Major League Baseball pulls the rug on Minor League Baseball teams and leagues

It’s one of the biggest scaling back operations that the MLB has undertaken in a long while. I was talking about this very subject today on The Baseball Talk Radio Show podcast that I do with my good friend, Gary Mack, the host of a long time running Mets themed podcast called Mets Musings. I’ll post a link to that show here on the blog in case you haven’t listened in before.

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Yes, relationships can go through changes, and the relationship that Major League Baseball had with it’s myriad teams of the MILB has now been changed forever with leagues being eliminated, and associations with Major League teams being changed all over the country. The Trenton Thunder were affiliated with the NY Yankees for years, now that is going away.

Did you like the New York Penn League? Did you know it was the oldest continuously operated ‘A’ league of the MLB? And that its origins date back to 1939. Well like it no more, cause the MLB just eliminated it. How’s that for wanting to promote the sport of baseball. Take it away? I don’t quite understand that. Well, they took the MLB affiliation out of it but the league may go on under a new banner as talked about in this article. Ok, a wood-bat baseball league for college teams to draft from and preview players? I don’t know how long that will last, will the fans still support that?

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The Phillies tie in with the New York Penn League was the Williamsport Cross-Cutters, there you may have seen a young guy playing that would eventually make the Phillies team possibly. Well, now changes to the league mean that this probably won’t happen as the Phillies will have nothing affiliated with the league anymore.

Where is everyone gonna go? There’s hundreds of younger players that don’t necessarily come out of colleges to play baseball, the amatuer draft and all that? There may be thousands of player affected across the country, and thousands more that worked these ballparks and affiliations that now are moot.

I will again link to a Phillies blog that has some of the latest news coming out about the proposed new MLB affiliation rules that the remaining teams in the MILB will have to follow. The ‘all-controlling’ MLB will be setting the rules for everything. Evidently, this is what is going to go on from this point forward, I still think that the system they have now, though it may be somewhat fragmented for the range and skill levels of players kind of serve the game better, at some point, you’re weeding a lot of ‘dreamers’ out that maybe would have never made it to the MLB, but had a small role in development at the possibility of getting there, all the while providing some baseball entertainment to fans.

It could even lead to something that will keep athletes away from baseball, if there is a narrowing down to a whole lot less teams, why even try from the start, there are a ton of others things that younger people can do with their lives than being ‘kept away from baseball’ when the MLB tightens it’s rope around the game. MLB doesn’t ‘own’ baseball, they probably would like to think they do, but they don’t. The game exists and the MLB just happens to be Major League Baseball, it’s not the be all and end all of the sport, though it’s doing everything it can under the current commissioner of baseball to foul things up, in this writer’s opinion.

Check out all of the changes coming to Minor League Baseball here from an article in ESPN.com towards the end of the summer on September 3., 2020

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