Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1628: What MLB’s Remaking of the Minors Means

Episode Date: December 11, 2020

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about and the Phillies’ surprise hiring of Dave Dombrowski as their president of baseball operations, then (15:04) bring on Baseball America executive editor J.J. Cooper to talk about the ongoing overhaul of the minor leagues, the history of the relationship between the majors and minors, why MLB sought to […]

And I don't want to know what I should do I know it's hard to give up when I don't want to be saved Take me in your heart again And I know where to keep your heart up, but I won't do it again Don't you go and leave me here, my friend Hello and welcome to episode 1628 of Effectively Wild, a Fangraphs baseball podcast brought to you by our Patreon supporters. I'm Meg Rowley of Fangraphs, and I am joined as always by Ben Lindberg of The Ring. Ben, how are you? Happy to be here. How are you? I'm happy toley of Fangraphs, and I'm joined as always by Ben Lindberg of The Ring. Ben, how are you? Happy to be here. How are you?

I'm happy to be here too. Good. Well, this is our promised minor league restructuring episode where we try to make sense of what exactly is happening here. And we do that with the help of J.J. Cooper of Baseball America, who has been all over this subject from the start. And really, I think this conversation is helpful for me as his work has been just because I feel like I'm still forming my opinion about what all of this means. Is it good? Is it bad? What are the implications here? It has been sort of oversimplified, I think, in ways that maybe reduce it down to its essence or maybe distort it. And so I just haven't really formed a concrete impression of what the long-term effects of this will be.

And maybe it's too soon to do that, as JJ will tell us. So he will lay out exactly what is happening here with various independent leagues becoming partner leagues and affiliates becoming non-affiliates and some affiliates staying affiliates, but moving around from team to team and level to level, everything is changing really compared to what it has been for decades. So this is something that we've been wanting to talk about for a while, but we wanted some of the dust to settle, although really some of the dust is still settling. Yes, the invitations have not been formally accepted. Yes, the invitations have not been formally accepted. There isn't one person who works in the league who's like, my job is to intervene when we're going to sound rude. My job is to intervene when we're going to sound like doofuses and say, hey, what if we call it something else? Because if we call it this, I'm going to say that we're going to sound like doofuses. They need to create that job. You'd think that it would be a PR job, but I think that you need a special doofus intervention specialist, a discrete role. What would you call this transaction?

Because, yeah, it's like 120 teams or 119 as of right now are being, quote unquote, invited to remain affiliates of MLP teams. And really, it's just like take it or leave it, basically. I mean, there may be some negotiation that goes on there, but it's sort of, you know, do this or you're sort of screwed. So invitation is a euphemism, but I guess I wouldn't expect them to use a non-euphemism. So I don't know what they should say that would be more palatable. I guess I mostly find it interesting that there are so many places where in the last couple of years we have seen the league and its employees, whether at the league office or at teams, sort of say the quiet part out loud. But then there are still these moments

where they feel the need to sort of shroud in sort of strange corporate doublespeak language the real thing. This is a legalistic moment apart from anything else. And I think that sometimes you're better off just being cut and dry because invitation implies, you know, like that you're coming to a party, right? And what we're asking you to bring is chips. And that's not what they're asking of minor league teams here to the extent that they're asking them at all. So I think that I would have simply said, we've informed minor league franchises

of our proposed role for them in the MLB-directed development league. And that's all. I just leave it at that because when you get cute and you're not being cute, people want to tell you that you're not cute. Yeah, it's definitely not a party or at least minor league teams are not treating this as a party. So you and Ben Clemens are also updating some research that you did, which may be published by the time people are listening to this potentially. So you can perhaps check out the written version and we'll talk about it next time. But basically, you're looking into what this will mean for access to minor league teams for your average Joe right out in America.

Yeah, we we did this in 2019. We took a look at sort of who has access to affiliated ball now. And, you know, we did a couple of different things to sort of define what access means, because obviously, if your nearest minor league affiliate is 100 miles away, and you live in Montana, that means something different to you than if you live in, you know, an urban part of California, for instance. But we did some work to try to quantify what the access impact is going to be. And I think that you're right to say that some of that picture beyond the raw numbers is going to remain murky, right? people and we will be saying how many people who have access to affiliated baseball now will have it in 2021 and how many of them will see the nature of their access change but what exactly that means for their ability to sort of engage with the sport become fans of the sport is i think still in some respects an open question but it will have an impact on these communities sort of regardless of what the long-term fan picture for major league baseball looks like. So we thought it was important

to put some analytical heft behind that. And so we've been working over the last couple of days to update that analysis now that we have this list of 119 teams that have been invited and then these 43 clubs that are losing their affiliated status some of which will remain sort of in the mlb family if you will by being a pro partner league or a summer wood bat league and i think 19 of which are sort of up in the air in terms of what their futures hold so you can look for that at fan graphs hopefully as you said by the time you're listening to this as i imagine this episode will post a little later in the evening, but keep an eye out for that. had a conversation earlier this week about the Philadelphia Phillies and where they stand and the way that their rebuild has sort of stalled and what went wrong and what might be next. And now

we know one thing that's next, which is that Dave Dombrowski will be running baseball operations for the Phillies. He was hired on Thursday, reportedly, as the president of baseball operations, which is sort of a surprising move. He had earlier indicated that he was not interested in going back to work for a team. He'd been in the running reportedly for the Phillies and Mets and maybe other jobs before this, but had seemingly taken himself out of that running because he was committed to working to bring an MLB team to Nashville. He had made some commitment to work on that effort for a number of years, but evidently the Phillies made him an invitation that he couldn't turn down or didn't want to turn down. So Dave Dombrowski back in the saddle for yet another team.

Feels like a weird fit to me, Ben. Yeah, a little bit. And I say that because I think that we have a good sense, a reasonably good sense of what Dombrowski's approach to franchise building is. successful, but is one that seems to depend on trading away prospects and signing big contracts and having a good competitive roster that is then in a couple of years less good because those players are older and you sort of mine some of the best aspects of your farm system in order to bring back sort of big league ready guys who are not the free agents that you've signed, but whose contracts are still clanking around. So that strikes me as a weird pairing with Philly because they don't have a lot of prospects and their current major league roster needs money reinvested in it in order to be good,

which Dombrowski is good at, but which the Phillies ownership group seems very nervous about. So I don't know that I get this one. Yeah. On the one hand, like he's won World Series with two different franchises. Not a lot of executive types have done that. And he's built pennant winning teams with three franchises. And he's built great teams in a lot of different places at a lot of different times.

So obviously that's someone that you would want on your side. But yeah, at least his recent MO, this doesn't seem to gel well with that because he's been someone who has built from within and been a farm system person before, like with the Expos going back to early in his career. So he's done that. That's one of his skill sets, or at least it was at one time. Of course, that was a long time ago and baseball was different then. And I don't know if he has the interest in doing that now or the patience in doing that. And one would think that they're not bringing him on to do like another full rebuild. Presumably they're bringing him on to do what he did with the Red

Sox, which is take them from being a good team to a World Series winning team. And that will be a little harder to do this time because, yeah, as you noted, the Phillies, according to Fangraph's farm system rankings right now, have the fourth worst system. lower on that list is the Red Sox, which they got there in large part because of Dave Dabrowski trading away a lot of their prospects and doing the job that he had been hired to do. Like that seemingly was his mandate, win us a World Series and, you know, damn the long-term consequences. And that's what happened. And ultimately, you know, maybe that contributed to trading Mookie Betts and their lack of success in the last couple of seasons, but he did do what he was tasked with. So that's the question. Like, one would think that he wouldn't have been seduced here by the prospect of, well, you know, win long term. Like, he's been everywhere. He's done everything. He's a veteran person. I don't know if he's signing up for a long-term thing here or

whether it's just let's convert this into a winning team. But how does he do that? He can't really do the thing that he did with the Red Sox, which is trading a lot of highly touted prospects because as you said, they don't really have them right now. And if it is just about spending, which always seemed like a strange sort of highly valuable skill to have. Like if your skill is handing out the biggest contract and like signing the biggest free agent, I mean, I guess there is some skill in persuading a player to sign with your team or talking another executive into trading with your team. But if you do have kind of a blank check, then it seems like a lot of people could probably convince someone to take it.

