GM sounds warning: Cuts in minors will come soon
On Saturday, the Pirates committed to paying their more than 300 minor league players through the end of June.
Minor league pay became a hot topic after the Oakland Athletics announced they would not extend a $400-aweek payment past May 31. Other organizations opted to continue paying minor leagues, including the Pirates, through June.
But that pledge didn’t mean the Pirates wouldn’t still have to make cuts to their minor league system. On Wednesday, in a conference call with media, general manager Ben Cherington confirmed cuts would be coming.
Any players released will continue to be paid $400 a week through June. But Cherington, who must look forward to the 2021 season and beyond, said the Pirates wouldn’t be doing their minor leaguers any favors by keeping them around if they have no future with the club.
“I do expect we’ll make some releases,” Cherington said. “We’ve wanted to be as thoughtful as we can, especially with a new GM and trying to learn as much as I can about the player group that we have. We’ve had a good amount of dialogue over the last several days about that, It all comes back to the best information we have about looking forward to next year. Our feeling, and I think the feeling of other teams, has been that if we truly cannot see opportunity next year for a minor league player, we are not necessarily helping them by extending the relationship, if it’s that clear.
“That’s where we are and I’d expect we’ll have some released probably this week after we have a couple more conversations.”
Any discussion about minor league players spurs a larger one about development of the organization under a new management team. Most people in baseball believe there will not be a minor league season but MLB teams would have a taxi squad of minor leaguers available in the case of injury or other unforeseen problems on the major league level.
Players left off that taxi squad would be in a sort of baseball purgatory. Cherington said he and the rest of the league’s general managers understand that they can’t simply let their minor league players sit without baseball for a year and hope they’ll pick up where they left off in 2021. Still, figuring out the details of major league season is paramount right now, and what a development system would look like in 2020 is unknown.
“We definitely remain hopeful that there will be some kind of player development activity in 2020,” Cherington said. “Exactly what that looks like, where it is, remains to be seen. The league wants to prioritize figuring out a solution for the major league season first. I would characterize it as an important topic for the league to figure out, but we need to figure out the major league portion first. There’s been a lot of work done behind the scenes by the teams and the league. We hope we can get to that and include as many of our players as we can. It may not be 100 percent of them. We’ll see.”
At the very least, some system for the minor league players would help inform any cuts Cherington and the Pirates have to make. For now, though, it seems they will be making some releases in the very near future for the players they don’t anticipate making it to the Pirates down the road.