Five Things to Know About the New Minor League Schedule
Or really, six
The simple pleasures sometimes bring the greatest thrills and last week, lovers of minor league baseball had a blast pouring over the new, FINALLY released 2021 schedules. For those of you already eagerly planning your trips to Sutter Health Park in Sacramento, PK Park in Eugene, Excite Ballpark in San Jose, or, like me, The Diamond in Richmond, VA, there are a few new things you’ll need to know about this year’s minor league schedule. First, look them over and peruse them yourselves:
For those of you quick on the uptake, you probably noticed a few curious elements of in the 2021 schedules. And, because I’m told the proper way to internet is to create listicles — whether or not a list is warranted by the subject matter — let’s run them down by the numbers. Forthwith, here are the Five Things You Need to Know Mostest of All about the New Minor League Schedules!
1. They May Well Be a Work of Fiction
I suppose the proper way to listicle is count down from 5 to 1, but this really is the crucial element and I don’t want to be burying the lede here. Though the schedules are printed and announced, we’d be fooling ourselves to think that this means we’ve passed the “Go/No Go” point for the launch of the 2021 season. The obstacles still facing a minor league year starting in the next 3-4 months are many and large. And they all have to do with the tragedy that’s surrounded our every moment of life for the last 12 months, the COVID pandemic that has taken more than half a million American lives and created the single deadliest year in U.S. history.
While the Giants’ success at navigating through the 2020 season without a single legitimate positive COVID test was an extraordinary accomplishment (seriously, L.J. Petra’s work monitoring and enforcing the protocols for the Giants can’t be acclaimed enough), we always have to remember that major league teams are operating with a flexibility that most minor league clubs simply don’t have. I feel like I’ve brought this point up ad nauseum over the last year, but the financial margin on which most minor league teams operate makes many of the necessary COVID health protocols cost prohibitive. That’s simple things like an extra bus to take players to the stadium so that they can spread out and keep a healthy distance from each other (Baseball America’s J.J. Cooper has estimated this is an expense that can be anywhere from $2000-$4000 per night). It’s the ability to utilize a large locker/room workout area to sequence small groups of players (or, for that matter, folks in the tiny minor league press boxes).
That’s without even getting to the question of fans. Baseball America reported last week that some minor league teams have run the numbers and determined that having some fans will actually be more cost-prohibitive than having no fans due to the increased staffing that even a limited fan-entry scenario would create (opening the food booths and gift store, ticket counters, and bringing wayfinder and gameday experience staff in for every game).
All of these issues would be daunting enough, but at the AAA level there’s an even more precarious situation that needs to be solved. The major league health and safety protocols place extreme restrictions on major league players’ interaction with the public and all travel this year for the big league clubs will be on privately chartered flights. At the AAA level, teams necessarily travel by plane (since teams can be thousands of miles apart) and they absolutely can’t afford to charter private ones.
You can see how this creates a collision of contradicting forces. When major league teams need to reach down to their AAA pool of talent for a fresh arm or an injury replacement, they’ll be choosing among a group of players who have all recently taken commercial flights — indeed, who might very well need to take a flight just to join the team — violating the health and safety protocols for the major league club. That’s to say nothing of the obvious health risks it creates for the AAA players themselves. There’s no obvious way to square this circle. MLB could pay for their AAA clubs to take regular charter flights, but the first three words of this sentence no doubt DQ it as a potential solution in MLB’s eyes. The big league club will have a taxi squad again this year traveling along with them all the time, and that helps the situation some, but it doesn’t really provide the flexibility to deal with all of the exigencies of the season.
Conceivably, some kind of hybrid AAA/Alternate Site might be set up where some players are on a AAA roster playing games while others are set aside as a depth pool for the big league club. But you can see that it’s a messy situation with no obvious answers, and even the partial solutions bring up yet more issues and still leave the minor leaguers exposed to greater health risks.
The date to focus on for all of this is March 15 — that’s the Go/No Go date for starting the AAA season on the scheduled date of April 8. If Rob Manfred is going to issue a delay to the AAA season, it has to come by that date. We’ll keep an eye on it!