But that doesn't seem like it's in the cards here either because, yeah, that's why we talked about the Phillies earlier this week, the rumors about cost cutting and about Zach Wheeler being on the block and all of that. So unless that's not true and unless they said, hey, yeah, come on, Dave, and we'll give you everything you need to turn this into a winner i don't know that this will go as smoothly as it did in boston yeah it seems like seems like an odd one i feel like we're missing a piece of information this is one of those where i'm like i feel like i'm missing something here perhaps i don't know but i don't know what it would be but i mean we knew that they had interest in him and it didn't seem like he had enough interest in them. And you would think that he would not take this job unless he saw a path to a title, to achieving what they want him to achieve here. Like if he thought there's no farm system, there are no prospects I can trade, and they're not going to let me spend, then I don't know that he would have been coaxed into taking over this team.

So he must think that there's something here that can help add to his legacy help get him to the promised land again maybe he has learned something about the viability of a franchise in nashville that we don't know yet maybe he has learned something about the viability of his aesthetic wearing cowboy boots perhaps he has learned that country music is bad for him and that he risks rupturing his inner ear if he listens to it and to our listeners i am not saying that country music is bad i like it i am saying some people don't and maybe he has a medical condition that precludes him from listening to it and then why are you trying to start a franchise in nashville there's country music all over the place uh throw a rock and you'll hit some so perhaps there's something going on here it's been a long day ben and i feel a

little bit tired and now we're punchy yeah well we'll see if this means that maybe the phillies are in the real mudo market after all i don't know if they'll just uh decide to double down like they're close enough it seems like their avenue to getting there is to spend now because they have done some spending and they have traded prospects for established players and they're at the point where they're supposed to be winning now so to do that it seems like you know getting over that hump will require further investment and this is the person who is known for making that sort of investment so we will see it It's kind of confounding, but also semi-exciting, I guess, if you're a Phillies fan and you want them to follow in the trajectory of the Red Sox.

So we'll see if he can do it again. Well, I think it's particularly gratifying if you're a Phillies fan because there was some scuttlebutt that they had sort of held off on hiring a GM because they were worried or perhaps even hoping that there wouldn't be a 2021 season at all. So this seems like a superior alternative to that, no matter what you think of Dombrowski. Yeah, they went with the name brand. They're not cost-cutting when it comes to executives, at least. So that's something. All right. Well, let's just shift gears here and let's get to our minor league conversation and bring on J.J. Cooper.

I don't want to change your mind I don't want to change the world I just want to watch it go by I just want to watch it go by We were young and old We don't have no control We're out of control All right, we are joined now by the executive editor at Baseball America,

who, according to his Twitter, is suffering through some post-Rule 5 draft adrenaline drain. J.J. Cooper, welcome to the show, and thank you for cutting this out. I know it's been a busy week for you. I'm glad to join you guys. Glad to join you. How are y'all? We're doing okay. So there is a lot to cover here, and you have covered it for years at this point. I can't think of anyone better to talk to about this topic because you've been one of the leading reporters when it comes to this whole minor league restructuring saga, which you could probably write a book about at this point. You probably have written a book's length of work, So you could just print it out, put it together,

and it'll be a book. But in order to explain what is happening here, it seems like there needs to be a little bit of context and history. And if you could just briefly sort of summarize how we got to this point, it seems like too big a question to say, what's the history of minor league baseball? But if you could kind of lay out the history of the professional baseball agreements and how we got to the point that the minor leagues and MLB had this relationship that is now completely changing in a short answer, if that is even possible. So the year was 1903. And no, we really could go there we're not going to but you could because i mean basically it that at the starting point you had minor league baseball banded together because

they were they they felt like that they were tired of having their players taken by major league teams and you know and have their contracts not honored and all that and so they formed the national association to stop that. And eventually the National League and the American League, who didn't like each other a whole lot either, you know, did agree to honor their contracts. And that started the system that we had. And you get to the 60s and minor league baseball at that point is dying, essentially uh you know you had 475 teams by uh night in like 1947 1948 you know 48 40 40 plus million i don't want to get the right number i won't get the wrong number so i'll just say 40 plus million people come into minor league games all that dries up and so in the 60s major

league baseball basically bailed out and saved Minor League Baseball from dying. And they essentially said, we'll subsidize it. We'll pay the players. But not only that, we'll pay you payments in lieu of for the fact that you're allowing us to broadcast our games in your markets, which I know sounds incredibly quaint now. But so you had the professional baseball agreement. Incredibly quaint now. But so you had the professional baseball agreement and by which major league baseball promised to provide players to minor league baseball teams. Minor league baseball teams had a list of requirements of things that they had to provide in return. They're going to do the travel.

The fields and the facilities will, you know, be safe for the players and all these things. And that's where we went for the next half of a century, really. Every seven to 10 years, the professional baseball agreement would expire. There was a really ugly negotiation in 1990 where both sides actually had separate winter meetings because they were so mad at each other. They didn't have an agreement,

but I wouldn't even say cooler heads prevail, but at some point they both realized that it was going to be tough to, that the alternatives seemed a lot more painful than figuring out a way to work together. They came to an agreement. They really upped the standards for the facilities, which is what made minor league baseball owners really mad at the time. But that ended up leading to the boom of the 1990s and 2000s, all these new stadiums.

And they found that fans really enjoyed coming to new stadiums a lot more than they did the stadiums built in the 30s. And so there's where we were. We just keep rolling along. New professional baseball agreement about every 10 years. And about two and a half years ago, we started asking questions saying, so what are you hearing about the upcoming one that expires September 2020? hearing about the upcoming one that expires September 2020. And the answer that minor league baseball found out about 15, 14, 15 months ago was major league baseball says, hey, we have this idea.

We want to cut out all rookie and short season baseball outside of the complexes and affiliated ball. So we want you to go from 160 teams to 120. And as you might not be surprised to know, minor league baseball teams did not take that well, and we're very upset about that. Right. And that's led us to where we are today. Sorry, that wasn't very short. That was pretty efficient. It's a lot of ground to cover. So I don't know how you could have done it in less time, really. Yeah. And I don't want to take us too far into the weeds of the negotiation, although I guess that's kind of unavoidable. But I'm curious, JJ, what your insight is into

this proposal is obviously negotiated by Major League Baseball. But at the team level, at the Major League team level, we have seen in the last couple of years sort of varying approaches to player development, some of which have resulted in teams expanding the number of affiliated clubs that they have as they're trying to field more and more rosters and sort of fill them with players. So I'm curious what your sense is of the internal dynamic at MLB about trying to, in some way, balance their desire to have greater control over minor league baseball writ large with some of their clubs, you know, some of which are, you know, teams like the Yankees and the Dodgers,

right, that have sort of storied player development histories and had pretty expansive minor league organizations, and whether they cared at all that this move would, in some instances, sort of undo a growing trend within player development? It's a great point, great question, and I think that may be part of it in some ways. To use a truly probably awful analogy on this, but it's like, I mean, it's like an arms race. It's why did the U.S. and the Soviets have, you know, enough nuclear weapons to each blow up the world, you know, a thousand times in the 60s and 70s? It's because, well, if they build more, I build more. And there are MLB owners, and I emphasize owners, not front offices, but owners who view this as if the Yankees have nine minor league affiliates, then I have to have at least eight. have nine minor league affiliates, then I have to have at least eight. But I really would appreciate it if we pass something that prevented the Yankees from having six or seven, and then I can

only have five or six. And so, yes, there absolutely are teams out there who are not happy about this. I mean, Brian Cashman has publicly said, why would I ever want to have less lottery tickets? I want to have more lottery tickets. So there are teams that are, the Yankees are one of those who have always looked at it and said, the cost of having an Appalachian League team is really very minimal in the standards of a budget of a major league baseball club. Right.

