Giants, A’s get new Minor League affiliates,
The Giants and A's now know where their prospects are going to play under a reconstituted and controversial arrangement for developing players.
Triple-a and Double-a will stay the same for both, the Giants keeping Sacramento and Richmond, Va., respectively, while the A's will remain in Las Vegas and Midland, Texas.
The Giants and A's also will maintain affiliations with San Jose and Stockton, respectively, but those two California League teams will drop from high-class A to low-a under a league shift that was expected.
Each club will get a new affiliate for high-a. The Giants are going to Eugene, Ore., and the A's to Lansing, Mich. The Eugene Emeralds were the Cubs' entry in the Northwest League. The Lansing Lugnuts were the Blue Jays' Midwest League club.
The Giants are coming full circle in Oregon. They were Eugene's first affiliated big club, from 1959 through `62.
Eugene general manager Allan Benavides said in an interview he was thrilled with the new affiliation because that part of Oregon is Giants country.
“I think that what transpired is the best possible outcome we could have hoped for,” he said. “Don't get me wrong: We love the Cubs. What a run. But the Giants are the team in our market. We are beyond excited that this happened.”
Eugene's gain means a bitter loss an hour north in Oregon.
The Giants' longtime affiliate in the Northwest League, the SalemKeizer Volcanoes, was not extended an invitation to remain part of the MLB development system.
The Northwest League had been a short-season rookie league that began annually in June, after the draft, but that level is being eliminated. Though all but two Northwest League clubs, such as Eugene, were retained to make the jump to full-season ball, sources say Salem-keizer was excluded in part because of concerns over its ballpark.
Mickey Walker, the Volcanoes' CEO and part of the family that has owned the club since 1995 and built the Oregon ballpark with private money, expressed the same frustration that several minorleague teams felt Wednesday from the lack of communication from their big-league partners and the league. Walker said he learned Salem-keizer was out when the Giants tweeted their new affiliation list.
“For a partnership of 26 years to end that way kind of feels like a slap in the face,” Walker said. “That's the toughest part to deal with. I think heartbreak is an appropriate term. This is something my father spent his entire adult life trying to build. He sacrificed everything to keep this a functioning business through the years.”
Walker hopes MLB works with Salem-keizer to have some sort of baseball in the city and expects some ball to be played there this summer.
Likewise, the A's short-season rookie team in Vermont is now without an affiliation.
The A's were hoping to move their high-a club to Vancouver, according to sources, but coronavirus travel restrictions between the United States and Canada made that impractical. So the A's moved to Michigan instead. Vancouver remains a Toronto affiliate.
“As long as we've been in the Midwest League, Lansing has really been in a desirable spot,” A's general manager David Forst said. “It's a great ballpark. It's a college town. It's a really good city for players to be in, and we're happy it worked out the way it did.”
The A's had their highA team in Beloit, Wis., in the Midwest League. That becomes a Miami farm club.
At the same time, Forst called the Vermont loss a “sad part of the process. You couldn't have been geographically farther away, but it ended up being a great relationship.”
Like the A's, the Giants gain one geographical advantage in the new setup. Their low-a team moves from Augusta., Ga., to San Jose, which is owned by the big club. Augusta becomes an Atlanta affiliate. The Giants now have all of their farm teams on the West Coast except for Richmond. There are no Double-a leagues in this part of the country.
The Giants risked losing Richmond because the Nationals wanted to move their Triple-a team there from Fresno. But MLB rejected the plan because it thought the Richmond ballpark was not sufficient for a Triple-a club. So the Nats chose Rochester, N.Y., instead.
MLB gave the Grizzlies a choice: Take a huge drop to low-a as a Colorado affiliate or get no affiliation at all. An online news site based in Fresno, gvwire.com, reported a deal between the league and team was completed after complicated lease negotiations between the Grizzlies and the city.
Before the affiliations become official, all of the franchises must sign agreements with Major League Baseball, which has assumed complete control over the minor leagues after a decadeslong arrangement with an independent organization that ran them.
MLB is reducing the number of affiliated teams from 160 to 120 and will maintain four levels instead of five. A number of prospects who are not part of those four levels can play rookie-level ball at the teams' development facilities and in the Dominican Summer League.
MLB has said that it will try to maintain some relationship with franchises now excluded and help them get some form of organized baseball.
The main impetus behind the overhaul was the league's desire to standardize its minor leagues, improve conditions for players, reduce travel time and, by shrinking the number of affiliated leagues, save money by not paying so many “organizational players” who have little chance to reach the majors but are needed to complete rosters.