginess. I’d like to see a smoking gun or at least something more than “they rich and parsimonious”.
So far, MiLB has only advanced touchy feelie, social reasons why MLB should continue to subsidize them, regardless of facility conditions, player treatment, etc. Everything but sing FIDDLER ON THE ROOF’s TRADITION. Or document the business case why MLB should continue to subsidize short season.
The two sides have a contractual business relationship and companies reevaluate those kinds of relationships all the time. For all sorts of reasons. Responsiveness, for one. Effectiveness. Changed market conditions.
There’s lots of things that contribute to the bottom line.
When you do the math of what the non-MLB owned facilities cost to be built and maintained over their lifespans vs. what MLB paid in salaries, MLB comes out HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF DOLLARS ahead. So who’s subsidizing whom? For the record, MiLB teams contribute 7.5% of ticket prices to MLB (~$18-20M annually)
Even Stevie Wonder should be able to see that the real endgame is for MLB to devalue the franchises that survive this war to the point where they can be purchased at a fraction of their current valuation.
Only slightly related, but I wish the NCAA would get off this silly Mid-February to late-May regular season for baseball. Are they really wedded to the school calendar?? Move that all one month later and more northern colleges will field teams.
It’s a huuuuuuuuuuuuge pain in the ass to host sports during the semester break. Easier in the summer, mind you, than the winter (where they have to put athletes in hotels). If you play for a D1 team, you’re basically on campus year round lifting anyway. A lot of the advantage to warm weather teams, btw, is year round practices- even high school teams will do a tour of southern states to get reps in (like Don Bosco will go down to IMG for a couple of weeks).
Several points:
(1) I don’t think it’s valid to assume that this would lead to some significant increase in the number of teams. Wikipedia and Googling inform me that there are approximately 300 D1 college baseball programs. (I found counts ranging from 297 to 302.) That compares with about 350 D1 men’s basketball programs and 256 D1 football programs. The latter figure is inclusive of both “FBS” (formerly named Division I-A) and FCS (formerly named Division I-AA). Basketball has some obvious ease of running a program relative to both baseball and football just due to smaller rosters and the ability to play and practice in gyms that can be used for multiple sports.
(2) Probably not great for interest/attendance to push regular season games past the point where students are around for classes.
(3) While some overlap with regular season major league and minor league baseball is inevitable, it’s probably not great for interest/attendance to push the schedule toward even more overlap.
NCAA Div 1 teams are obviously going to be limited by the number of NCAA Div 1 schools. What is far more relevant is the number/$ of athletic scholarships. Those are a form of payment to the more promising 18-year old athletes. The NCAA is the major constraint on sporting competition that limits opportunities for 18-22 athletes to be professional or semi-pro during those years.
NCAA Football (FBS and FCS) – 254 schools offer a total of 21450 scholarships with an average annual value of roughly $36k for FBS and $21k for FCS. That itself is enough to kill off competition for the NFL because of the anti-trust advantage those schools have re media contracts and taxpayer subsidies for stadiums (and likely a much shorter career arc anyway).
NCAA Men’s Basketball – 351 schools offer 4560 scholarships with an average annual value of $38k. That (with the other advantages of NCAA) certainly skims off a large portion of the athlete talent pool which could otherwise become a professional or semi-pro competition to NBA (as the AAU ‘industrial’ leagues were in the 50’s and 60’s).
For men, ice hockey is the only other sport that provides scholarships that are meaningful enough in value to drive career decision-making for a young athlete – roughly 1200 scholarships with AAV of $31k. All the other men’s sports scholarships have an AAV of $10k-$20k. Not enough to actually pay for a degree – but enough to help pay for college for someone who otherwise would likely go anyway – and with the NCAA rules re ‘can’t be paid’, enough to kill off alternatives to just going to college at age 18. In the case of baseball – 7000 scholarships with an AAV of $13k.
For women, the ‘meaningful value scholarship’ sports are different – basketball, volleyball, tennis, gymnastics, hockey – but I’m sure the economics of a non-NCAA professional sports league for adult women are different too.
I appreciate that this somewhat forgotten issue is being discussed here. But, this article is more than a bit one-sided. Maybe a point/counter-point format would be better here with someone else arguing the MLB position?
MLB has spoken for itself and clearly assumes we’re too dumb to understand that “efficiency” means “spending less money”.
This argument, “There’s a business argument to be made based on the fact that the value teams recoup in developing one average baseball player from these ranks probably pays for about 10 years worth of team salaries.” – Is the same argument I’ve made about the idiocy of the NFL killing their offseason Europe league. The fact that Kurt Warner (and to a lesser extent Jake Delhomme, James Harrison, Adam Vinitieri, etc) came out of that league more than makes it worth it to fund the entire damn enterprise for a decade.
