Baseball's changing minor leagues are a symbol of everything it's doing wrong
And a sad, fond farewell to the Salem-Keizer Volcanoes, whose shirt I will wear proudly
In its infinite grace and wisdom, Major League Baseball finally allowed its constituent teams to announce who their minor league affiliates will be in 2021. With an assist from COVID, which removed all the leverage Minor League Baseball would have had and put every one of its teams in dire financial straits, MLB blew up the old minor league system, dissolving Minor League Baseball as an independent entity in order to take direct control. They used that direct control to get rid of 42 minor league teams and reorganize the ones that remained, reducing costs.
Does it seem like that sentence should have had more of a finish? Like, there’s a blank space at the end being held for a reason that they did that other than reducing costs? Yeah, sure seems that way to me.
The effect of all this on the Giants isn’t huge: They keep their top two teams, the AAA Sacramento River Cats and AA Richmond Flying Squirrels; their previous Hi-A team, the San Jose Giants, gets moved down a league to Low-A; their previous Low-A team, the Augusta Greenjackets, is now a Braves affiliate; their previous short-season A team, the Salem-Keizer Volcanoes, has been yeeted out of affiliated ball; and their new Hi-A team is the Eugene Emeralds, who had previously been the short-season affiliate of the Cubs.
Did you catch all that? It was a whirlwind of activity at the lower levels, mostly driven by the planners in the league office, and if you’re not either (A) a big ol’ baseball nerd or (B) a person who goes to minor league games in one of the affected cities, then it probably doesn’t mean a lot to you. It means a whole lot to the employees of the teams that were eliminated (or turned into independent league teams in some cases) and to the players who would have been on those teams, but it’s not MLB’s job to care about them, is it?
This reorganization is, for the record, the brainchild of former Houston Astros GM Jeff Luhnow and current Orioles GM Mike Elias and current Brewers President of Baseball Operations David Stearns — both Elias and Stearns worked for Luhnow in Houston — making this just one more example of the Houston Astros ruining shit. Their theory is that playing instructional league games in Arizona or Florida is just as useful for development as playing low-level minor league games, and much more cost-effective.
And look, I don’t want to get into discussions of cost-efficiency or the efficacy of biomechanical feedback compared to experience in game situations. I don’t give a shit about any of that, and it’s missing the forest for the trees. Minor League Baseball — as much Minor League Baseball as possible — is a vehicle for making people into baseball fans. Baseball’s fanbase is old, and the sport needs to be doing everything in its power to show people, “Hey, we’re fun and we’re a sport for you.”
Instead, kids growing up in Salem, Oregon won’t have baseball games to go to. They’ll just spend those three hours playing Minecraft, which is a perfectly reasonable way to spend an evening, but does nothing to help solve baseball’s long term growth problem. Every decision the league makes seems designed to squeeze as much money as possible out of their fans and the cities they’re in, while ignoring that problem, so it shouldn’t be a surprise.
And yet, it kind of is (or was, when the rumors first started more than a year ago). Because you’d think at some point, business people would understand that you have to solve PR problems instead of creating new ones. Tickets are getting more expensive, dropping attendance? Raise the price of beer! Money problem solved, and so what if the fans are pissed off. Fans are feeling alienated watching the game during a pandemic? Put split-screen ads in during the game to maximize money from the ones who are left! It’s a win-win, because now declining ratings are less important.
But baseball has no interest in solving their problems. Maximizing short-term profit, which owners want to see, increases franchise values, which owners want to see. Solving problems costs money, which owners don’t want to see, and takes resources that could be used to maximize profit, and owners, again, like seeing profit maximized more than anything else.
In the big picture of baseball, this minor league reorganization will not be seen as a big deal. But as a sample of why MLB’s long-term future is much hazier than the NFL’s or the NBA’s, well, you couldn’t do much better. Major League Baseball could use its cash reserves to exploit the thing that makes it special — its connection to myriad American communities that other sports don’t touch — and build a fanbase for the future.
It’s not going to do that, though. Baseball will choose money every time, even over its own survival. You almost have to admire the singlemindedness, even as it slowly strangles the league.