Recently, the MLB announced a reduction in the number of farm teams that can be affiliated with a major league baseball team. Hence, there has been a restructuring of minor league ball clubs. Why does the MLB care how many minor league teams each MLB team has? It seems such a non-issue to me.
Money money money money. For one, there’s been a focus on how little minor league players make compared to the majors. The ugly truth is that most minor leaguers have zero chance to make the majors, they’re just there because you need 9 men on a team and enough pitching to play a season. The days of someone showing up on a bus from some farm town with a bat and glove and working their way up are over. If there’s some kid in Mongolia with a good arm, MLB scouts are going to know and be able to see everything about him on an iPad.
Expanding on @dalej42’s excellent post which makes sense if you know a bunch about how the baseball business operates. But not so much if you don’t.
It all starts from understanding how MLB operates as a business. MLB is a legal cartel. It’s 30 separate competing businesses in the same industry that, unlike ordinary businesses in ordinary industries, are permitted by law to get together in a smoke-filled room to make deals that help them all to the detriment of the consumer, their suppliers, and their employees. And they have the legal right to enforce these deals against each other; something that’s also illegal in ordinary industries.
MLB is all about making a system where all the teams make money, not just the biggest / wealthiest. And as among those wealthy ones, MLB wants to discourage an “arms race” where, e.g. the Yankees, Red Sox, Dodgers, etc., each spend more and more money to try to beat the other teams. If all the teams can all agree to not do that extra stuff, they each save money while still competing just the same. Which means more profit for everyone. The only way to prevent an arms race is to have industry-level collusion like this. Which is illegal except in the sports leagues like MLB, NFL, NBA, etc.
With that background, let’s talk about farm systems.
Historically, farm teams were how the majors found and developed talent, having more farm was a competitive advantage. But also cost (at least some) money. So the major teams colluded to have MLB set a maximum on the size of the farm system. That way they wouldn’t feel any need to grow their farm teams in a zero-sum arms race with the other major teams.
Nowadays, as @dalej42 said, the lower-league farm teams are not how MLB raises talent. They just grab it from college or overseas. The highest level farm teams (Triple-A) are valuable to fine tune talent up to almost-MLB level and to have a low-cost ready reserve of almost-good-enough backup players. Both to protect against injuries and to remind the MLB players union not to get too greedy since there are replacements for every one of them just waiting to move up.
So the current farm system is an anachronism, and even pre-COVID was in financial crisis. It costs too much and delivers too little value. Unlike in 1950 or 1965 where the local minor league team was the only entertainment in Bumfuck Arkansas, so lots of folks went to the games and developed their lifelong interest in baseball, now the folks in Bumfuck can stream just as much sports or other entertainment as somebody in downtown NYC. The public just isn’t attending minor league games at any level. And the cost of operations is only going up, despite player salaries being roughly zero.
So MLB was looking to cut even before COVID murdered the entire minor league ops for a year. But again, in the cartel world, everybody gets together to all agree to all save money by cutting and that nobody will gain an advantage either by not cutting as much as everyone else or by cutting more than everyone else.
After the smoke-filled secret meeting, the new standard goes out. And all the teams can tell their minor players & coaches, their minor fans, the small towns losing a tenant in their little stadiums, etc.: “Sorry folks. MLB decided. We tried to save the Bumfuck Mudhens, but they just wouldn’t listen. So the Mudhens are closing forever effective now.” Then they laugh all the way to the bank.
This, for sure. Players who have any kind of real chance of making it to the majors are going to be spending most of their minor-league time in the “high minors” (AAA and AA); if a prospect spends more than a season in A ball, he’s unlikely to ever make it, barring some sort of breakthrough (e.g., he finally figures out how to throw a good curveball).
Most of the affiliated minor-league teams which are losing their affiliations are A level; MLB teams have, in the past, typically had one AAA affiliate, one AA affiliate, and a bunch of A affiliates. The new plan gives each MLB team the same number of affiliates (one AAA, one AA, one “high A,” and one “low A”).
I suppose a MLB team does NOT have to have minor league teams at every level but for practical purposes, they all do. In the old system, I’ve wondered myself why bother with the lower levels such as the short-season A class (now gone it seems).
But as mentioned, money has a lot to do with it, streamlining and reorganization another. The pandemic surely played a small role.
One other thing is that some independent leagues are now MLB partners. Now, there are players teams can buy without having to maintain a minor league infrastructure and thus saving money. However, how much money are they really saving? It’s not like those lower level leagues were costing that much. What this new arrangement might provide is a higher talent level throughout the minors and independent leagues.
The minor leagues and how MLB uses them, as well as independent leagues which I’m counting foreign leagues in there too, has evolved in the last 100+ years, more like 150 really. This is just another step in that evolution and not even a big one in my opinion, there’s been bigger ones than this.