Major League Baseball Seized Control of the Minor Leagues: What Happened, What's Happening Now, and What it Means for Players, Fans, Owners, and Cities

Abstract

Major League Baseball Seized Control of the Minor LeaguesWhat Happened, What's Happening Now, and What it Means for Players, Fans, Owners, and Cities Mark Cryan (bio) It began with lies and misrepresentations. MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred addressed the assembled media near the end of the owner's meetings in Arlington, Texas in November of 2019. Visibly irritated, Manfred laid out MLB's case for drastic cuts in Minor League Baseball, reducing the number of teams affiliated with the major leagues from 160 to 120. He listed four major concerns: inadequate facilities; seventy-seven franchises that have moved since 1990, making for untenable travel; poor pay for minor leaguers; and drafting and signing players who don't have a realistic opportunity to make it to the big leagues.1 Addressing what he termed "untenable travel," Manfred stated that minor league players were enduring "bus rides, long, 6, 8, 10 hours, and trust me, in a lot of cases, it's not a luxury cruise liner, it's on a school bus, OK?"2 Like many of the MLB statements about their new plan, this claim is simply not true. Even at the lowest levels of Minor League Baseball, teams travel in chartered motor coach buses. Nobody in affiliated US Minor League Baseball was travelling ten hours, or even two hours, in a school bus. Manfred also complained about the low pay that players receive in the minors. "We think our minor league players need to be paid better," he said. This is clearly true, and clearly a problem.3 But, Manfred's statement implied that low pay was one of MLB's grievances with the operators of minor league teams. There's just one problem with that; the players in Minor League Baseball work for Major League Baseball parent teams, which dictate their pay. Manfred and his thirty bosses could have given minor league players a raise any time they wanted, but instead, they included it in their list of problems with Minor League Baseball. What Manfred was really saying was that MLB is willing to increase pay but only by cutting the number of players, thereby maintaining roughly the same total minor league player salary costs. [End Page 17] Manfred also criticized minor league team operators for having "moved 77 franchises since 1990, OK? Left communities 77 times to get a bigger subsidy somewhere else."4 This is the leader of a business with over $10 billion in revenue whose most recent new stadium in Arlington, Texas, where Manfred was speaking, was paid for, in part, by a roughly $500 million dollar subsidy from taxpayer funds.5 Why did Arlington agree to contribute half a billion dollars to the Rangers' new ballpark? It's because if they hadn't, the Rangers would have been packing the moving vans for Portland, Charlotte, Montreal, or possibly just up the road where Dallas was also making a play for the team.6 Ironically, 1990 was the logical cut-off point for Manfred because that was the year that MLB imposed new facility requirements on minor league teams.7 Many of the seventy-seven teams that "left communities" did so because their existing home cities couldn't (or wouldn't) pay for new facilities that would receive MLB's approval. These improved facilities were, in reality, driven by Major League Baseball's priorities: larger locker rooms, improved athletic trainer spaces, coaches locker rooms and offices, and better field lighting. Some elements of these improved facilities certainly benefited the fans and local team operators, but much of the cost of these projects could also be classified as local taxpayer subsidies for MLB's player development infrastructure. Ultimately, the lengthy travel caused by some of this franchise relocation was an easily fixable problem. Leaders throughout Minor League Baseball agreed that it was time for a realignment, particularly in Single A baseball in the eastern United States where multiple leagues overlapped or were adjacent. With the shift of two franchises from the Florida State League to the Carolina League in 2017 as a model,8 travel could have been easily addressed through a re-organization of the leagues. There was no significant opposition from any...