MLB to Small Town America: Drop Dead

Seems to me MLB has plenty of systematic flaws (starting and ending with 4 hour games) but driving away small town fans' interest hardly seems wise to me.

Across the Country, Minor League Towns Face Major League Threat

For example, Chattanooga has had a pro baseball team since 1880. Not sure why you'd want to not continue that.

 

Paywalled so I can't read the whole article, but nowhere anywhere in any of the stories on this subject have I seen an actual bullet list of the teams to be eliminated, or the other class realignments involved.

EDIT: OK, I tracked it down. After a fair amount of effort.

 

From what I understand, it's the short-season Single-A teams that will be most affected by this.

 

Something like half the Southern League is getting axed.

 

You'll never guess what team is behind this
Rob Manfred’s plan to destroy minor league baseball

 

Bottom line, it's the fucking silver spoon multi multi billionaires who run MLB, not content to bend over their own host communities with extortionate demands for taxpayer-paid stadiums and hundreds of millions in tax benefits, attempting by extension to do the same thing to all the minor league cities too.
Basically unless your city has a gold plated Taj Mahal stadium built or renovated to the specifications of MLB, you're fucked.

 

The two short-season teams in my region (I live halfway between them) will remain, but become full-season teams. I’m not sure how that’s going to play out, attendance-wise. One team is in an area that used to have higher-level full-season ball and teams used to fold on a regular basis. The other one has seen attendance fall a small percentage once the novelty wore off, but I can’t see them doing well in a full-season schedule, both due to the weather and oversaturation.

As I said on the MLB thread, this plan has disaster written all over it, on multiple fronts.

 

The (pending?) lawsuit over pay for minor leaguers is a big part of this.

 

In addition to the 42 teams to be contracted immediately, probably half of the remaining 118 would be on notice they could be next on the list.

How many minor league teams do you really need to develop players for each MLB farm system? I dunno, one or two?

Maybe have each team with a 30-man MLB roster and a 30-man reserve (or JV) team?

Reserve teams play at 1 pm if the varsity teams go at 7 (and vice versa)?

Everyone else stays in Florida/Arizona working on swing angle and pitch mechanics.

 

I wonder if this is a bunch of smoke and mirrors. This reminds me of something that came about in my town on the Connecticut shoreline a few years ago. There was talk that the railroad was going to build a new line that would have cut right through the heart of this small town (Old Lyme, which has been an artist's enclave for a hundred-plus years) all to save 15 minutes to get to Providence. It was so outlandish to be true. Naturally, there was an uproar, and after a year or two it went away. FWIW, one of those teams facing extinction is the one 30 minutes away in Norwich, the Connecticut Tigers (formerly the Navigators/Defenders).

I have a feeling that MLB is doing this as a public pressure on the MiLB pay issue (as Wicked pointed out), and then once they cave, they'll say, "Just kidding! We would never take away your parks!"

 

They could easily pay minor leaguers an extra $1,000 a month each. Still a low salary, but not hovering lower than minimum wage.

$25K/month/team for 6 months would be $150K each season per team. Even if a team had 10 affiliates, that would be $1.5 million a year. Hardly a dent.

 

One thing is sure: any minor league town trying to get tax money for stadium construction or renovations can fuckin forget it, now: who the hell is going to spend tax money on a stadium if MLB can contract you out of existence in three or five years?