According to Jeff Passan of ESPN, MLB owners (in their most recent proposal to the MLBPA) have asked (in Passan’s words) “for the ability to eliminate hundreds of minor league playing jobs.”
Passan later provided an update on Twitter that previous offers also had this on the table and, expectedly, they were rejected.
Updating: The MLBPA has rejected past offers from MLB that would agree the league can control the number of domestic minor league playing jobs and plans to formally reject the proposal that would allow MLB to cut from 180 per organization to as few as 150. https://t.co/ZkKNE7LhsG
— Jeff Passan (@JeffPassan) February 15, 2022
Rob Manfred and the MLB owners continue to wreak havoc on both MLB and MiLB
The MLB owners and Commissioner Rob Manfred want to have the ability to cut around 30 players from each MLB team’s roster pool. As things currently stand, each franchise has to operate under the “Domestic Reserve List,” which has the number of players that a franchise can employ at any given time as 180. As part of the CBA negotiations, MLB owners want to cut that to 150, but the league could decide to propose a cut for even more.
That would eliminate nearly 1,000 minor league players (30 teams x 30 cuts = 900 players).
According to Passan, MLB does not want this to happen right away or even in 2023, but they want the flexibility to do this in the future.
The problem is that if MLB owners truly look at the long game, things would be better for them if they had more minor league teams.
Minor league players are already paid peanuts but there’s a chance that one or two of them make it to the majors. Sure, they would have to pay them $30-plus million eventually but the owners would be making a ton of money because one or two players panned out.
Case in point: The Los Angeles Dodgers and Mike Piazza. Piazza was drafted in the 62nd round of the 1988 Draft as a favor to his godfather, Dodgers manager Tommy Lasorda. Four years later, he made his debut, and the next year (1993), he won the NL Rookie of the Year Award and he was in the top 10 in NL MVP voting for the next six seasons.
Amazingly, 28 years after he was drafted, Piazza got into the Baseball Hall of Fame on his fourth ballot.
Now, there are only 20 rounds in the MLB draft and after the 2019 season (it was supposed to be after the 2020 season), MLB eliminated dozens of minor league teams because they wanted “better facilities” for minor leaguers.
However, they still won’t pay minor leaguers more. In fact, MLB doesn’t even want to pay minor leaguers to be in spring training.
As long as this garbage continues for baseball, they will further alienate their fans and the number of fans will dwindle down more and more as baseball falls further behind the times, especially if they don’t have any product on the field once winter gives way to spring.