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Leagues and Governing Bodies

No formal progress in MLB-MiLB discussions

The Professional Baseball Agreement between the major and minor leagues expires at season’s end.getty images

Contentious negotiations between MLB and minor league baseball over a new Professional Baseball Agreement have followed a hard-and-fast pattern for nearly four months: public squabbling, pledges to keep quiet, a short-lived truce, more public squabbling, rinse, repeat.

 

After detailed letters from both sides found their way into the media last week, this much is clear for an agreement to be reached before the current PBA expires at the end of the 2020 season: “The process has to be different than it is now,” said a source directly involved in the discussions. That sentiment is shared by sources on both sides who spoke on condition of anonymity because of ongoing discussions. 

While sources on both sides also concede that there have been some constructive, informal discussions, no significant formal progress has been made. Almost four months after Baseball America first reported MLB’s proposal to dramatically overhaul minor league baseball — which could result in cutting as many as 42 teams — the two sides can’t even agree on whether MiLB has presented a formal proposal (it says it has; MLB disagrees).

MLB has presented MiLB’s negotiating committee with an idea of moving away from its initial notion of a Dream League — consisting of independent teams composed of unaffiliated players — to be played in towns of contracted teams with another league consisting of players preparing for the draft. MiLB views MLB’s evolution on that front as a modicum of progress, though a wide chasm remains.

MiLB believes MLB has lied about MiLB’s positions, which it says has prompted MiLB to stage an aggressive public and congressional campaign to save baseball in communities nationwide. MLB does not believe the current highly public nature of the debate and the intervention of Congress is creating a situation in which an agreement can be reached. Four members of the House of Representatives introduced a bipartisan resolution last week asking MLB to abandon plans to cut minor league affiliates. 

A MiLB source said support for MLB’s proposal to overhaul minor league baseball is less hardened among the 30 MLB owners than MLB deputy commissioner Dan Halem described in his eight-page letter. A continued aggressive public and congressional campaign could further weaken support among the 30 owners, the source said, adding that MiLB believes it has crafted a compelling public narrative: “It’s Wall Street sticking it to Main Street.”

MLB disagrees with that framing of the issue, saying instead that MiLB is disingenuous to claim it is trying to save baseball in communities at the same time minor league teams regularly make unilateral decisions to relocate. In his letter, Halem said that has occurred 77 times since 1990 and that MLB recently learned that the Class A New York-Penn League put the Batavia (N.Y.) Muckdogs into receivership and sold the team to an owner who intends to move the franchise.

“Given the track record of MiLB abandoning communities when it suits the owners’ economic interest,” Halem wrote, “it is more than a bit ironic that you hold yourself out as the defender of local communities.”

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