2. New Start Dates, End Dates and Season Lengths
Assuming that April 8 date IS met, however, there’s still plenty of new and interesting developments here. First and foremost is the staggered start for the levels. So as to create the healthiest situation possible in camp, most players ticketed for AA and below will not be reporting until after the major leaguers leave spring camp (the top prospects who received non-roster invites to big league camp are the obvious exceptions here).
That creates a schedule wherein the A/A+/AA start dates are pushed back to May the 4th (allowing Opening Night to coincide with that favorite minor league promotion: Star Wars Night). As it stands now, those leagues will all conclude their seasons on Sunday, September 19, which is about two weeks later than normal. With a month’s delay to the start of the season and two weeks extension on the end of the season, it’s pretty clear that some games will be getting squeezed out. The traditional 140 game season is getting pruned by 20 games at the A and AA levels.
At the AAA level, the season is scheduled to start on April 8 for Sacramento and run 142 games to the same September 19 conclusion. It’s worth noting that while the schedules have the season ending on September 19, a memo MLB circulated to all teams earlier in the winter put October 3 as the latest possible date the minor league seasons could go to, so there might be some wiggle room if MLB delays the season start further to still get in the full 120 games (for A/AA) or 142 games (AAA). In all cases, there will be no minor league post-season this year, as MLB is prioritizing getting the most games for the most players.
3. Get to Know Your Opponents with Week Long Series
I noted above that the real risk of getting this minor league season off the ground is heightened exposure for the players to COVID-19. One way the schedule is attempting to mitigate that exposure is by reducing travel significantly. Some of this will be familiar from past seasons — Augusta has for years played a heavy portion of their schedule against the Rome (GA) Braves while virtually never seeing the Hagerstown (MD) Suns. That type of regionally focused scheduling will be increased this year, particularly in the larger leagues where many teams will never see some of their league mates.
But the new innovation is a schedule made up almost entirely of week-long series (the only exception being one four-game series in AAA which is an adjustment to the MLB All Star game). Teams will travel just once per week, with all series running six days and the entire league having a unified travel day at the conclusion of the series. Once again, AAA will be slightly off-kilter from the other levels, with their series running from Thursdays to Tuesdays, with Wednesdays being the travel day. For all other full-season teams, series will run from Tuesdays to Sundays and Monday will be the travel day. You may have noticed that the schedules above try, as much as possible, to alternate home and road series, so teams aren’t spending multiple weeks away from home most of the time. And most importantly, reducing travel to one day a week, reducing the amount of times players are checking in and checking out from various hotels, climbing onto buses for long trips, etc. will help keep them safer until everyone’s had the opportunity to be vaccinated.
4. Regular Off Days
This is part and parcel of the above item, but it’s really an interesting innovation that I think might have staying power beyond the COVID era. With the introduction of six game series, every team in every league will have the same one off day every week. Beyond the attempts to keep players healthy under the current pandemic situation, there are a number of obvious player-development benefits from this arrangement. While minor league operators will still want to keep some “Educational Days” on the calendar to bring in the schoolkids by the bus loads, those dates won’t be followed by a hurried stumble onto the bus for a six-hour ride. Players won’t be hustled onto overnight buses to trade cities mid-week following a game that went until midnight.
The regularity of the weekly off day should help standardize other parts of players’ daily schedules too — regular sleeping hours, for instance, which is a huge part of a healthy life regimen. Giving players a six-day period without throwing bus travel on top of games and their other duties should give them the freedom and flexibility to regularize their eating and workout schedule. This would give them more time at stadiums to work with their coaching staffs on development issues or allow those staffs to rotate small groups of players in and around the facility for safety as they did at the Alternate Site last summer. This strikes me as an absolute good and really should have a life beyond COVID. There’s no particular reason, as far as I can see, for teams to adhere to traditional three or four game series at the minor league level, especially given how arduous much of that travel can be.
All of these changes should help you with your fanning as well. Follow these two simple rules:
Don’t go on Mondays (or Wednesdays if you’re in Sacramento)
By and large, if they’re gone this week they’ll be home next (and vice versa)
5. League Names Have Gone Muzak On Us
This is the least important change in the new minor league setting, but it probably creates an inordinate amount of outcry because names are such a source of charm for us humans. We like homey labels for stuff, so sue us! But, yes, for the 2021 season at least, all minor leagues will go by monikers better suited for wayfinding around a Walmart than for establishing any sort of character or charm. The beloved “Pacific Coast League?” It’s now the antiseptically labeled “Triple A - West” league. Or “Conference,” maybe, since there’s an East and a West. Who even knows?
