The right long-term solution for the prosperity of baseball, writ large, is (still) Joe Posnanski's proposal to
Free The Minor Leagues. All this restructuring is just dancing around it rather than dealing straight with it, and it'd be a tragedy if 40 clubs were shuttered when 30 of them could be viable independent franchises in their own right.
Concept is like soccer leagues the world over:
- there are multiple tiers, each playing a season against each other, with the best teams moving to higher competition and the worst to a lower tier of competition for the next year of play ("promotion and relegation")
- Teams are independently owned; very few of them make any meaningful money, but also there are a ton that are financially stable, albeit humble
- In England, only the top 5 tiers are fully professional, and the next few are semi-professional (or have a few full-time pros on the roster, with the rest semi-pro). In Germany and Spain, only the top 3 leagues are fully professional, and in France and Italy I think it's only the top 2. In England, the pay is very good (better than MLS) in the 2nd division, pretty good (~$100k/yr average) in the 3rd, and after that it's living wages but nothing impressive.
- Players enter the professional ranks through the youth systems and academies of a given club; if they wash out of that club's youth system they can catch on with another (usually lesser) club, etc. There is no draft. However, it's still easiest to become a starter for a top club by moving through that club's youth system.
- Conversely, if a player joins a lesser team and becomes a starter there, they can still advance to higher levels of play by having their contract bought by a bigger club (who invariably have bigger budgets, and also a lot of pressure to make a splash). As a result, smaller clubs can do some great business by becoming a place that identifies and develops talent, and then sells it "upstream" for small fortunes to acquiring clubs. The USA's best soccer player just spent the last 4 years doing that at perhaps the 2nd-best such soccer club on the planet (Borussia Dortmund), and ended up having his contract sold to the equivalent of an MLB team (Chelsea) for nearly $100M. Oh, and as part of that he got himself a hefty salary raise, too.
- The crucial part: Teams are established in towns and small cities, sometimes rather out-of-the-way places, and come to represent that area's pride and be a part of their cultural identity, even if they're on the 8th tier of "the pyramid". You may not have the best players in the world, but if Springfield can beat Shelbyville, that's all its patrons really ask of it.
As Pos points out, baseball is a great
regional sport. Where it's played, it's very popular, but if you don't have a team nearby, you probably don't fall in love with it. And yet - here are these hundreds of minor-league clubs (256!) which could all field competitive teams against regional competition, on humble budgets, but do so while trying their hardest to win. And that just doesn't happen when the club is essentially a host body for the MLB club's parasitic needs. At least, not optimally.
And there's a strange effect it has on the rest of baseball fandom, to look down on "independent leagues" as being some grotesque and anachronistic creations. Frankly, with all the oxygen in the baseball market that MLB sucks up, it's a testament to how much people love "just goin' to a baseball game" that the independents continue to exist at all - proof that you don't have to have the best players on the planet in order to be a great family-friendly entertainment experience.
Here's how an overhauled minor league system could operate more like global soccer, and gain awesomeness:
- MLB divests true controlling interests in the minor-league club to the current owners (who are essentially caretakers today), and/or finds new ownership that wants to run the team like an actual sports franchise, for whom winning and profitability are correlated. It gets out of the business of micromanaging each team. This means selling actual equity in the cases of MLB-owned teams, but also phasing out of the Player Development Contract system across all such teams.
- MLB teams each form ONE affiliated reserve or development team, which would play in the lower levels of the minors according to the club's performance and how much the parent invests in it.
- The MLB commissioner no longer has any say in how MiLB operates. MLB does not collectively-bargain on behalf of minor-league clubs.
- The minors reorganize to re-tiered leagues (the "Baseball Pyramid"), based partly on geography but also on stadium capacity. At all except the highest level of the minors, there will be multiple regional leagues at the same level (not different conceptually from today, except you get some weird alignment right now due to the whims of MLB clubs).
- All well-organized baseball joins the pyramid. That includes anything that's at-least-semi-pro: Cape Cod League, the Minnesota Baseball Assn, hell, include the Mexican League and anything decent in Canada. At lower tiers, it should also include the top-level rec baseball leagues in each major city, many of which are populated by former pros or near-pros and play an attractive game.
- For the tiers that are mostly- or fully-pro, clubs are able to make cash-only offers for any player on any team, whereby it'd be like trading for a player, except they just paid cash. Obviously they wouldn't go buying rec-league players, most transactions would occur within a reasonable geographic radius to avoid the player objecting, and just as obviously clubs would retain the rights to trade players as well as buy them. But the ability to just pay cash makes the market SO much more fluid.
- A club receiving an offer can accept or counter or refuse, but there would be terms in any pro player's standard contract for a "Release clause", which is an amount of money that any interested club can pay to the signing club to automatically release a player from his contract (for purposes of signing him for their own club, of course). If you really value a player highly such that you want to be sure to retain his services unless you get a Godfather offer, a player can demand increased salary in order to up that release-clause number.
- MLB clubs can buy and sell talent, between the big club but also between their reserve club and other minor clubs. One thing MLB would have to agree to is that they can't just offer a minors player a big-league contract and automatically have him get out of his existing contract, they'd have to compensate the minor-league club somehow, probably bigtime for a true top MLB prospect.
- To preserve some stability in a team's roster and a league's competitive environment, there would be limited windows of time each year when players can buy or sell. Most soccer leagues have a lengthy offseason "transfer window" and a shorter mid-season one, the activity for which ends up resembling a big-league trade deadline (except more front-loaded as larger teams address their needs first, throwing their financial weight around, and that money percolates down the pyramid). You might need to extend the window for MLB clubs to buy contracts from lower-tier clubs, perhaps just from their own Reserve team, but you'd need some deadline for clubs trading talent such that at some point they can go to war with the army they've got, and see who's the best at the end of the season.
