Atlanta Braves and the new minor league rule changes
What’s Going On Here
This is being implemented by the minor league baseball arm of MLB. That requires a bit more explanation, and Wikipedia is succinct enough for our purposes:
"Minor League Baseball is a hierarchy of professional baseball leagues in the Americas that compete at levels below Major League Baseball (MLB) and provide opportunities for player development and a way to prepare for the major leagues. All of the minor leagues are operated as independent businesses. Most are members of the umbrella organization known as Minor League Baseball (MiLB), which operates under the Commissioner of Baseball within the scope of organized baseball."
The more important aspect of this is that the MLB Players Association has no relationship with minor league players whatsoever. All collective bargaining done by this union supports only the players who have signed major league contracts, and agreements between the union and the MLB owners do not carry over to the minor leagues, with limited exceptions.
Since the Commissioner of Baseball and his office have direct oversight of the minor leagues, they have often used that power to perform an end-run around the union in order to either test-run or outright implement many initiatives deemed important by the Commissioner’s office.
Some examples include:
- The Ban on chewing tobacco. Implemented in the minors in 1993, this policy found its way into the newest Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA) in 2016 for new major league players.
- The aforementioned pitch clock. Test-run in the Arizona Fall League, and then implemented for 2015, this was, of course, a hot topic of the off-season.
In short, the minors are effectively being used by the Commissioner for two reasons:
- To be a lab experiment for his designs on Pace of Play efforts
- To get those players used to the idea of playing under such restrictions – likely in the hope that the union will eventually yield to them for major league play.
In point of fact, there truly is no ‘Pace of Play’ issue in the minor leagues. Games proceed at a straightforward pace.
Here are the game times for 10 Mississippi Braves’ games from 2017, taken more-or-less at random throughout the season:
- 3:08
- 2:47
- 2:38
- 3:08
- 2:50
- 2:43
- 2:49
- 3:11
- 2:25 (7 innings; part of double-header)
- 2:30 (yes, this one went 9)
- 2:31
So there would be no point in doing these ‘pacing’ changes at all unless the Commissioner had designs on ‘conditioning’ players for making changes at the major league level: the ‘lab experiment’ rationale.
That brings me back to the Extra Innings changes…