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.”
And so on. It’s nice that being kicked out of affiliated ball and into independent leagues has worked out better for some teams than the predictions of imminent doom that were rampant when the downsizing plan was first announced, with minor-league owners saying they would never be able to survive if they had to pay their own players rather than getting them for free — well, really in exchange for affiliation fees — from their parent clubs.
But for an article headlined “‘I was wrong’: Why MLB’s restructuring of the minors turned out mostly better than expected,” there are two big caveats. First off, as becomes clear further down in the article, plenty of now-former affiliated-ball owners are not thrilled with how things turned out, including owners of four of the eight teams (Staten Island Yankees , Norwich Sea Unicorns , Salem-Keizer Volcanoes and Tri-City ValleyCats ) that straight-up disappeared, who are pressing forward with their antitrust lawsuit against MLB . (Other owners of defunct teams, ESPN notes, couldn’t join the suit because they also own teams that survived, and had to sign away their rights to sue in order to retain those affiliations.)
The other problem should already be obvious: ESPN didn’t interview anyone other than minor-league baseball owners — and one MLB executive — about how things are working out. But the slashing of the affiliated minors was never about screwing over MLB owners’ somewhat less-filthy-rich minor-league cousins; it was first and foremost a gambit to force a bunch of salaried minor-leaguers to pay for free while creating a sword to hold over the heads of minor-league cities that didn’t pay for stadium upgrades . And on those counts, it’s victimizing exactly who it was expected to: The unpaid Draft Leagues may be working out for some team owners, but the story likely looks different for players who lost their (poorly paid) jobs playing baseball and now effectively have to audition for affiliated ball as summer interns; and minor-league stadium subsidy demands are going gangbusters , as “give us money or we’ll vaporize your team” has proven to be exactly as effective a threat as you’d think, notwithstanding MLB’s supposed “promise that no town would lose baseball because of de-affiliation.”
Now, writing an article about how minor-league downsizing has affected minor-league players or minor-league cities would be a slightly tougher lift than the one that ESPN wrote — not only would you have to track down players who’ve been frozen out of paid jobs and city officials who’ve been extorted out of stadium cash, but they might not be as eager to share their thoughts, given that they’re now at the mercy of MLB’s new system for their very baseball existence. (Actually, you could say the same for the minor-league owners who were interviewed: It’s not always easy to tell the difference between “happy with how things turned out” and “trying to take lemons and make lemonade,” especially when you’re talking to people who are still reliant on MLB to provide the lemons.) But an entire article that evaluates a power move against players and small city taxpayers by talking to a bunch of millionaire owners … is on-brand for ESPN , let’s just leave it at that.
