Pandemic could change minor league landscape

As Major League Baseball considers playing in a pandemic, minor league baseball faces a more treacherous climb to return — if it can.

While the majors can run on television revenue, it’s virtually impossible for the minor leagues to survive with empty stadiums.

The possibility of no games in 2020 could put some teams in jeopardy and change the landscape for attendance-driven baseball in the short- and long-term future.

“There’s no future for minor league sports with empty stadiums. There’s zero,” said Gary Green, who owns Triple-a and Double-a baseball teams. “If some of the teams don’t have deep-pocketed ownership groups or owners, I don’t know how they’re going to pay their bills.”

It is by far the most pressing question facing minor league baseball.

The minors are deeply baked into the North American sports landscape as talent developers for the majors and cheap, family-friendly entertainment in towns big and small.

Experts are divided on how they will survive and how soon they can bounce back.

Pacific Coast League officials and team representatives will conduct conference calls Wednesday to discuss their next steps. Aviators president Don Logan said Monday that he didn’t expect any decisions to arise from those calls and that any kind of agreement regarding the status of the season is expected to occur in the next two to three weeks.

MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred estimated a 40 percent loss of revenue if major league baseball is played with no fans, and Herrick Feinstein sports law group co-chairman Irwin Kishner estimated it is probably twice that for minor league sports. As it is, Green doesn’t expect minor league baseball this year.

There already were 40 minor league baseball teams scheduled to lose their MLB affiliations before the pandemic under a restructuring plan that would have to try to make it independently.

Green already has thought ahead to what “socially distanced” crowds in ballparks might look like and hopes that treatments and a coronavirus vaccine gets things back to normal eventually.

But the end of the pandemic may not be enough to pack minor league stadiums if Andrew Zimbalist, an economics professor at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, is correct about the situation and economic downturn changing people’s behaviors.

“It’s just going to take several years to get through it all, in my view, and while that adjustment or recuperation is happening, it means that there’s going to be higher rates of unemployment, lower rates of income and people are going to be more careful about how they spend their free income, their leisure income,” Zimbalist said. “So, I don’t expect the leagues to really start flourishing again for several years.”

Syracuse University sports analytics professor Rodney Paul, whose parents are season ticket holders for the Single-a baseball Daytona (Florida) Tortugas, is more bullish on minor league sports in the near future because of their affordability and value to communities.

“Those types of entertainment experiences, we’re still craving those type of things,” he said. “Hopefully this doesn’t destroy that for the super long term or forever.”

The Review-journal contributed to this story.