I don’t mean to brag here, but this is a very influential newsletter.
I wrote a few weeks ago wondering what was taking MLB so long to cancel the rest of Spring Training and the beginning of its season and they’d done it within a few hours. I wrote on Tuesday about the high likelihood of playing the major league season without fans, should there be a major league season, and it was a topic on Twitter for a lot of the day.
So with all my considerable cachet, I would like to propose baseball answers a question: what the hell is going to happen with the minor leagues this year?
Imagine that, in fact, fans can’t go to major league games in 2020. All right, that sucks, but major league teams get through it. But fans being unable to go to major league games means that fans probably also shouldn’t go to minor league games. A few thousand people in relatively close contact is a recipe for trouble.
So, natural solution: no fans at minor league games either. But, wait, what’s the point of putting them in Minor League stadiums without fans? The whole point is to give people something to watch; otherwise, who benefits from getting on that 5 AM El Paso-Tacoma flight to play a game of baseball? Without the revenue from attendance, minor league teams can’t really afford to put on games. They aren’t rich enough, and, with a few exceptions, they’re financially independent from their major league overlords. There just isn’t the money to put on events for no one with no revenue coming in from them.
So, second natural solution: Just don’t have the minor leagues this year. Whenever baseball starts up, anyone who’s not a big leaguer can play in their team’s minor league Spring Training complex. They have a lot of fields, they can play the games without making any concessions to fans, and problem solved. Does anyone see a problem with that? Yes, you, in the back, who don’t actually exist and are just part of a point I’m making. You see a problem?
Oh, right, minor league teams can’t survive this. Yes, that’s a problem all right. Well stated, Device To Further My Point.
Minor league teams are small businesses that just don’t have the kind of cash reserves to keep their staff employed and to keep paying property taxes/rent/I don’t know how the land deals work on their stadiums. They can’t not have money coming in if they’re going to continue existing. Money comes from attendance, so games or not, no attendance is a death sentence for a lot of these teams.
Another problem with the “play everything at the complexes” plan is that 2/3 of those complexes are in Florida, a state which is incredibly likely to still be ravaged by COVID-19 through the summer due to the governor’s irresponsibly late action in giving a statewide shelter-in-place order, that order irresponsibly exempting churches, where people will gather all together and spread the virus, and the staggering willpower of average Floridians to go out to the beach with a bunch of their friends in the middle of a pandemic.
Florida is likely to be one of the states hit hardest by the virus. And you’re gonna throw hundreds upon hundreds of minor leaguers to the wolves there? Well, even if you want to, you’ll have a state of emergency to deal with, and baseball is practically the definition of non-essential, so no dice there.
And it’s not like Arizona will be spared either. They will also get hit by the virus, just like the rest of the country. The best they can hope for is it won’t be especially bad there, but that doesn’t mean they’ll be pain-free.
So the real solution here is probably for major league teams to pay the minor league teams some amount of money to play games in front of no fans. But the commissioner’s office, which is owned by the 30 owners and is therefore a reasonably good proxy for what those owners want, spent a lot of the offseason promoting a plan to get rid of a bunch of minor league teams. They think they’re spending too much on the minors already — don’t laugh if you know what the players make, please don’t laugh, oh you’re laughing aren’t you — and so they’re not likely to spend more to save a system that they don’t particularly want to save.
I honestly don’t know what the answer is. Someone will have to lose money, and the only people with money to lose — the owners of the 30 major league teams — have a strong incentive not to do that. But on the other hand, where else are these guys going to play to hone their craft, which is the ostensible point of the minors (I have had several players refer to even Triple-A as a “developmental league,” leading me to believe that attitude is common)? Or will teams just, en masse, not care about developing guys, because that’s long-term thinking, and they have money to not lose in the short term, and that’s the priority?
It’s still possible there’s no baseball at all this year, but on the off chance there is, well, something will have to give here. Will minor league teams risk their fans (and players!) falling ill just so they can keep the lights on? Will major league teams just let them wither on the vine? Will major league owners spend money that is not absolutely necessary to spend no, no they won’t, I’ll answer that one right now.
Even assuming reasonably good intentions from all sides, it’s hard to see what will happen here. Not all sides have those good intentions, which muddies the waters even more. And circumstances can change at a moment’s notice, which makes it even harder to tell.
I wish I had a conclusion here that wrapped things up. But I don’t know how things wrap up. Sorry, baseball world. I know you count on me to show you the way, but this time, I’m flying blind.