Major League Baseball Affiliation Realignment Rearranges Deck Chairs on the Hindenburg

OPINION -It is minor league affiliation realignment season again, and, to borrow the imagery of Stephen Colbert, Major League Baseball is soaring into the digital future by rearranging the deck chairs on the Hindenburg.

What is affiliation? Major league clubs sign contracts with minor league clubs at the AAA, AA, High A, A, Short Season A and Rookie classes of baseball to affiliate these teams to their club. The clubs at each level develop players, and make up the farm system for that major league team.

Most of the teams in minor league baseball are independently owned and operated. They sign contracts with the major league clubs for a year or four to be part of the farm system.

Why would a Major League team switch its minor league affiliates? Why would a minor league team want out of an affiliation?

In past years, changing affiliations for both major and minor league teams has been about new ballparks. For the minor league owner, fan friendly facilities help drive up attendance and concessions. Major league clubs covet modern locker rooms, indoor batting cages, and other amenities that come with those rebuilds.

Today it's about the two Ts: Turf and Television.

Blue Light Special on Prospects, Aisle One

The theme of the 2006 affiliate realignment season is the baseball super-market.

In a "super-market" the major league club arranges its affiliate minor league clubs into the same geographical region to pick up fertile ground to sell subscription television packages on cable. These networks are not covered in MLB's revenue-sharing agreement. It is an owners' bonanza.

Clubs located within the super-market make a seat sold for the Frederick Keys in Frederick, Maryland, a subscription sold for the Mid-Atlantic Sports Network (MASN) which covers the parent club, the Baltimore Orioles, or so the theory goes.

Forget the Alamo. The Houston Astros, over the last couple of rounds of minor league affiliation monopoly, moved out of places like New Orleans and into Texas towns like Austin (Round Rock) and Corpus Christi. Now they dominate key television markets of the Lone Star state from central to southern Texas.

Moving clubs into these markets is just an acceleration of the dominance that the major league clubs used to use local media to achieve in a less revenue positive way. Over the the history of MLB, major league clubs have made sure that regional fishwrap and local news tube jockeys within several hundred miles of the mother ship were in the BWS. That turned to money in hats and trips to the major league club, but it didn't have the impact of subscription television.

The Most Important Stat in Baseball

The most important stats in the baseball biz are not ERA or HRs or RBIs... They're the real performance twins: EGT and RBS

EGT, or Eyes Glued to Tubes, is the new money stat. RBS, or Real Butts in Seats has been a growing number for minor league baseball, and a flat or shrinking stat for MLB.

Major league clubs have been paying minor league salaries for years as an investment in the few that will make it to the major leagues.  Thanks to monetized, monopolized television networks like YES, NESN, and MASN, they can cash in on every paid player, and expand their club's market base too!

Adding games of minor league clubs to the mix of team-centric cable networks is a win-win. It pulls in the local market fans, and showcases the future talent to the major league home market fans.

Team television coverage of minor league games gives the club a way to test market reaction to rising stars. Joe may be as good of a slugger as Jim, but if he lights up that old Nielsen box every time his mug hits the screen, that may become the thing in his favor come promotion time.

The Genius of Peanut Butter & Chocolate

Take two great things and combine them. It worked for Reeses®. Now MLB owners hope that bringing minor league clubs into their home markets and their subscription television networks will allow some of the attendance magic to rub off in the form of increased television revenue.

This post-season alignment has already seen one amazing change as minor and major clubs move towards these super-market realignments to up their EGT numbers.

The Norfolk Tides, who had been the Triple-A affiliate of the New York Mets since 1969, dumped what was always considered one of the premiere affiliations in minor league baseball, to take on the Baltimore Orioles. It raised a few eyebrows in conventional baseball circles. Why the O's?

Being an Orioles affiliate looks a might more appealing when the Mid-Atlantic Sports Network (MASN), which reaches from the Southern portion of Pennsylvania to the Northern part of South Carolina, may put some of your games on television. More important, can you afford to be a Mets affiliate in a marketplace where the television is dominated by Orioles and Nationals baseball and their affiliates?

This off-season, the Los Angeles Dodgers pulled up their High-A club in the Florida State League, the long-standing Vero Beach Dodgers, and moved the affiliation to San Bernardino, a sixty-minute drive from Chavez Ravine in L.A. They moved the Triple-A club to Las Vegas in 2000.

Stacking the Deck Chairs on the Hindenburg

While all of this may fill the major and minor league owners coffers up another year or two with tube cash, it still is missing the point: Baseball, along with the rest of America, is decentralizing.

Internet power and overnight delivery. You do the math. You can be anywhere in America and do business. The prosperity of minor league baseball isn't due to the shiny new parks. It's due to the demand for a "major" experience in any town where fans with big-city expectations relocate, or just spring up.

The Dell Diamond in Round Rock is the nation's best minor league ballpark (MLN Top Ten Ballparks 2006, MLN Sports Zone ). Dell Computer has its biggest campus down the way. At the rate that Round Rock and Austin are growing, the Express are steaming into the future of baseball, while clubs like the Brewers look increasingly like its past.

Instead of embracing and adapting to decentralization, MLB owners with these networks are trying to harness it into their decades-old model for big broadcast professional baseball, major market-centric sport.

Catching the Tokyo Drift

Just as there won't probably be a newspaper on paper in a decade, and the internet will reshape how television and movies are delivered to you, there is going to have to be some rethinking of how professional baseball works in a world where Austin is going to be bigger than Milwaukee, and Tokyo might drift into the Pacific region of a larger, more diffuse baseball world.

The century-old New York-As-Mecca model is dead. Look at this season's pathetic, overpaid Yankees. Enough horsepower to get to the CS, but too many stars and not enough team heart to carry them further after a grueling season.

While they make fine television for YES during the regular season, hungry teams with underpaid players will beat up on superstar-saturated clubs wallowing in their own bloat. World Series champion Marlins, Angels, and Chi Sox all make the point. Most of those clubs owe their success to strong depth in their farm system that allow them to bring up fresh arms and switch out injured fielders without their local media falling into apoplectic shock.

The super-market shuffle is just putting a Band-Aid on the broken system that we have now. It is nothing more than a weak siphon of the minors' popularity. If MLB clubs really want to rev up the revenue engine, rethinking the structure of the game to build on the enthusiasm of these growing regions, rather than try to cramp it into the old box, is going to have to happen.

Like the growing popularity of NCAA sports, wouldn't more people in a five state market turn on the tube to see their post-season All-Star club from the West take on the hated East club? Team Mountain takes on Team West. A few top talents from every club and you have a lot more vested television sets in America, in markets great and small, racking up revenue for MLB.

The malaise of the national pastime is clear. The power base is shifting. Baseball recognizes it, but wants to channel it back to a broken model. Without making some changes to capitalize on the trend that is lofting the minors and college sports into the stratosphere of attendance numbers, baseball will soar into the future like the Hindenburg.