What has long been expected will become official today: There will be no minor league baseball in 2020.
According to multiple sources, Minor League Baseball is expected to officially announce this afternoon that the season has been shelved because Major League Baseball has been unable to provide players. The teams have been informed that they can make their own announcements later this afternoon after the MiLB announcement.
Athletic reported Monday that an announcement was expected on Tuesday.
Now the focus is on what comes next. First, teams must unravel as much as they can about this season. No doubt, there will be an avalanche of fans and advertisers calling and asking for refunds for tickets or offers they bought for games that had simply been suspended and not officially canceled.
Some of those fans and advertisers will choose to roll their dollars around 2021, but others will want to replenish their own cash flow as best they can. The stagnation of the economy has negatively affected almost all industries, and some people and companies will want to recover as much as they can to stay afloat.
For the rest of what would have been the minor league season, teams will likely continue to do what they have been doing. In other words, they will continue to make the most of what they have. For weeks and months, teams have been using their stadiums to attract as many people as possible while staying within their municipality’s social distancing guidelines.
Pensacola Blue Wahoos and Salem-Keizer volcanoes have turned their stadiums into Airbnb properties for fans to rent out overnight. Others have started organizing park restaurants, farmers markets, driving movies, and anything else teams can dream of getting a few drops of income in a dry season.
Teams from the Texas and Pacific Rim leagues are preparing to host the Texas Collegiate League, one of the few summer college leagues across the country that are still slated to play despite the coronavirus pandemic. Other stadiums are hosting tournaments and high school exhibits, while one plans to host a softball league for adults.
A small number of teams (Altoona, Toledo, Port Charlotte and others) will organize alternative training sites for members of their parent club player groups who do not accompany the team during the regular season.
With no revenue, minor league teams have been laying off and suspending employees throughout the pandemic. With no games in sight and payroll protection loans issued in the early part of maturity closing, more jobs will be lost.
The teams will follow up with a few staff members who can help with whatever path they choose to keep fans in their stadiums, but those numbers will likely be minimal. Notable exceptions can be found in Pensacola, Beloit, and Portland, which have promised zero layoffs or licenses no matter how long the closing lasts.
Perhaps the only silver lining is that teams can now schedule stadium events without restriction on questions about whether the season will take place. Even in normal years, minor league baseball is a year-round business; Now the schedule is clear for teams to start scheduling those non-baseball events without the possibility of being forced to scrap their plans at any time.
For players who are not part of your team’s player pool, canceling the minor league season begins a low season of uncertainty.
The volatility of the coronavirus and the increase in cases in the training states of the major leagues of Florida and Arizona have seriously jeopardized the possibility of the instructional league and the Arizona Fall League (as well as a possible companion league in Florida) .
Stains in foreign winter leagues will be in high demand and will depend on relaxed regulations regarding international travel. Some players, with their contracts suspended as part of the country’s national emergency declaration, will choose to play in independent leagues, but those leagues have also been dramatically reduced in number this year due to the coronavirus.
The reality is that many players are simply not going to play organized baseball in 2020. They will miss a year of development and, in some cases, they will have to ask from month to month if their parent club will continue to pay stipends of $ 400 per week. that have been going on since March.
That is the near future. In a slightly longer view, the picture of what the minor leagues will look like in 2021 will begin to clear up.
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At the beginning of the pandemic, Minor League Baseball reportedly signaled its willingness to give in to Major League Baseball’s plan to hire approximately 40 of its teams as part of a massive effort to realign the organization.
The original list of the 42 teams in the cut block has been seamless throughout the process, and the teams have worked on and off the list for the past seven months. The MLB proposals, if adopted, would result in the elimination of the season from the Appalachian and New York-Penn Pioneers and rookie-level leagues entirely from affiliate ball. In many cases, those teams at least wanted to have a goodbye season. The pandemic has erased that.
Some of the teams in the contracted leagues will continue to be part of the big picture, likely split across multiple leagues at any Class A level, which will include four full-season teams and at least one complex rookie-level league team for each of the 30 major league clubs.
Memberships will also change as part of the plan. The standard two-year player development contracts will be removed and replaced by much longer deals (some sources have said the deals could last up to 20 years) that will eliminate biannual membership confusion leading to odd and inconvenient arrangements (the affiliate Triple-A de los Nacionales is in Fresno, for example), which generates great headaches for both players and organizations.
The league structure will also look different. Although there are many possibilities, a probable scenario requires the creation of a third Triple-A league and possibly two more Class A leagues. The short-season Northwest League may go full-time as part of the deal, and a “Mid-Atlantic League” may also appear in Class A. The lower Class A of the South Atlantic League could also split into two leagues.
All in all, 2020 will be the worst season in the minor leagues since at least 1918, when the Spanish flu pandemic and World War I wreaked havoc enough that only one league (the International League) ended its season.
There will be no extravagant alternative jerseys, no big heads, no extravagant concessions, no canvas runs, no possums on the warning track, no pets, no emerging prospects, no seventh-inning runs or home runs.
There will be no joy … anywhere, because the minor league season is gone.
