A better idea than farm teams, with application to MiLB

Dusting off, and following up

Lockdown is a time for returning to old projects never finished.

Me, I’ve got a follow-up to write in a series imagining new directions for pro baseball.

• Last time, I wrote about a season format concept to make games more relevant.
• This time, I’m imagining league structures to make seasons more relevant.

The big idea here is an open league system with promotion and relegation.

• Relegation would mean top-tier teams keep competing even once eliminated.
• Promotion would give teams outside the top league(s) real rewards for winning.
• Teams would be face more opponents of similar strength, especially at the top.
• Relevance is revenue – more to play for should lead to more consumer support.
• Progressive seasons would work hand-in-hand to make relevance increase.
• The Temple Cup would be a new opportunity for inter-level competition.

Importantly: I’m not suggesting any of these changes could be implemented.

• MLB owners wouldn’t vote to reduce the number of top-tier teams.
• The players’ association wouldn’t vote to reduce top-tier jobs, either.
• Baseball’s largely traditionalist fan base would resist this much change at once.

I’m not writing with much reference to empirical sports economics, either.

That is, I’m writing a “what if…”, not a “so let’s…”, and it should be read as such.

• Baseball’s sleeping in this long offseason. Might as well do some solid dreaming.

Post-competitive is post-sustainable

The rise of the post-competitive equilibrium is not to MLB’s long-term gain.

• Teams increasingly cut costs and play not to win unless they’re real contenders.
• But the more teams tank at once, the less relevant each regular-season game is.
• Lower relevance, I suggest, is a big driver of lower game-to-game attendance.
• As attendance drops, it’ll get harder every year to keep raising revenue.
• No individual franchise ever has any reason to buck this trend.
• But it’s got bad implications for the franchise system as a whole.

Of course, post-competitive behavior in closed leagues is not unique to baseball:

• Tanking for top draft picks is now a long-accepted practice in the NBA and NHL.
• F1 is now the Mercedes League, and only two other teams even challenge.

But I’m writing about baseball, with ideas I think it’s best positioned to use.

Meanwhile, realities the majors may have to face soon already impact the minors.

• Winning MiLB games leads only to MiLB pennants – a built-in limit on relevance.
• Farm teams’ business strategies are set for the big club’s benefit, not their own.
• The march of science is reducing MLB’s dependence on the farm for training.
• At the same time, the majors seek to wring ever more profit from less support.
• All that means they’ll increasingly find the minors, as a whole, expendable.
• Issues of player pay and team survival have become crises already this offseason.

Ideas to make the games more relevant, and grow the audience, aren’t lacking.

• Gold plan drafting would reduce non-contender teams’ reasons to tank.
• Progressive seasons could create a larger set of meaningful games each year.

But these are marginal, not fundamental, moves – and they only address the majors.

Today’s idea instead involves minor-league as teams first-class citizens of pro ball.

Open league system

Specifically, what if teams moved up and down between leagues based on results?

Instead of via farm arrangements, leagues should relate via promotion and relegation.

• Teams at each level of baseball would operate independently of each other.
• Teams finishing last at each level would be relegated to a lower league.
• Teams finishing first at each level would be promoted to fill resulting vacancies.
• Lower levels would have more teams and leagues, in a pyramid shape.

Under this model, all leagues’ games are injected with new kinds of relevance.

• Winning minor-league games will mean ascending to bigger stages.
• Losing major-league games will risk getting kicked out of the big time.
• In both cases, promotion and relegation mean new reasons to win.
• New reasons for teams to win will mean new reasons for fans to watch.

Some readers will already be familiar with existing uses of this scheme – in soccer.

• Football league systems in Europe all promote and relegate between levels.
• These hierarchies certainly don’t lack for big-money clubs at the top.
• They also feature survivable, well-supported clubs at lower levels.
• Individual teams in these countries do experience financial distress sometimes!
• But by marginalizing weak teams, promotion and relegation keep leagues strong.

Liberty for minor-league teams would be scary – but ultimately, I think, healthy.

• Their present business model is as basically contractors for MLB franchises.
• Independence would mean getting to make decisions for their own good instead.

Sketch of a league pyramid

What might a pyramid of interrelated leagues look like? Here’s one concept:

1. 1 16-team National League (relegating 2 teams)
2. 1 16-team American League (relegating 2 teams and promoting 2)
3. 2 14-team triple-A leagues (relegating 2 each and promoting 1 each)
4. 4 12-team double-A leagues (relegating 2 each and promoting 1 each)
5. 4 12-team single-A leagues (promoting 2 each)

This setup is in some ways as close as possible to today’s baseball ecosystem:

• About as many total teams appear as in all of full-season pro baseball.
• About as many top-tier teams appear as are actually in the race each year.

That is, the idea is to make teams more competitive, not more competitive teams.

• There’s no reason to think any plan could make thirty teams title contenders.
• Instead, this scheme lets those who are contenders play mostly each other.

As elsewhere, any part of this concept could be varied to meet particular ends.

• A top-tier AL shortens the Temple Cup and adds a series to progressive seasons.
• More leagues of fewer teams in low tiers might merely complicate promotions.

Applying this idea less completely, to today’s major leagues only, is also conceivable.

• This kind of misses the point of shoring up the minor leagues.
• But it’s easier to imagine overcoming the business challenges at such a scope.

Progressive seasons

Promotion and relegation would work together well with progressive season formats.