So we would want to do that. There are other clubs out there who very much view it and say, yeah, that may be true, but they're going to do it and we don't really want to. And I have trouble getting my ownership to do so. So maybe we're better off if the Yankees and these other teams can't do that. And I think one of the concerns, and this has been tweaked, I think this is not going to be as bad as originally it looked like. There was a talk at one point that there was going to be 150 player, minor league player limit for teams. 150 means everyone has to be pretty cookie cutter. If you're required to have four full season clubs and you can, but you're going to have at least one complex team

in Florida, Arizona, you've pretty much used up 150 players. Right. Now the limit is going to be 180. 180 allows a little bit more flexibility that teams can try different things. I still have this crazy dream that someone's going to do the Royals Academy from the 70s again. You have 180 players, you can do that now. If you had 150, you can't. So why did MLB enter this recent round of negotiations and instead of just upholding the status quo, decide to blow everything up and change the way it had

worked for the past several decades? And I guess you can go into their stated rationale for doing that and any maybe unstated or less stated motivations that they may have had for wanting to do that? Stated rationale pretty simply has been we want to improve the geography of our leagues. We want to improve travel for the players. We want to make sure that we're playing in top-notch facilities across the country. And they would say as they surveyed the landscape, they, we don't have 160 teams that meet those standards. 120 is closer to it. And by the way, let me make clear, the facility standards as they have been set out, no minor league team meets all of those right now. There are going to have to be significant upgrades. The lighting at Class A is going to have to go way up. They're going to now have, again, they have to reflect the fact that we're in 2020, not 1980. There are going to be locker rooms installed everywhere so that now when you have female staff members, they have a locker room that basically does not exist in most places, most minor league parks around the country.

Things like that. There's going to be food preparation areas that are going to be, you know, now weight rooms, all weather weight rooms, you know, that you can use in the summer. These are all things that have not been in many places. So that's a stated reason. And one that when you look at the facility standards and what they're doing, one that they are clearly doing. At the same time, I would say kind of the unstated reason is, is that there are teams out there. And again, this is not universal, but there are MLB teams who that really did view rookie ball and short season ball as something that was a very inefficient use of their resources. Ones who said it was inefficient and there are better ways to do it, you know, I think kind of won this argument. And I think one of the reasons they won this argument is you had one side saying it's inefficient. And then so if you're an MLB owner, the inefficient side says you can improve it, says you're going to save money. The other side says you're going to probably spend money.

Well, if it came down to it, you know, cutting the draft from 40 rounds to 20 rounds saves money. Now we can talk about how much money does it actually save in a $10 billion industry, but it does save money. And that's one of the, kind of the subtext of this as well. And which leads to the interesting discussion of, is affiliated baseball the important thing or is viable baseball the important thing? And which we could spend three hours talking about and not ever get to an answer. But MLB is saying affiliated baseball is not necessarily vital to developing baseball fans in communities as much as having baseball,

viable, high-level baseball in those communities. I don't want to skip ahead in the conversation, but let's maybe use that as an entry point to talk about what the state of affairs is going to be in terms of baseball in those communities. So we will still have,9 and then I guess potentially 120 if the Fresno situation gets sorted out, affiliated clubs. And then there will be a number of pro partner leagues that I guess will resemble sort of indie ball as we know it now for undrafted free agents and guys who get cut from the system as it stands currently, right? Because we are going to have these roster caps. And then there's this expanded interest in amateur ball that will come in the form of Summerwood Bat Leagues,

some of which will be part of the MLB Draft League and some of which will not be. And I guess your perspective on this is probably a little bit different than the average person because if you're a prospect person, having more concentrated draft looks isn't necessarily a bad thing, but I'm curious sort of, and this might be an unfair question because I don't know if we can really say that there's going to be consistency in terms of the talent level, but what is your sense of the talent level that fans in cities that are losing their affiliated minor league club and are going to be transitioning either to one of these pro partner leagues or one of the wood bat leagues?

What's the delta there in terms of the sort of quality of play that they should expect to see? Because I think that that's a little bit murky for some folks. expect to see. Because I think that that's a little bit murky for some folks. And that's, yeah. And the awful part of this is, I hate to say this as someone who's, you know, loves prospects, you know, all that. When I talk to MILB operators who are getting invites to be in the 120 and ones who are not, you know, and this conversation, you know, the conversation you have with GMs and owners over the years, they will admit to you, to the average fan, it will make, unfortunately, in my mind, unfortunately, because again, we all are, all of us on this are aficionados of baseball. But for the average fan who comes to a game, it probably will not make a whole lot of difference if everything around the game remains at a high quality i mean again the delta as far as the talent you're going to hear from

the mlb draft league which is what new york penn league clubs four of them have turned into they make the point we may actually have better talent and they they may again it's hard to say we haven't seen what those rosters are going to look like but the the point they're making is, is we're going to have draftable players leading into the draft, their draft year. And before we had draftable players right after they were drafted coming here. And many of those teams would note, we never had a whole lot of first rounders come here

because first rounders didn't really come to the New York Penn League. The Appalachian League is going to lose. I can confidently say that there will not be a Vladimir Guerrero Jr. playing in the Appalachian League in 2021. You know, that's, I feel safe in saying that because there are very few 17, 18 year olds who can play to the caliber. Wander Franco is not walking through that door in Elizabethton or, you know, Burlington or wherever. But at the same time, if you said, you know, I did a study and you say, OK, how many players come off the normal Appalachian League team?

You look 10 years later, how many of them are major leaguers? And the answer is three, four. Some teams had zero. A good, you know, maybe this team had six. And if you said how many of these rising freshmen and sophomores who are supposed you know they're aiming to be some of the best draft prospects in the game are going to come off of an Appalachian Appalachian League roster and make the majors it's probably going to be pretty similar but the the sad part about it again as

a baseball fan as a diehard baseball fan is is the key part for all of these teams is going to be the quality of the operator that quality of the economics know, like that MLB sets up in these systems or the operators who are doing these in these leagues that are not run by MLB set up. Because for the casual fan, which is the vast majority, the reason that minor league baseball almost died in the 60s was because all they were marketing to were really big baseball fans. Nowadays, in minor league baseball, even in college baseball at doing at the best level, you're marketing to more to baseball fans. You're marketing that it is a fun Friday night out, a fun Thursday night out. And oh yeah, by the way, we play a baseball game. And that part's

not going to change no matter what the, as long as the quality of baseball is not so poor as to become, I'm going to jab a fork into my eyes watching it and the game takes eight hours. If it's not that, people aren't going to notice whether that pains me or not. Right. Yeah. If you're a little kid, I mean, you're not going to know, well, this is an amateur prospect or this is a low A, you know, short season player. I mean, they look the same to you probably through your little kid eyes, but maybe there is a certain prestige that comes along with just having that association to the parent club and the idea that, well, these are people who are part of the same organization and maybe we are seeing the future Yankees or Dodgers

