Minor League Baseball Is Being Dismantled

Over the last few days, major league teams have announced their decisions regarding the future of their minor league players. 28 of the 30 teams have publicly committed to paying their minor league players at least through the end of June. Many of these commitments however were also met with a grand exodus of roster cuts. News of the roster cuts naturally came after the teams gained some goodwill from their announcements as they saw opportunities to bury the more unpleasant flip-side of their promise.

It would be foolish to categorize all of these roster cuts as purely evil. In any normal year, minor leaguers are released after spring training and before the draft consistently as teams decide who is worth keeping around beyond the short term. Yet, the timing of the cuts in conjunction with the uncertainty surrounding the general economic apprehension at the moment does turn these roster moves into something beyond a standard activity.

Many of these players have been hyper-focused on baseball alone over the majority of their lives and now will have to pivot toward finding a new income source for the near future. For many, this will signal the end of their careers as a whole. At $400 a week, it costs just $6,000 total to keep a minor leaguer on payroll until the end of the minor league system. Multiply that by the number of players being dropped and you'll find that every team is saving about half the cost of the major league minimum salary. Evidently, that is too much for some teams.

This gutting of the minors isn’t coming completely out of the blue. MLB was already set on cutting 40 minor league teams before the season and the loss of revenue from games put MiLB in a position of even less power. MLB under Rob Manfred has been dead-set on eliminating anything fun that holds inherent benefits that can’t be tracked by a dollar sign. They do not care for the impact that these teams have on small communities, or the alienation of fans who use these games as a cheap alternative to MLB, or for the hundreds (maybe thousands) of players and coaches who are supported by these teams.

Granted, not every single minor league player will become a future major league player or provide the needed depth for an organization. But is the potential for a player figuring it out not worth the incredibly low cost of keeping them around? Randy Dobnak was found from the depths of independent baseball, eventually started a playoff game, and now looks to be in contention for a starting rotation spot. Max Muncy was given a second chance by the Dodgers and is now one of the better hitters in baseball. Mike Piazza was taken in the 62nd round of the draft as a favor and eventually became one of the best catchers of all-time. What if none of those players got their shot because the team deemed them to not be worth it?

This gutting of the minor leagues destroys the great infracture of MLB. They’ll claim that these moves make the system more efficient because pure productivity is all they care about. To them, these aren’t teams, or players, or coaches who all have identities; they are just numbers. Numbers that can be eliminated or tossed away with the snap of a finger. It’s an unfortunate tragedy that will likely get lost in the greater discussion currently surrounding baseball but will be just as important to baseball’s professional future in North America.

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