As a summary, this means eliminating teams through the season instead of in playoffs:

1. 16 teams play each other for 90 games (one series each, home and away).
2. The top and bottom eight separate, each playing 42 further games.
3. The top and bottom four in each half separate again, each playing another 18.
4. A final series pairs the top two teams left, with the leader given a head start.

Analogous formats for fourteen or twelve teams are straightforward.

• Smaller leagues would let lower levels conclude their seasons earlier.

The open league system naturally complements this approach to scheduling.

• Promotion comes from full-season results, not just the crapshoot of playoffs.
• Later games among eliminated teams gain importance – for avoiding relegation!
• Very few games pair one team that needs a win and one that doesn’t.
• Overall, teams find themselves more evenly matched in any given contest.

Of course, season format and league structure could also be varied independently.

• Promotion and relegation with regular and post-seasons isn’t inconceivable.
• Neither, naturally, is a progressive format in a closed franchise system.
• But the advantages of each would certainly be enhanced by the other.
• A double top-level league would need to run a World Series between its champs.

The Temple Cup

What promotion and relegation would itself allow is competition across levels.

• Farm teams can’t meaningfully play higher-level clubs in today’s closed system.
• But independent teams in an open league system would have no reason not to!
• Just a few cross-level games each year could mean lots of revenue in the minors.

An inter-level tournament would effectively complement progressive seasons:

• Playoffs aren’t good competition design, but they bring in lots of money.
• A fall tournament would restore the postseason omitted in progressive formats.
• But as an inter-level event, it’d stand clearly apart from season pennants.

Consider a staggered, ten-week bracket plan, each tier entering following its season:

1. The 48 single-A teams enter the first week.
2. The 48 double-A teams join the 24 Week 2 winners.
3. The 28 triple-A teams join the 36 Week 3 winners.
4. The 32 Week 3 winners play the fourth week.
5. The 16 AL teams join the 16 Week 4 winners.
6. The 16 NL teams join the 16 Week 5 winners.
7. The 16 remaining teams play off over the last four weeks.

Each series might perhaps be two away games, then three home, for the higher seed.

• Placing more games in lower-tier parks might not optimize total revenue.
• But it’d maximize gate for lower-tier teams who’d be hungriest for it.

For this tournament, I’d bring back the name of the Temple Cup.

• The original Temple Cup was an 1890s forerunner of the World Series.

Soccer teams worldwide already contest separate yearly knockout and season trophies.

• A cup and a league are both played in almost every open football pyramid.
• The US Open Cup exists alongside America’s closed league system, too.
• (Of course, an actual farm system in American soccer would make that harder.)

Not all typical facets of soccer cup play should be adopted by baseball, though:

• A baseball cup should feature proper odd-length series, which soccer ones don’t.
• Cup games should follow the season, not interrupt it as typical in football.

Some practicalities: reserves, labor, geography

Promotion and relegation would impose some other concurrent changes on baseball.

First, the farm would be over, but a small set of reserve teams would still exist.

• Teams will want inactive players somewhere to replace the injured and so on.
• Teams in the Show might need, say, 15 to 30 reserve players just for continuity.
• Teams below the top level might well want at least some reserves, too.
• But continuity alone doesn’t demand large farm-type stables of talent.
• Just a couple leagues of teams for reserves, mostly shared, would suffice.
• In soccer systems overseas, reserve leagues usually exist outside the pyramid.
• (A few countries mainstream reserve teams, but that’s harder to get working.)

Second, there’s no way to make an entry draft work with an open league system.

• Of course, the draft just isn’t as important in baseball as other games.
• Sports where one good pick matters more might find this plan tougher to adopt.
• Absent a draft, baseball might look harder at a salary cap for talent distribution.

The labor market would get more complicated overall under open league structure.

Lastly, the new scheme might require the geography of baseball to change.

• Today’s MLB franchises can block new ones from entering their territories.
• This yields inefficient use of small markets and under-exploitation of large ones.
• A right to promotion, however, would conflict with such geographic exclusivity.
• Teams couldn’t be prevented from moving vertically just due to geography.
• Eventually, it wouldn’t work to restrict moving horizontally within levels, either.
• Over time, teams would grow denser in large markets and sparser in small ones.

Odds and ends

Promotion and relegation would stand to improve the public economics of baseball.

• Today, cities pay a lot for private stadiums to host a fixed pool of MLB teams.
• But those teams lose bargaining power if they might not always be major-league!

Now, it’s worth asking: if the aim is better competition, why is soccer the model?

• Many top leagues include only a few teams that are serious contenders each year.

But open structure isn’t why that happens; the reasons it does needn’t affect baseball.

• First, competitive balance devices like salary caps are unknown in Europe.
• Second, US and European national leagues differ because America is big.
• The USA is three to five times the size of the biggest countries in UEFA.
• US baseball sustaining proportionally more contending teams would be natural.
• Promotion and relegation would mostly mean grouping them in one league.

Summing up

Promotion and relegation could reshape baseball for long-term gains.

• Less dependent, more ambitious minor-league teams would gain sustainability.
• Post-competitive behavior at the top would be constrained by relegation.
• Progressive seasons would augment the scheme’s competitive balance benefits.
• An inter-level tournament would route big paydays especially to lower tiers.
• All of the above would be major, fundamental drivers of fan engagement.

I hope you’re staying safe, healthy, and responsibly far apart.