or Padres or whomever right in front of our eyes. And that could still be the case, of course, if you're watching amateur players. But it's harder, I guess, to forecast and to see that connection. So it does sort of depend on who's going to the game and who the audience is. But it's tough. I guess you could say that MLB won the war here. It got what it wanted, but it really lost the PR battle along the way, and maybe even more than it had anticipated, just the enormous backlash to this. And it's been sort of simplified as, well, MLB wants less baseball, or at least less affiliated baseball, and it's all about saving money. And there is some truth to that. And I think there is also truth to the idea that, yeah, this was maybe a little

inefficient, or maybe we won't see that huge difference when it comes to, say, the quality of play in the majors if that's the goal. if the purpose of the minors is just to supply players to MLB teams, maybe that can be done with fewer affiliates. It's certainly understandable. But if you're a fan and you're just saying, well, I want more baseball, I don't care if the owners get to save some money by contracting a couple of teams. That doesn't do anything for me. They're not going to pass those savings along to me. So it just means less baseball and this is bad and it's a big bad MLB and Rob Manfred

against fans or minor league owners or whatever. So to what extent do you think the way it's been portrayed has been accurate and to what extent is it distorted? I mean, is this actually just conclusively bad for fans or are there two sides to the story so two things i'll say one is is this we are getting to the end of this but i want i do want to make clear this is not over because no as of yet i don't believe any minor league team has signed up well they can't have signed a professional development license which is going to be the key contract in

the new system professional baseball pba professional baseball agreement replaced by pdl professional development license these names you know we don't have brandios working on these clearly but the thing i would say is is that so we don't know that they are going to get these 120 teams although it would be likely but you know we don't know it until they say here are our teams and they all have been announced and all that but the thing i would say is is and again this is there absolutely there is a a blowback a pushback and there are places around the country that are understandably utterly understandably upset if you've had affiliated baseball in your town and you're in burlington or clinton iowa and you wake up today and it's like we're're not going to have affiliated baseball anymore. After many, many years of it, there are fans who are understandably very upset.

And the fact that they may have a different form of baseball next year doesn't, you know, does not, that's a very small bandaid on their wound. At the same time, when we talk about the state of baseball around the country right now, one of the things that struck me, I love minor league baseball history, which puts me in a very weird group, I get. But we talk about, there's always been this talk about this golden age of minor league baseball, which was the late 40s. That was the time before TV had really arrived, before air conditioning had made people realize it's a lot more comfortable to be inside during the summer than it is to be outside if it's 95 degrees. But there was this time where basically minor league baseball had teams in every town with a stoplight. And as we said, at a time when the population of the country was way less than it is now, they were drawing 40 plus million fans to minor league baseball games, a record that it took until the 21st century to break. And I look back at that 470 some teams,

and this may be unpopular to say, but we're at that now. Now it's done differently. But if you were watching a Class D team in Americus, Georgia, and I've been by the ballpark, it's still there. It's kind of cool. But a Class D team or Class C team in Americus, Georgia, or Moultrie, or any one of these small towns at that time, you weren't watching future big leaguers. You were watching effectively semi-pro baseball, but you had someone in your town who wanted to have a team to take on the team. It really was

kind of like town ball from the early 1900s. Well, we don't have that now, obviously. We don't have 475 affiliated minor league teams. You know, that's not what we have. But okay, let's look at 2025. The key part of that is, is what I keep saying is if it's sustainable. I'm not trying to say MLB's right in doing this. I'm not trying to say they're wrong, but I'm just saying, so let's say we have 120 affiliated minor league teams. Let's say then we have another 60, 70 partner league teams. So now we're up to 190. Let's say we have, right now we have 200 Summerwood bat teams. The quality of those admittedly varies, but okay, so now we're up to 400. We've got almost 300 division one college baseball programs. And by the way, if you go back to the 40s, no one cared about college baseball.

And now if I'm in Baton Rouge or Starkville or, you know, take your pick, Chapel Hill here right down the road, I can go to a top-notch stadium to watch top-notch baseball. That was not an option, you know, many years ago. top-notch baseball that was not an option, you know, many years ago. So now we're up to, you know, the point being we could get to 500, 600 teams, but the point being, I don't think right now our problem is, is wherever I live in the country, I can't go see high-level baseball, quality baseball. Now, again, some of us, for some people, you say that it's like, no, I can't go to a major league game and anything below the major leagues is not quality. The thing that is happening here, for right or wrong, is before it was like that affiliated minor league baseball was here, you know, on some sort of hierarchy and everything else was viewed as much lower than that. And maybe that's fair. Maybe that's not.

I've really, I love indie ball Ball, which is now Professional Partner League Ball. And I've had a really good time going to Indie Ball games. And I think they're very enjoyable. A lot of people, you know, if I'm in the Cape during the summer, going to a Cape Cod League game is a very good way to spend the day. The thing that is happening here is it's going to be, is baseball sustainable in all these ways? And I had an owner who's lost his affiliation, was not invited yesterday. The way he put it is I'm in a partner league now, but if those lines are blurring and maybe I'm getting loans from

another team and I'm playing some players on my team are, you know, I'm in the Chicago area. Maybe I have a couple of Cubs players, minor leaguers who are playing for me in addition to the players that my team has procured and is paying. Well, that's kind of, we're kind of reversing back to the 1930s is where we are. I don't know that it necessarily means this is, you know, a pox on baseball. It's something where I think we don't, I'm not smart enough to know where this is going to go yet. Well, and it feels like we have to consider that sustainability question within the context of the short-term viability of a lot of these teams, because I imagine, you know, you guys have reported on this at Baseball America that the lack of a minor league season hit these franchises very hard.

So what's the current landscape even look like in terms of the financial viability of these teams, not five or 10 years from now when we're flooded with a bunch of summer wood bat leagues and partner leagues and affiliates, but what's their immediate viability having lost a season of baseball in a circumstance where I would imagine that gate revenue is really important to their economic viability? Yeah. Gate revenue is everything if you're a minor league baseball team. There are a few teams out there that are really clever. They do a lot around it, but even for those, it's a drop in the bucket. i mean to just as a kind of a quick financial like explanation of it it's like so let's just take your average minor league team that does pretty well right the a safe number is is in the industry in the minor you know like minor league owners and gms will talk about like a let's just say a 20 per cap 20 per capita any

person that they bring through the gates that they they buy a ticket, they think that you're going to get, let's just count it as $20 coming through the gates between ticket, concessions, you know, merchandise, parking, whatever, which is a pretty low number. That's a pretty, you know, inexpensive night out, right? But if you're a team that draws on average 2,000 fans per game, well, 2,000 times 20, so that's $40,000 on a normal night. And on a good Friday night, you may make $100,000. And that's just direct revenue. That's not counting sponsorships, all that.

So teams went from making, let's say, $40,000 a night for 70 nights because they had 70 home games. That's 60. Let's say that's really rainy that year. It's like by 60 nights to having zero. And obviously that's a disaster for all these teams. Financially, that is disastrous. Because minor league baseball now has been considered, you know, has become an investment in some ways for owners. That's something that people, you know, that they take out loans, they go out of their own pocket, they figure out ways to make it work. And let's also just acknowledge, and a whole lot of good people in baseball were furloughed or laid off also.

