By Mike Steffanos December 26, 2020
I've been writing a lot about minor league baseball this year, focusing mainly on the harm that the changes to the affiliation process will do to the towns and small cities left behind. Ultimately, I think that will backfire on MLB, severing a crucial link between the game of baseball and a significant chunk of America. There was a terrific piece on FanGraphs a couple of weeks ago showing how, by their calculations, the changes to minor league affiliations will cost 5.2 million people the chance to attend minor league games in person, as they will simply live too far away from an affiliated team.
Only time will tell just how much that matters. If MLB puts enough support into independent leagues to keep them going, that will pick up some of the slack. What it won't replace is the idea that fueled affiliated teams in those small towns and cities for so long, that some of the players you paid to watch at your local ballpark would someday show up on your tv in a major league uniform. Sure, a few of those ballplayers in independent ball will probably make it, but there won't be any connection between these places and specific clubs. For instance, as when David Wright grew up a Mets fan in Virginia because the Triple-A club was in the Tidewater area for so long.
Even the minor league clubs that didn't lose their affiliations, like the Mets long-time affiliate in Binghamton, were hurt by the complete absence of a minor league season in 2020. And, of course, another consequence of the lost season was that minor league players lost a year of normal development. Most of the top prospects saw some action at the teams' alternate sites, but even for those players the work that they were able to do was quite unlike what they would have done in a normal minor league season. That still puts them miles ahead of players who weren't top prospects and were mostly on their own in 2020. That year of development was completely lost for those players.
No comments:
Post a Comment