It’s sad but we are a nation that runs on our lawyers and this is the inevitable result of the failure of MLB and MiLB to come to an agreed upon Professional Baseball Agreement last fall. Because the traditional league names are, in fact, Intellectual Property that was owned by the leagues themselves (or by Minor League Baseball, LLC), MLB’s failure to negotiate a new agreement with those leagues means they have no legal right to the names. Remember, this isn’t a tweak to the structures that have existed for a century. MLB fundamentally blew up “Minor League Baseball” and is building a new creature on its remains. While there has been some vague notion that MLB might, in fact, buy the rights to the old names in the future, knowing the league, I would expect we should get ourselves used to the idea of the “Papa Johns AA League Sponsored by Wawa” coming our way soon.
It really is true that a listicle counting from 1 to 5, rather than the reverse, is less satisfying somehow. The rules which bind us together are indeed mysterious. But what if I had a secret Item #5A in pocket all the time? There’s a surprise I’ll bet you didn’t see coming!
And I do! It’s time, at long last, to discuss how the minor league season is going to cause some changes around here:
How the Schedule Will Affect There R Giants
For those of you who have joined me along the way this past year (and I’m very glad you have!), perhaps I should back up a bit and explain what, exactly, There R Giants was originally intended to be. Initially, I wanted to create a space where I could continue the work I did for many years with the “Minor Lines” posts at McCovey Chronicles. The intent was to make this a daily post, Mondays - Fridays, covering every game in the system and keeping an eye on the wider trends and important stories involving the Giants prospects’ development. And I intended to make it predominantly a subscription newsletter, with subscribers getting access to every post, while those signed up for the free version would get one post per week.
Then, of course, the world went sideways and there were no minor league games to keep an eye on. Because my raison d’etre had, more or less, disappeared on me, and because there were much larger things to concern us all at the time, it didn’t seem appropriate to me to establish a subscriber-based letter at the time. Here’s what I wrote back then:
Originally, of course, my plan was to launch a call for subscribers here, but that seems silly and callous now — for those of you who still have discretionary funds at this point, it would be much better to find ways to support your local businesses and workers. But I will still mark the outlines of the season by writing about the Giants’ system — I’m thinking of regular posts Monday, Wednesday, Friday starting next week with all posts available to everybody until the known world returns to us and there are games to cover again.
Though we’re still a long way from normal, I’m going to consider the If/when return of minor league baseball to be that promised “return of the known world.” As such, once AAA begins, I’ll convert the newsletter to its original intent: a daily (M-F) post that takes a deep look at every minor league game in the Giants system, as well as keeping up with the greater world of Giants’ prospects. Once a week, I’ll write a general post that wraps up the week — I’m thinking that for April this will come on Thursday, following the AAA off day on Wednesday, and then if the other levels begin in May, I’ll shift the weekly review to Tuesday, following the Monday off day for the other three levels. Occasionally, I’ll also do a Saturday morning post (because Friday nights at the ballyard are always so fun) and I’ll make that available to all as well.
In a normal year, I’d be making plans to attend minor league camp right now. But we’re not there yet. I’m still waiting for my vaccination tier to come up, and I’m fairly sure the City of Scottsdale is not allowing public access at the cramped Indian School Park facility these days. But I do have high hopes to be at Richmond for their opener and follow them closely through the season. And, with any luck, perhaps trips out west to catch the other affiliates may be in the future as well. Who knows? Maybe there’s even a trip to the Felipe Alou Academy in the Dominican Republic some day in the offing. All of these things will unfold as time allows.
I’m incredibly grateful to those of you who have read my thoughts over the last year (particularly so to those of you who have been subscribers even as I’ve made all my work available to all). And I hope many of you will join me on the journey ahead. May it be an interesting one, though perhaps a little less interesting than the past year has been would be acceptable.
Thanks for this Roger, here's hoping everyone stays safe and Minor Lines returns!