There are staffs that are a lot smaller than they were if we rewind to last February. But the thing we are now is, is are we going to have a 2021 season? Because it's going to be brutal. They're not going to dig out from this in just one year. But if there's not a 2021 season, okay, well, then we're talking a different story because I don't know how many businesses could go with two years of no revenue. And again, they gain almost all their revenue between April and September. I don't think anyone's going to go, you know, declare bankruptcy

and fail to field a team right now just because if you had a franchise that was worth, I don't know what it's worth now, but before all of this that happened with MLB, it was worth 10 to $15 million. There's a lot of incentive there to borrow, before all of this that happened with MLB, it was worth 10 to $15 million. There's a lot of incentive there to borrow, to do whatever you have to,

to figure out a way to keep it going until you can start making revenue again. And the thing we just talked about is, is if I can get to the point where I'm making that 20, 25, $30,000 a night, you know, when we're playing games, well, it's well worth trying to figure out a way to get there. But there's a lot of uncertainty right now also because everyone doesn't know what the financial structure is going to look like in this. And if the financial structure is very different than

what they thought, or if the franchise valuations are going to be massively affected by this, then the calculus may change. But everyone right now seems to be in the, I'm going to try to figure out a way to hang on because if I don't, I'm just throwing away something that could be still valuable. Are minor league baseball owners sympathetic figures, do you feel? Or is that just the case because they're being compared to Rob Manfred? I mean, minor league franchises are a great place for people to start in baseball. A lot of people lot of people who go on to positions with MLB teams, maybe they started because they went to the winter meetings and they got some job as a summer marketing intern for a double-A team or something,

and that's how you get started in baseball, and that can be how broadcasters get started. And obviously a lot of players are employed by those teams who will now maybe not be employed or will be outside of affiliated ball. But the owners themselves, I guess, have been guilty of some of the same behavior that people get angry at MLB owners for, right? You know, public funding of ballparks or just being opportunistic when it comes to maybe jumping from one place to another, depending on, you know, what's advantageous to them at the time. So I guess it varies quite a bit, but these aren't exactly mom and pop stores, I guess,

for the most part, right? Yeah, it used to be that they were. I mean, that's the thing that has changed. Okay, so like Miles Wolfe is kind of like, to me, one of the legends of baseball. Miles Wolfe is this guy who decided he wanted to get into baseball in the 70s and get to the late 70s. And again, this late 70s is a time where pretty much, I mean, when you say mom and pop, I mean, I literally, the first team that I covered, the Macon Braves in the 90s, had one of these mom and pop operations. Ed and Mary Holtz. It was a husband and wife.

They've been doing this since the 50s they literally gathered the receipts every night in a shoebox and went off to the office to count them i mean it was americana from the 1950s you know like as far as like they i mean i they may have had an abacus you know an abacus to count them for all i know but when miles wolf he's in baseball in the 70s and he hears that that the Durham Bulls basically are really struggling and they're going to fold. And essentially, he gets the Durham Bulls. He purchases the Durham Bulls,

not as someone who has all this money or anything, but because basically he's assuming the debts. That's, if you'll just take this club off my hands and write the checks to cover the debts that we have. It's yours. That's where baseball was, minor league baseball was in the late 70s and early 80s, where you literally, if you sold your car, that might be enough to buy you a minor league team. Well, obviously we're not there anymore. You know, we haven't been there since the 1990s. These are, I mean, your low class A teams sell for 8,, $10, $15, or in case of Dayton,

$40 million. Your AAA teams are, you know, they're not measured in, you know, they're 50, you know, 40, 50 million for a really good, higher than that maybe for some of the best teams. These are large businesses in their own right. Now, and again, there is absolutely kind of that back and forth. I was covering the Macon Braves and they had a stadium from the 30s and the Braves who owned the Macon Braves wanted a new stadium and Macon didn't build it. So Rome built it down, you know, a few hours away and the Macon Braves became the Rome Braves. That's something that's happened long before this current negotiation that's going on. But the reality of it is, is that when, you know, when you are millionaires, you know, battling with billionaires, MLB is not a figure that's going to come across as sympathetic

in kind of almost any, you know, negotiation and fight because they're MLB. And on top of that, you just hit on the key thing, which is, but minor league baseball is also, it is a small business in all these communities. And you have a whole lot of people working for these teams who they may have worked from for 5, 10, 15 years. And you have people who are running these teams in many cases who, this is their community. This is where they are. They're not just here for a couple of years on their way up the ladder. A lot of these people are, this is where I am. This is their community. This is where they are. They're not just here for a couple of years on their way up the ladder. A lot of these people are, this is where I am. This is my community.

And I would say with that, minor league baseball has done an excellent job. One of the ways they are successful is they very much do view themselves in the best operators view themselves absolutely as a key part of the community. And anytime anything bad happens, they want to say, what can I do to help? You know, if there's, you know, if there's a problem in the town, what can we do to help?

And that means that, you know, they are small town communities. Well, small town, they're part of the community, whether it's a small town or a big city, but they're part of that community. In addition to being, they're not kind of, they're not viewed very much as a faceless corporation because in many cases, even the person who owns the team is someone who's been in that town for

20, 30 years and has kind of everyone knows that person. Do you think that this consolidation will have any effect, either speed up or slow down the trends that we have seen in recent years of parent clubs wanting to have a complete ownership stake or a partial ownership stake in some of their affiliate teams? Yes. And the big reason why is this. So, okay, they're going to sell, well, so they're going to be offered, teams are going to be offered 10-year professional development licenses, those PTLs. The safest way, as I can understand it, to ensure that you continue to be that team's affiliate beyond those 10 years is to have that affiliate, that owner of that major league team also own a piece of your team. Doesn't mean it has to be the whole thing. own a piece of your team. Doesn't mean it has to be the whole thing. But if you're a business partner, I would say it's more likely that it's going to be easy to work these things through

than it is if you're an outsider in the relationship. Now, the flip side of that, though, is that there are a lot of major league teams, a lot, but there are a number of major league teams that do not want to own their minor league clubs. That's it. It's the money that we're talking about. The profit we're talking about is pretty minimal compared to a major league team. You know, in many cases, in some cases, the profit, the balance sheet profit from year to year is pretty much non-existent in some cases. So it's not worth all the hassle. And the other thing about it, I'm not saying this is universally true, but it's generally true that if you look at the teams that are owned and operated by Major League Baseball teams, and you compare that to the teams that

are owned and operated by individuals or groups that are not, you know, tied to Major League Baseball, the operators on the individual side usually do better. They're usually better operations. And I think one of the big reasons for that is, is this is a big deal to them. This is big business to them. And that's not the case for a Major League team. You know, the look at the ones that are run by Major League teams, they're generally going to be a little bit more conservative in what they do. If you run a MLB owned team, they want you to make money. But I'd say probably the safe, the easiest way to get fired is to push the envelope and do something that creates negative

attention for you and your major league club. The easiest way to get fired if you are a GM or an operator of, you know, a GM of a independently owned minor league team is to not make money. And so that's where I think, you know, the operations are often a little bit different. And the other flip side of that is, is that if MLB owns minor league teams, you know, the question Ben had, if someone who's been in that community, even if they are a relatively wealthy member of that community, but someone who's been in that community comes and says, we need a new stadium. The stadium's 40 years old.

MLB is going to take their minor league team away from us. We don't get a new stadium. They often can get some public funding or a lot of public funding in many cases for a new stadium. When a major league team who owns a minor league team comes and says, hey, the stadium here in this town is pretty old. We want to build it. We want to build a new one. So we think that you guys need to build us a new stadium. The answer that they often get is you're a billion dollar, two billion dollar corporation. We think you'd probably have a better idea if you built that stadium because you have more

funding than we do. And so that's another reason that it's kind of a downside if MLB tries to own all these minor league teams. How were the 120 teams, or I guess 119 as we speak, that received these invitations decided? And how close does this group come to if you were to do some sort of merit-based determination of the best possible choices based on local support and facilities and resources and all of that. Are we close to that, or are there cases where you sort of scratch your head and think, well, maybe someone knew someone or had a friend in high places? I wrote a story yesterday at BaseballAmerica.com about this, that there's like these multiple factors. And the one that they talked about, we talked about earlier on the podcast, facility, quality of facilities, geography. That was very important to Major League Baseball.

Political considerations did play a part in this. There are absolutely senators in states who helped ensure that teams stayed in their states. But the biggest one that overrode everything else is desires of the MLB club. There was largely a rule. I would say largely. I can't say it was a hundred percent true, but largely a rule that said, if you like your affiliate, you get to keep it.

