MLB to Small Town America: Drop Dead

Batavia (NY) lost its longtime NY-P League franchise in the contraction. But their summer wood-bat league team doubled the attendance of the affiliated franchise.

Batavia Muckdogs see success in collegiate ball

 

That'll come in the next round of contraction in 3-5 years.

 

Keizer owns the stadium, not Salem. I don't think it needs $10 million in upgrades, but it is about 25 years old and definitely showing its age. The metro area is about 250K. Still curious to see what happens. Buying out the lease of the old Volcanoes owner will be the hard part, he'll have the owners of the Emeralds over a barrel.

 

The affiliates were usually extensions of the major league team's brand. It was four months of advertising for the big-league clubs, all they had to do was pay the salaries. It's gonna turn out to be very shortsighted.

 

I thought the previous post said five million to buy out the lease and five million for upgrades, hence the number 10 million.

In any case what protections will Salem have for its protections if MLB does the same thing in 2020?.

 

I think that makes sense if the parent club is close by. But here locally, Birmingham has been a White Sox affiliate since 1986, and I don’t think they’ve got any meaningful fan base here.

 

Basically MLB wants to transition the entire player development process to
the Euro soccer model.
They did analysis of their rosters and they realized that only 10-15 percent of minor league players ever make the majors at all, not even for a Moonlight Graham cup of coffee.
So MLB.Inc doesn't want to spend 10 more cents on those other 90 percent. They want to identify the dozen or so players in each organization with MLB potential; everybody else can go piss off.

 

What probably needs to happen eventually is the MLB franchises get to have 25 players on their active roster, 25 on the reserve/AAA team, and 25 on the futures/developmental team. And that's it. Nobody else under contract.

There would be plenty of other guys playing baseball on plenty of other teams, but the MLB franchises wouldn't be paying the bills. Or calling the shots.

 

That's the obvious end game. MLB looks at the NFL and NBA with jealousy, because the colleges spend all the money on four or so years of player development. They'd like Division I baseball to do that, too.

Football and basketball require specific skill sets, but the elite technique or talent usually plays at the next level. Even All-Americans turn out to be busts, but a kid who rushes for 1,500 yards at a Big 10 or Big 12 school should be a safe bet. Still, the NFL is full of guys who went to small schools who made it despite not being on TV every Saturday.

Baseball's even odder. Some guys peak at 16. Others peak at 26. There are pure hitters, but MLB is full of guys who needed three or four years of minor league ball for pitch and strike zone recognition before they were ready for the bigs. Same thing with pitchers. There are gobs of guys with fastballs, but very few with command and even fewer who understand how to pitch. And the only way to learn that is to get your brains beat in sometimes by better opponents.

Willie Mays and Ty Cobb and Bob Feller were outliers.

Even I could sit at a tryout and pick five guys out of 100 who could potentially play some level of professional baseball, but my job -- and millions of dollars -- aren't on the line. Plus, I couldn't tell you which ones have already hit their potential or which still could get better.

But even with 60 games at the D1 level, can a professional scout tell you which of those 1,000 guys he sees is going to be worth the money and development time needed? Even worse, can you spot the right 17-year-old phenom in high school or the 16-year-old kid in Venezuela?

The biggest leap in the minors is from A to AA, because that's where the majority of the weaknesses get exposed. But imagine taking both of those levels out -- or putting them in some sort of non-organizational structure where the clubs have no or little input on development -- and asking guys fresh out of college or high school to jump back and forth from glorified training camp to AAA?

You want guys to make their mistakes and learn from them when the wins and losses don't count. But baseball's freakishly random, which is why the worst teams will still win 50 times and the best will lose 50 times. They play that many games to try and lessen the random chance.

As Jake from State Farm posted this morning, MLB players don't even know basic fundamentals (like tagging someone without the ball in your glove?) let alone counting on some nebulous "semi-pro" league to do it for you.

If it goes that way, anyone who spends money to watch that charade is exactly what P.T. Barnum thought them to be more than 100 years ago.

 

The Euro development model doesn't think you particularly need to play any actual games to develop major league caliber skills: just drill, drill, drill, drill, then you can just plug your "generic baseball player" skills into any hole the major league team sees fit.

 

And if you don't have a replacement player on your cadet roster, you just go spend money on somebody else's superstar. Sort of like how tanking works now.

So the Yankees, Dodgers, Red Sox and Angels are destined to be the Man United, Man City, Chelsea and Arsenal of the sport. Too bad if you happen to root for Aston Villa or West Ham.

How wonderful.

 

So I bag on Worcester here and then get an email minutes later from Uber ... get the fuck out of my life, Internet demons!

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