ESPN: Minor-league downsizing working out okay for team owners, there’s no one else we should ask, right?

ESPN ran a long article on Friday about people who’d decried Major League Baseball’s forced elimination of 42 affiliated minor-league teams after the 2019 season, and who now say actually, the whole thing worked out okay for them:

“We had a great season, and we had a blast doing it,” [Missoula PaddleHeads] owner Peter Davis says. “You really were hamstrung as an affiliated team … yes, we loved being an independent team.”

“I was wrong,” says Jeff Katofsky, the owner of the now-independent Northern Colorado Owlz and a vocal critic last year. “I thought fans cared more about affiliation than they actually do. … I’m encouraged. I would’ve told you it was going to be a s— show, and it wasn’t.”

“The first initial reaction was ‘change is bad, change is bad, I want status quo,'” says Andy Shea, the CEO of two teams that lost affiliation. “Now that I’ve realized it, the quality of baseball is better, the name recognition is better, and there’s still that autonomy that we have.”

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