The minor leagues, if you haven’t heard, are going to be contracted soon, going from about 160 American teams to 120.
In official statements, everyone is still acting like there are no deals in place, but all indications are that Major League Baseball and Minor League Baseball have agreed that MiLB will drop 42 affiliated teams as part of their new agreement. There’s no reason to doubt the reports, since MLB has been very clear for months that this is a goal of theirs and, in the face of the coronavirus, MiLB has lost all of the leverage it might have had in negotiations to resist MLB.
(As a side note, there unequivocally will not be minor league baseball at all this year, since the only way minor league teams make money is based off attendance. We won’t be able to have these kinds of public sporting events, so you can just write it off completely. These teams, which are not big businesses, are in dire straits, and in order to survive, many of them desperately need money for nothing)
(Yes, I wrote that entire parenthetical just to make a Dire Straits reference, and no, I don’t regret it)
MLB likes to claim they’re pushing for this because those pesky minor league teams refuse to upgrade their facilities, but that’s a lie. They’re pushing for this in order to save themselves the money they spend on minor league teams, and that money isn’t much.
This plan would essentially eliminate short-season ball from Minor League Baseball. Now, not all of the teams on the chopping block are short-season teams — the Binghamton Rumble Ponies, bless their hearts, are a AA team — but the remaining teams will be moved around to ensure full AAA, AA, A+, and A-ball leagues, with the have-nots being put into something called the Dream League, which will be unaffiliated and no one will really care about because it’s unaffiliated and it’s not worth our time.
But the short-season ball thing is important because those leagues are active for less than three months a year, compared to at least five months for full season affiliates. The only cost to major league teams is the salaries of players and coaches; players already make less than minimum wage —codified into federal law! — and in short-season ball, they’re only playing for half the time, so they make half as much.
Here’s a chart from 2018:
Those are full-season salaries. $6,500 for a full season of work in Low-A. $3,300 for the short-season teams we’re talking about here. Let’s assume a team has to pay 30 players. $3,300 times 30 is $99,000 in payroll for the entire team. But salaries are going up about 35% next year and there are a few more team employees there — trainers, coaches, scouts — so let’s, I dunno, quintuple it. That makes $500,000 in costs to have an affiliate in short-season ball. Maybe I’m missing something here, but I’m not sure what.
$500,000, to a major league team, is nothing. The major league minimum salary this season (assuming there is a season, which looks more likely by the day) is $563,500.
Now, teams aren’t getting nothing for their $500,000. They’re outsourcing their player development, for one thing. They’re getting a good landing spot for guys who just got drafted out of college and aren’t quite ready to face guys who’ve been honing their craft at the professional level for two months. And, probably biggest of all from an economic perspective, they’re getting advertising.
There are a lot of towns and cities in America. Very few of them can have major league teams, because there aren’t that many major league teams to go around. So think of every minor league team as an advertisement for baseball. You go to see the Hillsboro Hops as a kid growing up in Portland, and it’s fun, and now you care about baseball. If you live in Idaho or Montana or West Virginia, this is the only professional baseball in your state. These teams are a cheap way for baseball to grow a new generation of fans.
And they’re throwing it away. For what?
This is what America does. We pinch fractions of pennies now so that we can lose hundreds of dollars later. It’s not enough for it to be objectively good that a thing exists, or for that thing to provide a valuable service for the money you pay. A thing does not justify itself with value, since value only exists in order to be destroyed for money, which can then be used to buy more things, destroy them, and make still more money.
To build a thing that lasts, you have to invest in it. Pulling away from rural communities — never mind the economic impact of losing jobs in, like Bluefield, West Virginia, which is absolutely not MLB’s problem — is the end of an investment. It’s short term thinking which, hilariously, barely even has any short term advantages. It’s a plan that a bunch of McKinsey assholes came up with after they went to Houston, cheated their way to a World Series title, and congratulated themselves on how smart they were. It’s the exact same thinking that America has applied to healthcare over the last 25 years, that we can just keep raising prices and cutting costs and hurting people and the bill will never come due.
The only thing cheaper than a rich guy is 30 rich guys. They’re cutting off their noses because someone offered them a penny to do it. Baseball is the national pastime, after all, and what’s more American than that?