Houston Astros Abruptly Leaving Appalachian League
While many have praised the moves the Houston Astros have made in their rebuild of their organization, they made a curious decision this weekend.
The Houston Astros have had some fits and starts in their rebuild, specifically in things that require some public relations nuance. The CSN television channel debacle put a bad spin on the team as it was just starting to come out of some pretty terrible years of baseball and had begun to have exciting young players to watch.
On Saturday, Baseball America put forth an article discussing the decision that the Houston Astros would be leaving the Appalachian League immediately after 2017.
Why this matters
The Astros’ actions were to go around the affiliate league and go straight to Major League Baseball. This allows them to leave immediately rather than fulfill their commitment through 2018.
It will allow the Appalachian League to add a team quickly, though it will be curious as the contract was through 2018 with the Astros, so whether the new incoming team will sign a deal to fulfill just the Astros’ contract or to go beyond that will be very interesting and certainly means that there will be some immediate negotiations happening from major league teams.
However, leaving an affiliate high and dry this close to the 2020 service agreement between Minor League Baseball and Major League Baseball looks bad on the Astros for sure. While it is unlikely any team will sign an extension past 2020 with the likelihood that the current service agreement will not be extended in 2020 and there will be a new service agreement in place, not keeping some general level of order has rattled a lot of cages and surprised many around the game who were unwilling to go on record with me when contacted, but all the same were extremely surprised that the organization would do this.
Who could benefit
Currently, a number of teams in rebuilding stages have overloaded their minor league systems with quality prospects that need to have quality development time that requires an additional affiliate.
In researching this past offseason why the Atlanta Braves were not adding an affiliate, I found from multiple sources in the Braves front office and Minor League Baseball’s offices that the procedure of starting a new team from scratch is typically a three-to-five-year process with the requirements to get approval from the league that is adding on, approval for the site being used, approval for the funding/ownership structure of the team, and all sorts of other small things that could extend things out significantly.
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The Appalachian League is considered “advanced rookie” level baseball. With their leaving the level and not replacing with another advanced rookie level team, the Astros will be in the minority in not having an advanced rookie league team, but they would not be the only team to do such, leaving them with multiple DSL level teams, a GCL team, a team in the short-season A-ball New York-Penn League, then one at all four full season levels.
For those teams mentioned previously that have seen their system depth swell in the last few years, adding an additional advanced rookie level team would allow for additional playing time for those players who are still young and developing, rather than having to do multiple time-shares, never really giving any player the type of development that they need at a very crucial early development point of their pro career.
BA’s story referenced that multiple major league clubs have reached out in the last couple of years to the Appalachian League. The league will likely have plenty of suitors, especially if league rules would allow for MLB teams currently in the league to own a second league team (something that can happen with the Dominican Summer League, Gulf Coast League and Arizona Rookie League). Hopefully it’s a quick turnaround for the people in Greeneville!