- Likewise, you would want to have some sort of "Loan" system for MLB clubs to place major-league players who are recovering from injury on short-term rehab assignments; the MLB clubs would probably need to pay for the privilege, and there would probably be some limits on it as upper-tier Pyramid teams approached their playoffs, in order to maintain competitive integrity. There's definite tension between the goals of big-league clubs seeking rehab assignments and lower-tier leagues seeking competitive integrity and not being made into a mockery.
- At the end of the season, the top clubs in each league get promoted (or play-off against the bottom clubs in the next highest tier for the right to be promoted), and likewise the bottom clubs get demoted to the next lower tier (or play off against the would-be promotees). How many depend on how many clubs are in each league. The highest tiers may have some requirements clubs would have to meet (in seating capacity or amenities or financial solvency) to get promoted.
- MLB, being a closed association, would of course be under no obligation to have their clubs be a part of the promotion/relegation scheme. I'd argue that they should be willing to at least have a for-charity series between the winners of the 2nd-tier league and whichever MLB franchise is willing to play them, perhaps during playoff off-days in October. But this can all work even with no on-field interplay between MLB and the new Baseball Pyramid.
- To maintain competitive balance, the MLB commissioner would probably have to set some sort of limits for how much an MLB club can pay to acquire non-MLB players (no longer "minors") in a given year, and probably expand revenue sharing in order to give each team a more-equal shot at it despite the disparities in payrolls and budgets. Pyramid clubs would be under no such restrictions, if the owner of the Omaha Storm Chasers wants to spend a fortune to acquire the best-damn 2nd-tier club and win a title, god bless him.
- There would be no geographic restrictions on new clubs forming inside MLB cities and joining the Pyramid. A city like NYC might end up with dozens of clubs on all sorts of different levels. MLB can agree to its own anticompetitive behavior within the league, that's fine, but residents of MLB cities shouldn't have to be forced to pay MLB prices to just attend a baseball game. If the product justifies the price, people will go, but they should be free to feel allegiance to lesser teams too. This obviously would be a major financial sticking point to MLB agreeing, but it's essential to maximize the potential of baseball writ large. In practice in Europe, only cities like the greater London area end up having tons of teams at all levels; 2nd-tier cities tend to have clubs consolidate and merge in order to field one highly competitive team that can get lots of fan support (and maybe really low rec-level teams below that one).
- Promotion and relegation playoffs would occur during September, a time when many MLB clubs might be not doing much and interest in baseball would be waning for all except the fans of playoff-bound or still-in-the-hunt MLB teams. You'd definitely get the top tiers' playoffs televised, at least regionally.
- They'd have to put in place some sort of similar system for Fall and Winter ball, such that it can continue its function as development opportunities for plausible MLB prospects, while also competing for something meaningful and having fans attend. That would be a sideshow by comparison to the primary spring-and-summer League Pyramid, though.
- I have no idea what the Draft would become. Maybe Hockey has a reasonable hybrid model between the global soccer system (join a youth academy, or go pro in a lower level and get signed at progressively higher levels) and the North American system (all pros are drafted to developmental affiliates of big clubs, or directly to those big clubs in the case of NFL and NBA). One which would maintain competitive balance between big-league clubs, while not limiting the movement of younger pros up through the Pyramid in a way that helps their clubs as well as the players themselves. Perhaps draft rights would essentially become a (time-limited) Right of First Refusal for an MLB club to buy the contract of the draftee, but the draftee could otherwise pursue Pyramid employment and advancement in a free-market setting - with clubs extra-motivated to employ them, at least the high-rounders, because of the increased possibility that an MLB club would in fact come calling with their checkbook.
What would be the main effects? You'd have team owners able to invest in fielding a quality team, for one, and only selling talent when doing so would bring it so much money they could reinvest that and make the club even better. You'd have true market salaries for Pyramid clubs rather than today's lottery-ticket-style minimum-wage abomination. But most significantly, these clubs and players would have
something to play for, other than just trying to look good individually and hope their parent club promotes them. Yeah, sure, the minors today have "playoffs", but the clubs could also be stripped bare of their talent at any moment, and have the entire season feel like a sham. In this scenario, with the exception of the MLB clubs' reserve teams (all of whom might not even be at the top level of the pyramid), that sham would end.
And the result would be much greater fan interest, at a much greater depth throughout the country. Any town of reasonable size could have a baseball club competing at
some reasonable level of the pyramid, and you wouldn't need to charge much more than a $10 to get in, have some beers with friends and watch players throw, hit and catch in impressive fashion. If your local club in Greenville SC is in the (say) 5th tier, at the equivalent of A-ball today, you'd have other regional clubs that you'd get used to rivalries with, you'd cheer or boo the acquisition or disposition of talent, you'd get more excited about the possibility of
the team getting promoted, not just a few hotshot prospects. And with greater interest in baseball overall, I'd wager TV ratings for MLB would go up as well, even if many of those incremental viewers couldn't reasonably get themselves to an MLB stadium to watch in-person. I think it would lift all boats, including big league clubs - but they'd only get there by giving away some control.
Oh, and those MLB owners? Not only would they gain from greater long-run TV revenue and interest, they'd also gain from the asset disposition of their MiLB team stakes. It's true that they couldn't demand a fortune for them today, but they could maintain passive minority stakes and then sell them once everything had stabilized a bit, and probably get a big chunk of capital appreciation from it. Those stakes today are completely illiquid, just value sitting there trapped by the lack of appeal of owning a minor-league team. Letting them get meaningful dollars (8 figures, surely) for those stakes across all their teams would essentially be conjuring up money for them out of nothing. I wager they'd listen to a proposal if that could be the result.