Proposed changes would diminish the game’s precious localized character. It’s not clear that they would even reduce the costs for MLB.
Proposed changes would diminish the game’s precious localized character. It’s not clear that they would even reduce the costs for MLB.
M ost sports fans would be willing to make just about any concession if it meant that their favorite sports could return to action. But there are reasons for baseball fans to be wary of the apparent agreement, between Major League Baseball (MLB) and its minor-league affiliates, on a Professional Baseball Agreement (PBA) that would nix up to 42 minor-league clubs from the 160 affiliate teams that Minor League Baseball (MiLB) currently comprises.
While MiLB officials initially resisted the proposed contraction — which I detailed here back in December — Baseball America’s J. J. Cooper reported that they were reconsidering the proposal in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. Cooper, who cited anonymous sources in his report, claimed that “multiple sources with knowledge of the negotiations say MiLB will indicate that it agrees to 120 affiliated teams in a new PBA” and that the two sides had “already found common ground on a number of the major outstanding issues that MLB deputy commissioner Dan Halem laid out publicly in a letter to members of Congress last November.”
Negotiations continued yesterday via teleconference, and no substantive details were made public. But after Cooper’s report got significant play in the mainstream sports press, MiLB released a statement Tuesday in anticipation of the negotiations, denying the substance of the report. That statement read:
Recent articles on the negotiations between MiLB and Major League Baseball (MLB) are largely inaccurate. There have been no agreements on contraction or any other issues. MiLB looks forward to continuing the good faith negotiations with MLB tomorrow as we work toward an agreement that best ensures the future of professional baseball throughout the United States and Canada.
Baseball fans should hope they are telling the truth. The proposal from MLB is flawed to its core, and threatens to undermine the local character of the sport, all in the pursuit of dubious short-term gains.
None of the defenses of MLB’s proposal holds water. First, the league argues that enhanced analytical techniques and predictive modeling reduce the need for “performance laboratories” for young prospects. Since data-driven scouting has proven a better means of selecting high-school and collegiate prospects than the “eyeball test” alone, and since MLB scouts have a better knowledge of predictive analytics than was even conceivable three decades ago, the league argues that fewer Single-A and rookie-ball teams are required to gauge talent at the introductory levels of the game.
This argument makes intuitive sense but fails in a few ways. It first assumes that the only purpose — or the preeminent purpose — of low-level baseball is to separate the proverbial wheat from the chaff. While this is one of the functions of low-level affiliates, an arguably more important one is the development opportunity it offers for young players in a transition phase between collegiate baseball and the professional game. The impact that these entry-level programs have on player development have upstream benefits for the quality of play at the MLB level. The quantitative effect of those investments on later performance are unknowable, unless and until some of these programs are taken away.
Arguably more important to the game of baseball, however, are the dividends that these affiliate programs pay in terms of fandom at the local level. Baseball’s fandom is more “localized” than any other major professional sport in America. (Online-search results for the NFL’s Atlanta Falcons, for instance, are widely distributed over much of the South and Midwest, while those for the MLB’s Atlanta Braves are concentrated in and near Georgia and the Atlanta metro area.) Many of the 42 minor-league teams initially cited as possible casualties of MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred’s proposal are located in small towns and smaller metro areas, often enjoying significant patronage among local fan bases, which — and this is no small fact — have in many cases paid for stadiums with their tax dollars. Scrapping these small-market teams, which inculcate a love for the game of baseball on a local level, figures to have a non-negligible upstream effect on interest in professional baseball.
Defenders of the realignment proposal highlight the costs associated with maintaining the status quo. To be sure, some small-market ballclubs on the chopping block are located in outlying areas, or are using outdated facilities. One of the benefits of the realignment proposal touted by MLB is that it would reduce travel costs. By scrapping redundant or geographically remote teams, MLB argues that wear and tear on players — as well as on the league’s pocketbook — could be minimized. But it is far from clear that the proposal would, in fact, mitigate those supposedly prohibitive costs.
Professor Anton Dahbura of Johns Hopkins University, along with two of his peers at the university’s computer-science department, recently released a study casting doubt on the savings associated with the MLB’s minor-league realignment proposal. “Attempting to fix one or more shortcomings of the existing MiLB leagues leads to a realignment that simply introduces new significant shortcomings,” the authors conclude. “The current concept under consideration by MLB, based on our analysis, does not improve any conditions related to player wear and tear based on any reasonable metric.” The study also highlights inefficiencies in the proposed realignment that could potentially increase travel costs. The Northwest League, for example, would move from eight teams to six under the proposed realignment, which the authors say would be “extremely problematic due to the distances between the remaining teams, with an average of about 360 miles per trip.”
Any attempt to forge a “geographically sensible realignment,” Dahbura tells National Review, “is not a slam dunk.” He says that there are so many nuanced distinctions between leagues and schedule formats that “when you try to fix one thing, you end up breaking two others.” Dahbura uses the example of an eight-team league with “two clusters of four teams each” — that is, two divisions within the league, with the divisions separated along geographical lines. An eight-team league with two four-team divisions creates natural off days — there are an even number of teams in each division, so intra- and inter-league play can be easily coordinated. If MLB were to reduce the number of lower-level minor-leagues and consolidate the surviving teams into fewer leagues, it could make coordinating long travel more difficult. If that eight-team league is expanded into a ten-team league — and the two divisions have five teams instead of four, making coordinated off days more difficult — “it becomes more complicated to program long travel,” Dahbura notes.
The reality is that this proposal is bad on the merits because it poisons the very local roots of a very local sport — but even on the practical metrics that MLB cites, it isn’t clear that its realignment proposal would be much of an improvement.