This is foul ball!
MLB’s plan to destroy minor leagues sells baseball’s soul for pennies on dollar
Once Rob Manfred and MLB’s grand plan to blow up the lower minor leagues and grass roots baseball became public last week, reaction from Congress and fans from the many communities targeted with extinction was fast and furious. MLB’s response? “Oh, it’s just a proposal. Our main objective is to improve the conditions of the minor league ballparks and the quality of life for the minor league players.”
And if you believe that, then, well, I’ve got a ballpark in Staten Island to sell you.
(Actually, the team in Staten Island needs to be sold after being run into the ground as one of the lowest drawing teams in the New York-Penn League by a Manhattan hedge fund group, Nostalgic Partners L.L.C., who bought it for $8.3 million in 2012. But that’s a whole separate story.)
The Daily News last Sunday published details of the plan/proposal, which, among other things, would (1) eliminate 42 minor league teams including the four short-season leagues, (2) put a cap at 150 for the number of players the 30 major league teams can have in their organizations, (3) move the amateur draft from June to August with contracts for the signed players to take effect the following season, and (4) the establish an independent “Dream League” where jilted minor league owners, who will have lost all their equity, could take their teams but now absorb all the costs of the salaries of players, managers, coaches, trainers, equipment people, as well their work compensation insurance.
Almost immediately, 104 members of Congress sent a letter to Manfred expressing their firm opposition to the plan, and shortly thereafter, New York Senator Chuck Schumer wrote a separate letter to Manfred expressing his “deep concern” for the New York State communities in Auburn Batavia, Binghamton and Staten Island, all on the “120 Plan” hit-list. At a press conference in Binghamton Thursday, Schumer went further in his complaint by announcing he’s open to reconsidering MLB’s anti-trust exemption in which the federal government allows baseball to operate as a monopoly.
To those concerns and objections, on November 19, Deputy Commissioner Dan
Halem wrote a four-page letter to Congress, noting how MLB “heavily subsidizes” the minor leagues, paying nearly $500 million in signing bonuses and salaries each year, while also identifying “more than 40” minor league stadiums “that do not possess adequate training facilities, medical facilities, locker rooms and in some cases, playing fields.” Halem further noted how minor league owners “regularly re-locate affiliates to cities where they can obtain the most favorable economic subsidies for stadium development.” The current system, complained Halem, has resulted in a minor league map “that places significant travel burdens on players who travel by bus and results in major league clubs being located far away from their affiliates which circumstances have a negative impact on player development.”
According to sources familiar with the negotiations between the majors and minors, Halem’s number of minor league stadiums not meeting up to standards had previously fluctuated from 23 to 30 before suddenly ballooning to 40 last month. In any case, the minor leagues have said they are more than willing to work with MLB in getting those facilities up to the enhanced standards now being proposed by MLB. They have also said they are willing to work together on the travel and schedule issues.
But what, for instance, can they do about situations like the South Atlantic League and the Lakewood, N.J. Blue Crabs, who are hundreds of miles to the north of all the other teams in the Carolinas and Georgia – when it was their major league affiliate, the Phillies, who moved them to New Jersey from Fayetteville, N.C. in 2000 so they would be closer to Philadelphia?
Halem noted that 77 minor league franchises have relocated since 1990, but under terms of the Professional Baseball Agreement between the minors and majors, MLB must receive advance notice of any relocations and, according to sources, have never once objected.
MLB’s desire to establish conformity on the number of players in each team’s minor league system may make sense for some of the smaller market teams (the Yankees alone have nine minor league affiliates and nearly 230 players under contract this year), and maybe the 150 they are proposing is the right number for them. But it’s the ham-handed, haphazard way they are proposing to do it, threatening to gut the heartland of baseball Americana, that has now incurred the wrath of Congress.
MLB is couching this plan/ proposal – they’re calling it a proposal now but in their negotiations with the minors for the last six months they’ve definitively outlined it as the “120 Plan” – as an effort to improve the stadiums and “wellness” for the minor league players. But it’s abundantly clear their main objective is to get rid of teams and leagues and save money by limiting the number of players they have to pay in their organizations.
A closer look at that, however, reveals the savings for MLB by eliminating 42 teams would be minimal. Of the $500 million MLB pays the minor league players – their own players by the way – a large chunk of that comes from the signing bonuses, and the total outlay below Triple A is about $40 million, half of which is subsidized by minor league baseball in the form of an annual ticket tax which it pays to MLB. Under the “120 plan”, the total savings for MLB from top to bottom would be roughly a $20 million in an industry that grossed in between $11-12 billion in 2019 – or less than a fifth of 1%.
For this, is MLB really prepared to destroy baseball in the grass roots communities of the lower minor leagues, put dozens of owners out of business with no equity to show for it (not to mention hundreds of ballpark employees), invite millions of dollars of lawsuits, risking Congress stripping them of their antitrust exemption, and, most importantly, losing hundreds of thousands of baseball fans, many of them in 6-16 age bracket, forever? These are the same communities in which MLB has conducted clinics and outreach programs in an effort to “grow the game.” The same communities where baseball fans, who can’t afford, or can’t travel to, major league ballparks, have a chance to develop and nurture a love for the game through the future big league stars that play in their towns every year.
There will be lawsuits, and believe it or not, neither MLB nor the minors want to see baseball stripped of its antitrust exemption. There would be dire consequences for both of them. What they should be most concerned about now is that the one thing Republicans and Democrats could agree on is their mutual outrage over their local communities losing their minor league baseball teams. Who knows? Maybe the minor league-major league dispute will bring the country together.