Right, because without Kurt Warner, there wouldn’t have been anyone to play QB for the Rams all those years.
Oh, wait, that’s not the way it works at all. Other players would have taken their places, and while leaguewide caliber of play might have fallen 2%, nobody would have noticed it … just like nobody complained after they closed up shop that “Gosh, the NFL isn’t as good now since the Euroleague went away.”
Kurt Warner was more a product of the Arena League than NFL Europe. He spent 3 years in the Arena League, followed by 1 year in NFL Europe.
By the end of NFL Europe, it was reportedly losing tens of millions of dollars per year. It also wasn’t really being used much by teams as a developmental league. They preferred to keep players in their own off-season programs rather than send them to play under a different coaching staff in Europe. To cite just one example, it’s telling that someone like Tony Romo was never sent to play in NFL Europe. He was signed by the Cowboys as an undrafted free agent in 2003 after playing I-AA in college (Eastern Illinois). He didn’t throw a pass in a regular season NFL game for his first 3 seasons. Perfect player in theory for a spring developmental league, yet he wasn’t sent there.
As for eventually finding players who don’t make NFL rosters right out of college, the CFL is still around, and the new incarnation of the XFL may also survive.
Politicians are in the game for a key reason: MLB wants them to continue their support for favorable legislation and tax treatment, and, at the state and local level, wants them to continue to grant taxpayer-funded subsidies. MLB’s proposal is mostly about money. And, because that’s obvious, it obscures a bigger question, which is whether or not a smaller player pool really is in the best interests of the game. That’s not clearly been articulated. I’d rather see data about players who never get past A-Ball, and I’d also like to see it including Winter League play. If there really is a large surplus of players, then there’s a case to be made for tightening up a bit. But that hasn’t been demonstrated, and, if you are cutting the lower minor leagues, where are those hyper-talented can’t miss types going to start? They still learn things there, even if they are vastly more gifted.
I get the intuition of there being a large surplus of players and that’s a point that has me not really all that angry at MLB for this. I mean, teams largely draft players in the later rounds as filler rather than players who they think will actually become real prospects, so that suggests a surplus. You do bring up a good point about examining that through data before we move forward with tightening up the enterprise, though. I’d like to see that examined.
And for guys entering the system via the lower minors, I’m assuming they’d mostly move that phase of development to the complex level. So, an expanded version of extended spring training or something along those lines, maybe branching out a bit to more ballparks around complexes to accommodate more players.
Unlike the previous installment, this one seems to brush aside legitimate arguments as to why the plan makes sense from a player development standpoint (here are my thoughts on why the plan is a net positive for MLB and players: https://tinyurl.com/v2h3mfs). To refute these arguments, one needs to explain why the current system is better, and not simply point out contradictions in what MLB has stated in the past.
“Additionally, reducing the number of rounds in the draft would make the second and third points moot. It doesn’t matter when the draft is or what teams prefer to do with drafted players in the summer if they’ve already decided they don’t want to have enough players to field short-season teams in the first place. ”
This is just an antagonistic way of saying what could just as easily been expressed as “MLB has multiple reasons, all of which reinforcing each other.”
“Earlier this week, we discussed the principle bone of contention between Major League Baseball and Minor League Baseball ”
The word you want here is “principal” (adj. – primary) as opposed to “principle” (n. – tenet/belief).
Sincerely,
Raymond Holt
Thanks. Fixed. Keep counting those steps in your head like a normal person.
Spitballing here, but what may work is to start a separate independent League with 20 odd teams filled with unaffiliated AAAA players. Online TV model, wages in the $50,000-$250,000 range.
Fans can root for these teams as they won’t get players pinched by MLB teams at any point. If they an MLB team does want a player, pay a soccer style transfer fee. Players get better wages and a bit of stability.
I appreciate these teams exist, but I’m thinking more of a B division for MLB, but separate.
“There might be an argument that MLB should stop preying on these players’ unrealistic dreams..”
Elites, particularly media and political elites, need to stay out of other people’s business. Commoners do not require a writer on a fancy website, or anyone else, to determine what options they are granted permission to pursue.
The legality of the entry draft and reserve clause for minor leaguers should be struck down. Players can decide for themselves whether their dream is worth pursing, where they choose to work, and teams can sign players to a multi-year contract if they want to lock them up.
Otherwise mind your own business and keep your opinion on someone’s dream and voluntary agreements made by other people to yourself.
(MLB is not “preying” on those players. A more accurate way to look at it is that every year dozens of good ballplayers who have almost no chance to make an impact in the major leauges lower their asking price to a level that the long shot makes sense to the person paying. Paying those players more was never an option, thousands of players going back decades never would have received the opportunity if there was a higher minimum salary from the start. Those opportunities only existed due to the conditions at the time and the opportunities will be different under different conditions.)