And so that was kind of the starting point of how you put this together was like G I geographically, I would say that overall, they did a lot of things that would, you can say, you can look from the outside and say, that makes a lot of logical sense. They moved the Northwest league to full season baseball added six teams to do this the logic being before there wasn't a way that a west coast team could have a team on the west coast in low a in high a in triple a still can't double a because the texas league is close as you get but you can be in the texas league that, geographically, it makes a lot more sense that the Seattle Mariners have affiliates in California and Washington

than it does that they send their players across the country to West Virginia. So from that standpoint, absolutely, there's going to be less travel. Facility-wise, there are some of the facilities that minor league people have long talked about as ah that's one that we probably you know it's that one has seen us better days those have been in some cases eliminated but at the same time it didn't fix everything by any stretch and when we say the MLB desires trumped everything else right now as they have it invited if they've invited teams if everyone accepts you've got a high a league that stretches from georgia and kentucky to fish kill new york

and it's going to have about 900 and some miles between those you know and the team in kentucky bowling green nice facility good ownership good market that. But it doesn't really fit geographically with the rest of that league. And it doesn't have an airport in that town that you can fly out of commercially. So you don't really have a whole lot of good options for travel. You're going to have a lot of long bus rides, or you're going to bus somewhere else and fly, which flying in a high A league is going to be very expensive. So you say, well, why did that happen? Well, the Rays wanted to be in Bowling Green. Well, why did it happen? The Red Sox said at the end

of the day, they wanted to be in Salem and Greenville. And if the Red Sox had agreed to have one of their teams in Lowell, which is where they had a short season club, you'd have had six Northern teams, six Southern teams in this league, and that probably would have all worked out. Instead, you have seven teams in the South, five in the North, which means every day of the season that you're having games, you're probably going to have, you pretty much have to have a team from the South playing a team for the North,

which means some team at all times is on a really epically long road trip. So they did not check off every box on that, at least as it is currently constructed. I'm curious for the teams that did not receive invitations. And again, just like what a what a really great and, you know, empathetic bit of branding on the part of Major League

Baseball. But of the teams that did not receive invitations, what is your sense of the the teams that sort of the future path of the teams that are not going to be part of the Summerwood Bat Leagues or in a pro partner league? Are they going to simply try to strike out on their own and continue to field baseball teams? Is there litigation that any of them are pursuing against either what would be their parent club and the league? Do you have a good sense of where that stuff sits?

So MLB has been consistent publicly at saying that every single team left out will be offered high level baseball. Now, the key word there is offered. And I think they've also said it may be offered to municipality. If an owner in a city says no, but they can still get a lease done and get something done with the city, someone else, they'll do that. So MLB, again, we're not far enough along to say because we haven't seen who said yes who said no or anything like that the mlb's point is there will be baseball the opportunity baseball in all these cities that said if you want to have mlb help you do it if you want to

join a professional partner league and you want to have mlb pay your way in which mlb will do will pay the entry fee into one of these indie leagues well now professional part at least formerly indie leagues gonna take me a while to get used to that but to do so you will also sign away your like right to sue and we already have had one team has said now we're not going to do that staten island yankees were offered opportunities to be in the mlb draft league they also was talked that they could be an Atlantic league professional partner league team. The Staten Island Yankees have announced, Nope, we're not doing that.

We're suing the Yankees, MLB, but especially the Yankees. And so we'll see where that goes. They're suing for 160 million. I think it is, which, you know, the, the club was sold for 8.5. So if they get 160 million out of this lawsuit, that would be quite the amount. Now, I'm not a lawyer, but I do talk to people who are. And one of the things that stands out about this is, you know, MLB does not like discovery. Discovery is not fun if you're Major League Baseball.

Your books are generally closed, all these things. So if there are lawsuits, the key question is going to be, is it going to reach a level where you get to discovery? Because if you get to discovery, then you may have a likelihood of getting a settlement of some sort. The key thing that the Staten Island Yankees have, the problem that teams are going to have if they want to sue is, we talked at the start about the professional baseball agreement. Major League Baseball, professional baseball agreement has expired now. It expired September 30th. The professional baseball agreement said that Major League Baseball would provide players to minor league teams as long as there was a professional baseball agreement. Well, that's expired. So Major League Baseball can argue,

we are not taking away your ability to operate. All we're is is we're no longer providing you players and so we have fulfilled our agreement with you the pba has expired therefore we are legally not bound to you know to any other obligations the tricky the the thing the yank the staten island yankees had is they bought their team from the new york yankees it was was previously New York owned by the Yankees. So they are able to say, you made representations in when you sold us the team. You made, as they would say, promises at that time, written promises that you have violated. And that is why we now are suing. That's a little additional part that they have that a whole lot of teams don't have, which may mean that that's not something that's going to become very common. But we do have a lawsuit already out there.

It'll be interesting to see if we will have more. But any team that does sign up for the 120 or any team that gets MLB help for a partner league or join the MLB draft league or whatever, from everything my reporting, from everything I understand, one of the things you're signing is you are signing away your right to sue. Do you think we would be having the same conversation today if there had been no pandemic? Obviously, MLB conceived this plan prior to the pandemic, and maybe things were moving in this direction anyway. And then there was a big backlash to that and Congress was getting involved. And it seemed like maybe that surge of support for the minors might make MLB back off a bit or at least postpone these plans. And then the minor league season was canceled and suddenly it seemed like MLB had all the leverage and now they're extending these offers that these teams

can't refuse essentially. So do you think this would have happened anyway, or would it have been a less total takeover, or might it have taken longer? I obviously don't have a perfect answer for that question. There are a lot of people in minor league baseball who think that it would have been different. I'm a little bit skeptical on that. Again, I try to cover this, you know, both sides and relay what they say. But one thing I will note, when you say like there was political pressure, there was political pressure. But one thing that I'll note is most of that political pressure was representative from my district to support saving minor league baseball, basically, as it currently existed. There were not a lot of senators who were hopping on board on that. If I'm a senator, especially if I'm a senator in a state that also has a major league team, it's probably a little tougher to get the senator on board because the senator, I mean, I'll be cynical enough to say MLB teams generally donate more money than minor league teams do. And so that's, you know, part of the factor.

So I think that the political side was always going to be difficult for minor league baseball. But the other thing that was always going to be difficult for minor league baseball is this is an agreement. This is a relationship where one side has long needed the other more than the other needs them and that hasn't changed like if you go back to the last time that there was this brawl between the two sides in 1990 i mean it's crazy how different the minor leagues were there was very simple a lot of similarities but there were co-op teams. There were independent teams playing in minor league baseball at the time. They didn't get players from any MLB club. In some cases, they drafted in the same draft.

They actually got that taken away in the 1990 PBA. So you would have the Miami Miracle, and they would draft their own players, and they would field their own players, and they would compete against farm teams from all these other clubs. and they would field their own players and they would compete against farm teams from all these other clubs. So you had at that time, this muscle memory, these owners who basically had bought their teams

for pocket change and the ability to operate and they felt comfortable. When there was that threat at that point, okay, well, we'll just go our own way and field our own teams. And Major League Baseball said, well, we'll just field all of our teams that are complexes. Both sides, there was some plausibility of that. Now you have on the minor league side, almost everyone in minor league baseball, this is the system they've all kind of grown up in. When they bought their team, they just thought of the PBA as generally like a permanent

fixture part of this. And so on Major League Baseball side, when they say, hey, we're going to cut the number of teams and that's very important to us, they can say that. And the worst case scenario for them is we don't reach a deal.

