A fairly significant change is coming to the minor league baseball schedule. It won't have much of an impact on fans or cities, but it could have sizable ramifications for early-career development.
As Keith Law and I discussed at the top of this morning's podcast, Baseball America's J.J. Cooper reported that Major League Baseball is shifting the Arizona Complex League and Florida Complex league calendars up one month. They'll begin on May 4, and end on July 25. Meanwhile, the MLB draft will be held during the All-Star Game festivities July 14-16, which means that recently drafted players won't have the option of a former rookie-ball league to finish out the season.
It was a change that Cooper foreshadowed last May when he said that extended spring training outlived its usefulness, especially since teams could no longer use it as a holding ground for unpaid minor league players. He proposed a split season that would allow DSL players to make their stateside debuts earlier, with the later slate accommodating the prep players drafted in July.
Instead, the league is going with the option that is cheaper and less complicated, as Cooper points out that the fourth-option rule made the split season idea a no-go for now.
A relatively arcane rule derailed that proposal. Teams can get a fourth option for a major league player who has used all three options, provided the player has fewer than five seasons in the major and minor leagues at the point where the player runs out of options. A season in the complex leagues does not currently meet the “90 days requirement” in Rule 7(c) of the Major League Rules to count as a season. However, if the Complex League season were extended further, it would fulfill that requirement, and some players who may now receive a fourth option might not meet the requirements.
This won't have drastic effects on collegiate players taken in the first few rounds, because most of them only use the complex leagues as a tune-up before heading out to A-ball. For prep picks, it turns the professional segment of their draft year into a glorified instructional league at best. On the Sox Machine Podcast, Law said that this is a continuation of the league offloading player development on colleges, and not that many colleges get players ready for the pro game as well as a strong MLB organization.
To me, it just all feels cheap, because MLB's problem is not enough low-level games for their rawest prospects, and instead they're just trying to comb over the schedule with half measures that only address half the population.
Spare Parts
I don't buy much in the way of team gear these days, so while I've heard displeasure about Fanatics' takeover of the merch industry -- cheaper products, worse quality control -- I hadn't had much of a personal connection with the cheapness.
If the Cardinals' new Nike jerseys (and player reaction) is a sign of things to come, we may all be more acquainted with their manufacturing operations.
While the White Sox have followed the Royals a little too close for anybody's comfort in recent years, the Sox beat Royals to releasing renderings for a proposed new ballpark in Kansas City's Crossroads District.
The A's, meanwhile, still don't have renderings for a Las Vegas Ballpark that's actually supposed to open sooner. They also don't have a home after the 2024 season, and while they've explored using Triple-A parks in Salt Lake City or Sacramento, and they stand to lose their TV revenue if they leave the market. The city has some leverage, not necessarily with the future of Major League Baseball in Oakland, but land the A's own.
The A's on-field product will defy people to watch it, but their broadcast booth could draw viewers in spite of it, because Jenny Cavnar has been named the first primary female play-by-play voice for an MLB team in league history.
If you were wondering what's keeping GMs from making up injuries whenever they want to call up a fresh arm or stash an out-of-options player who would otherwise be exposed to waivers, Billy Eppler's one-year suspension for "the deliberate fabrication of injuries; and the associated submission of documentation for the purposes of securing multiple improper injured list placements" is something to point to.
And we beat FanGraphs to Prospect Week, which is starting with Eric Longenhagen's review of how the top prospects from 2017 who graduated from the class that year fared against their rankings. It's mostly fun to note that the White Sox had Nos. 1, 2, 15, 19, 21, 28, 34 and 36 on their roster last year, with No. 40 just missing the cut.
With pitchers and catchers trickling into spring training sites in Arizona and Florida, there are still so many significant free agents still on the board. At least one of them found a home, and Soler gives the Giants their best bet for their first 30-homer season since Barry Bonds in 2004.
In one season, Mike Tanier had the misfortune of covering the NFL for three outlets that no longer exist, at least in a paying form. Football Outsiders stopped paying writers, The Messenger was born, died and was buried, and the New York Times outsourced its sports department to The Athletic. Defector published this post two days after we announced the hiring of James Fegan, and Tanier's last two paragraphs sum up the landscape pretty well:
The media industry is a carcass getting picked clean by scavengers. The business models that made sense even five years ago no longer work. There are too many entrepreneurs seeking riches that were never there, too many SEO farms covering every web search with unreadable kudzu, too many social-media moguls treating links outside of their fiefdoms as an act of treason. The whole system is now so gamed that readers have a hard time finding good information or entertainment, while informative and entertaining people cannot find readership. It’s a hostile environment for consumer and producer, and it’s not getting better.
I love this work. I am good at it. But I cannot afford to sign on with another hedge-fund dink who has startup capital burning through his cargo shorts and some vague ideas about scale. I can’t bear another round of thanking readers for reaching out on social media after another employer slipped out of town in the dead of night. I cannot stomach another morning waking up to do a job that I am not even certain will still exist by the end of that day. My only choice, as I see it, is to work for someone I can trust not to sell the farm out from under me: myself.
As I mentioned in my post explaining the new Sox Machine, we're making a similar bet (and we're approaching 250 new subscriptions since adding James, which is very, very encouraging so far). We're also trying to meet people halfway -- essentially combining two subscriptions in one, and leaving much of our content open to everybody -- but it's all a grand project in trying to figure out what might work for what area. Something has to, right?
