San Jose minor league team shifts to low Class-A affiliate,
The Giants’ announcement Wednesday that they’ll have a minor league team in San Jose for the 33rd straight season doesn’t mean things will remain the same for their affiliate in the South Bay.
For the first time in 33 years, the San Jose Giants will no longer be an Advanced Single-A affiliate. San Jose and all the California League members — including the A’s Stockton Ports squad — will become Low Single-A affiliates, a level where most team’s top prospects don’t ordinarily spend a lot of time playing.
The change is just part of a myriad of moves made in the aftermath of Major League Baseball’s overhauling of its minor league system
to streamline its costs.
The Giants’ new High Single-A team, in Eugene, Ore., is actually an old affiliate. The Eugene Emeralds were one of the Giants’ first minor league teams after they moved to San Francisco
in 1958. Eugene, which had been partnering with the Cubs since 2015, won Baseball America’s franchise of the year award for short-season teams.
Also, for the sixth straight season the Sacramento
River Cats will be the Giants’ Triple-A team. San Francisco’s Double-A affiliate in Richmond, Va., will also stay the same.
Meanwhile, the Augusta Greenjackets, the Giants’ Low-A affiliate since 2004, have now partnered with the Atlanta Braves.
As a means of slashing costs, MLB will be eliminating 43 minor league franchises and instructing each big league team to have just four main minor league teams — Triple-A, Double-A, Advanced-A and Low-A — in addition to developmental teams in either Arizona or Florida.
Salem-Keizer in Oregon, which had been the Giants’ short- season team since 1997, was one of the 43 franchises that didn’t receive an invitation to partner with an MLB team.