We'll figure out a way to develop, you know, players on our own. On Minor League Baseball side, if you're a minor league owner, especially if you're a minor league owner who's paid $15, $20, $25 million for your club, and one of the big reasons that your team was priced at that compared to an indie league club or anything else was because it was one of the few teams who had these affiliate agreements. If you say, okay, well, we'll just go our own way while you go your own way, it's not as plausible a threat in 2020. I'm not saying we may not see someone end up doing it out of this.

Maybe some teams don't sign their PDLs and they decide to do that, but it's not nearly the threat that it was in 1990. And so this is not a negotiation between two equals. This is a negotiation between one side that has, you know, is billions and billions of dollars. And another side, which by the way, the other thing I've got to note, another side where close to, if you have of the 120 teams that are getting invites, close to 40 of those have some form of either partial or full MLB ownership. So, you know, when you say we're all in this together, you know, the Rome Braves,

the Gwinnett Braves, and the Mississippi Braves are like, whoa, whoa, whoa, we're raising our hand here. We're owned by the Braves. We're not in this with you. Whatever the Braves say to do, we're going to do. And there are teams all around the country that way. So this has never been a battle that had, you know, there's never been a really good walkaway option for the minor league teams. There are teams out there who feel that they may, the AAA teams, may think that they have enough, the markets, the stadiums are ones that MLB wants to be in. The markets, the stadiums are ones that MLB wants to be in. But as 160 or 120 teams even, if nothing else, would probably acknowledge that there was some reworking of the minor league system that could be done to make it better at what its stated goal is, which is to not only engage these communities and give people access to baseball and make them fans, but also to develop players who might become major leaguers. And so I'm curious, I think in part because the rhetoric around these proposals has become infused with so much of the distaste for the way MLB has conducted itself in the course

of the negotiations. Absent all of that stuff, if we were to put that aside and you, JJ, were designing the minor league system, what would you have done differently from the version of this proposal that we ended up with? And what do you think it kind of gets right in terms of what it's prioritizing in the franchises that it is keeping as part of affiliated baseball. On the what has got right, I think the flipping of high A and low A makes a whole lot of sense. It never made sense to me that you would have players who were in the Gulf Coast League in

Florida, and then they would get promoted, especially let's say you're a 18-year-old pitcher coming out of Dominican Republic. It's not cold in the Dominican. It's not cold in Florida. And so your first year, you're ready for full season ball. Congratulations. We're sending you to Lansing. And you get to Lansing. It's 38 degrees every night for the first month of the season.

And you do, you manage to go, you know, do well with that. You adjust and all that. And then you get sent back to Florida to play high A. Well, that's incredibly inefficient in many ways. And the flip side of that is, let's say you play poorly in Lansing, and then you get demoted back to Florida for the complex. Then you do well, so you get back to Lansing, and then they send you back over to Florida.

That seemed illogical, you know, for, for a long time. And now the idea that, that players will either go from Arizona to California for the California league, or they'll go from Florida and stay in Florida in low a,

and then they'll move up to the Midwest league or they'll move up to the Northwest league, or they'll move up to the mid Atlantic league they'll move up to the Northwest League or they'll move up to the Mid-Atlantic League. That makes a whole lot more sense to me. That's one of those times where it's going to save them some cost on travel. But more than that, it's going to be better for the players. The player provisions in this, I don't think, you know, and again, I understand why they don't get emphasized a lot because a lot of people look at it and say, well, that's something that's good about this and I don't want to talk about it. But the player provisions in this are better.

Travel for players will be better. You're going to have two buses instead of one. You're going to have sleeper buses or luxury buses on long trips. Over a certain distance, you're supposed to fly. You're supposed to have, you know, restrictions on getaway days on how late the game can start.

You're going to have a lot of things like that. The facilities that you're going to be playing at, the fact that. You're going to have a lot of things like that. The facilities that you're going to be playing at, the fact that players aren't going to have to pay dues out of their very small paychecks to that provide the food for dinner that the clubby then has to go and provide, that that's going to be something that will be an MLB team responsibility. Well, that's just logical to everyone. Why shouldn't MLB teams be paying to make sure that the food that their players eat for lunch and dinner at the ballpark is healthy, nutritious, and is the kind of things that you need for a developing young baseball player?

Those are all absolutely things that make all the sense in the world. The fact that, that they're going to be in nicer facilities with better lights. The fact that the lights at a class a facility now will be somewhere you can actually see the ball at a night game. These are all good things. And I don't think there's anyone who's makes a whole lot of arguments against that. The downside I do think is kind of what you kind of touched on,

which is to me though, I do think is kind of what you kind of touched on, which is to me, though, I do think that baseball is best. All of this really ties back to essentially an original problem with baseball at its core that it tries to wallpaper over all the time, which is the real problem is, is that baseball has a massive revenue imbalance, a massive spending imbalance between the large revenue teams and small revenue teams. And so a lot of things get done to make sure, to be, make sure that the large revenue teams can't do things that the small revenue teams can't keep up with. But so a lot of times, one of the things I think that can happen with that is, is you can't do things that the small revenue teams can't keep up with. But so a lot of times, one of the things I think that can happen with that is you end up kind of putting restraints and restrictions that keep you from being able to be as creative

as you can be. Now, again, I said the 180 players versus the 150 is big on this because it does allow at least some more flexibility. But this system where you say that everyone has to have four full season clubs and you're not allowed to have any more than that, this system that says you can have one, maybe two complex league teams, that kind of cookie cuts teams that they don't have as many options. You know, they don't have as many ways.

The fact that the draft's going to be cut and the fact that the amount of money that you can spend on a non-drafted free agent is cut. Those things put restraints and restrictions on ways that MLB teams can be innovative. And to me, MLB is best when it's kind of there's allowed for the possibility that one team can go off and do something differently and discover that it's really good. And then everyone else ends up copying it, which by the way, as y'all know, the cycle of copying gets faster and faster now. Right. You've taken some of that away with this because, you know, you can't do things as innovatively if you have less, less ways to

innovate. Do you think there's anything else positive that could come out of this one baseball initiative out of centralizing control of all of these various levels of baseball? You've reported about the possibility of a baseball cup, MLB teams playing minor league teams in some sort of in-season tournament, which sounds fun, if perhaps far-fetched. you know maybe there are more potential opportunities to test things out in these partner leagues the way that the Atlantic League has served as sort of a testing ground for MLB in recent years we've talked about the conditions and how standardizing and improving those can be good so is there anything else I guess on the positive side of the ledger because it sounds very nefarious and and big brother-esque almost you. One baseball and Rob Manfred and his flaming eye is overseeing all of baseball from the top to the bottom. And most people don't like how he's

handled his own league. So the prospect of him handling all the leagues or more directly, so that may sound sort of scary. So is there anything else, I guess, that we haven't touched on that could be a positive byproduct of this? Well, I should have noted also that players will get paid more in the minors, which is very important because players are fewer of them, I guess. Right. There are fewer of them. I will say also something. I need to write this. But I think that we're going to have to see compensation change for minor league players in a better way, too. You know, it's been a very archaic system. I don't know how to describe it, where you show up for spring training

and if you go to spring training and then you go to extended spring, you don't get paid for any of that. That's not competent. You don't get paid unless you're playing in a championship league season. So you get paid once you are on a club that is playing games in a championship season.

Obviously, that doesn't make a whole lot of sense. I mean, the legal arguments on that have included that it is optional to be there, which the next player who gets brought in and told on the last day of spring training, I got bad news for you. You didn't make the low A club. We're sending you to keep you here for extended. And the player says, I'm really bummed to hear that. I'm headed home. I'll stay ready. You just tell me the day that there's a spot in the Midwest league and I'll be,

I'll be on the plane and I'll be there. That's not an option. You should be able to be paid if you're in spring training, if you're, if you're an extended, if you're an instructs from the day you show up to the day, you, again, you're a professional baseball player, you should get paid. And I do think that that's something that with this will almost kind of end up have to happening because if teams do decide to be innovative with those 100, those extra players, well, they need to get paid too.

And right now there's a lawsuit going on that probably, you know, that is kind of pointing out that fact that, you know what, these players need to of pointing out that fact that, you know, what these players need to get paid from the day they show up to the day they depart. So that's something I think that will come from this. The other thing I don't know. And again, I just, I don't think any of us know what will this do? Is this going to actually, you know, MLB will make the argument that player development will get better because we're going to focus on players who really have a shot of making the majors.

And I don't know about that. It may be, it may not. I mean, I have a soft spot for the overlooked guy who figures that away and makes it to the majors, the Daniel Noves of the world. I've always loved those kinds of stories. But go a step further than that. I was talking to a scout right before we started recording this

and we were talking about it. And I said, you know, he was asking this kind of question about this. And we're saying, you know, take the Pioneer League, which is going to go from being a rookie level affiliate league to being a league for undrafted players.

I feel confident in saying that cutting the draft from 40 rounds to 20 or five like it was last year means that there are players who would have been major leaguers who will never play in the majors. Now you have cut them means that there are players who would have been major leaguers who will never play in the majors now. You have cut them off because there are players who, if they were a 26th round pick out of college, they'd have signed.

The Yankees drafted me. They want to sign me. I'm not going to say no to a chance to be a New York Yankee or a Seattle Marin or take your pick of whatever team. But when that phone doesn't ring and then the phone rings from the Pioneer League, and the Pioneer League says, we want you to be a Billings Mustang, they're going to say no to that.

So that's going to cut off a source of potential Major League players. But the flip side of that is, is that if there are players in the 30th round who got drafted and signed before, who then were the reliever who pitches twice or three times a week in a blowout on an Appy or Pioneer League club, and they do that for a year or two, and then they get released. do it and goes to the pioneer league but in the pioneer league he gets to pitch every fifth or sixth day you know and as a starter some of those players may develop that wouldn't have developed in the old system so i mean i i don't know there's always everything that mlb does when we every time there's a change to the draft rules every time there's a change to international rules there is

an unintended consequence that they have not figured out and i don't think you necessarily can figure out the time that you did it. Like they didn't know when they said these international rules, they didn't know that the Rays would look at it and say, you know what? We're better off spending over the limit in one year and just taking the penalty in the next two. They didn't know that one day the Padres would say, we're going to spend 75 million on the international market and take all the penalties, including penalties, because that's a more efficient way for us to play than to sign a free agent for a couple of major league free agents. They didn't realize that, and that's what happened, and then they changed the system again.

There are going to be absolutely effects of this that there are no ways for any of us to predict until we see it actually in action. Yeah. And I guess that leads into my last question here, because we want to let you go before you lose your voice entirely. We've been talking for an hour here just about all of the ins and outs and the implications of all of this, and there are probably more things that we could talk about if we had time. So it's a lot to get your arms around. And if you're someone who's not following the story in an in-depth way and hasn't read all your coverage, for shame, then you may not know all these details and you may just have it reduced down to, well, fewer minor league teams, fewer is bad. And I think that is kind of how a lot of people look at this. And there are ways in which

that is fair and accurate and ways in which it overlooks things. So this is impossible to do really given all the unintended consequences you just mentioned and the fact that this is still in flux and ongoing and these teams haven't even accepted yet. But is your sense that baseball is better off because of this or worse off because of that? If it's possible to even reduce it down to that. And I guess it depends how you define baseball, right? I mean, like if it's a stock and you're saying, is the stock going to go up or down because of this? Well, maybe it'll go up because MLB will be more profitable and teams will save some money. That doesn't mean that it's good for baseball fans or good for baseball the sport, which I guess is what I'm primarily asking about here, baseball the sport. Is there going to be a healthier baseball

decades down the line? Are there going to be more baseball fans than there would have been, or fewer or less, or is it just impossible to say? I wish I knew the answer to that. The best way I think I can answer it is this. I think that here's what I would define. And again, I'm not going to predict as much as I'll say. To me, the definition of whether this is successful or not, if we look at this, if we're talking five years from now or 10 years from now, if we're talking about this in 2030, we look at this and I wouldn't say all, all is an unfair standard, but most of the cities that had affiliated baseball that are losing affiliated baseball in this have viable baseball, whether it's a wood bat, professional partner league, some sort of baseball that is drawing fans like it has before. If you are seeing that people are still going to games all around the country, and that is where fans are made. My girls do not get to go to major league games. We are six hours away. They've gone to one major league game in their life. If they're going to go to a baseball game with me, it is going to be a minor league game, a college game, a Summerwood bat game, something like that, because that's what we have in North Carolina right now.

We have a lot of that. We don't have any major league baseball. If that is still true, then that is, I would say that I am about this compared to most people's reactions is if you look at the history of the miners over the last 150 years, it's never stayed static. In 1962, Class D, C, and B were lopped off, and it was just A, AA, AAA. There used to be the PCL for one year was a level above, for a couple of years, was a level above AAA. These things have changed a lot over the years. So just because it's changing doesn't mean that this is going to be bad, because if that's the case, I mean, minor league baseball has changed a bazillion times.

I mean, I wrote a story not long ago that was fascinating, at least to me. I don't know about anyone else, but short season baseball came about because of the Vietnam War. Players weren't they weren't going to sign pro contracts and become draft eligible by leaving college. So basically major league teams said, oh, we got to figure out another way to do this. They said, stay in college. You can play in these short season leagues during the summer, but you won't lose your draft exemption. That's something that, you know, again, things keep changing in minor league baseball. But the key thing about this is, is MLB doing this? By doing this, does this end

up killing baseball, unsustainable baseball, you know, in these communities where we say in three years from now that these partner leagues that they're springing up and these wood bat leagues don't survive? Well, then that would be a significant problem because that is taking baseball away from communities. But if these leagues are able to thrive in most places, at least again, not all, but most, well, then baseball's just changed a little bit, but baseball's changed a thousand times over the last 150 years. And so that part, I think could still be a success. That's the part where we just can't know until we know how do these leagues actually, how does this go over the next five years? Are these leagues successful or failures?

Right. Well, we will have you back on in five years to talk about it, I guess, and then we'll see. So in the meantime, I will link on our show page to a lot of JJ's recent coverage of this topic. We are lucky to have you digging into all of this and explaining it to the rest of us. So some of that is accessible for free on Baseball America's website. Some of it you have to subscribe to see, which you should do so that JJ can keep doing this kind of work. You can also find him on Twitter at JJCoop36. You can hear him on the Baseball America podcast talking about this

and many other prospect-related topics. You can also go pre-order the Baseball America 2021 Prospect Handbook, which is in the works now, coming in February. So thank you very much for all your time and for helping us understand this very complex subject. Thanks both of y'all. I hate that we're not seeing each other at the winter meetings this week, but this is a nice consolation. Yes. That will do it for today and for this week.

Thank you for listening. You can support Effectively Wild on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild. The following five listeners have already signed up and pledged some small monthly amount to help keep the podcast going

and get themselves access to some perks. Anthony Lupicino, Mike Flack, Jeremy Tice, John McGovern, and Sam Raker. Thanks to all of you. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash group slash effectively wild. You can rate, review, and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes and Spotify and other podcast platforms. Keep your questions and comments for me and Meg coming via email at podcastoffangraphs.com or via the Patreon messaging system if you are a supporter. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing assistance. We hope you have a wonderful weekend, and we will be back with another episode early next week. Talk to you then. I'm so blue, take me over In my mind and in my heart

I'm so blue, here without you I'm sitting here and thinking things That's a start.