♫Where have you gone, Jackie Robinson....♫

[captainsblog]

He actually hasn't gone anywhere. No more or less dead than he was a day ago, with his retired number and oddly placed Rotunda and other memories still intact. But the 19th century baseball league that was his first step over the color barrier got its death warrant today, the latest in the takeover of minor league baseball by the 30 Lords at the top.

The lower leagues already got their warrants of execution, as I recounted in the 2020 countdown. That purge was not expected to affect the long-standing franchises at the top of the minor league food chain nearest to here and along the 90 to Syracuse, but as "franchises" in the strict legal sense, they are no more, nor is the league that hosted the current Bisons, Red Wings and (Syracuse) Mets for most of the past century:

Under a new geographic plan released by Major League Baseball on Friday, all of the old minor league names have been tossed out in favor of geographic and level classifications. That includes the Mets’ International League, which was founded in 1884.

The Mets are now part of a 20-team Triple A East. The Pacific Coast League, which had been comprised of western teams, is now a 10-team Triple-A West.

As with most things, the devil is in the details, and this new scheme provides plenty of horns and red-tipped tails for consideration. On the one hand, the new “AAA East” format will be better for Wings, Bisons and S-Mets, who since the 1990s dissolution of the third AAA minor league have been stuck in a six team division with the others having only four. Now the former six-team IL North will remain as it was (other than the move of the PawSox to become the WooSox), while the other two "East" subdivisions will each have seven teams, making it easier for our teams to make the playoffs. Assuming MLB will allow those.

But with that benefit comes something more sinister, as this additional piece about the Bisons' status confirms:

Major League Baseball's sweeping realignment of the minor leagues was made official Friday as it announced it has received signed licenses from 120 affiliates that begin in the 2021 season. As part of MLB's new "Professional Development League System," the Bisons have signed a 10-year license to remain the Blue Jays' Triple-A affiliate. They have been in that spot since 2013.

The key word in that paragraph is "licenses." Under the old system, MLB teams and established franchises in minor leagues signed "agreements," which had terms binding on both parties.  Teams could partner for either two or four years at a time, and at the end of every other season, a carousel would spin as minor league owners sought out more supportive or prospect-laden parent clubs. At least a few times in my fandom, the Mets were left out when the music stopped and wound up stuck in bad ballparks or distant time zones. (They solved that problem, as several of the Lords have, by buying the Syracuse franchise outright.)

Now, though, the minor leagues are mere licensees of their parents. That's significantly less than an equal partnership and barely above squatting rights; and the term is for 10 years, revocable at any time by the big kids but with no leeway for the locals.   If the Yankees want a bigger ballpark, or a shorter commute for their prospects, they can pull the plug on Scranton at a moment's notice and award a new franchise to Newark or Newburgh or New Anything they want.

MLB could easily have kept the names and records and traditions of the two leagues that will mostly form the two new top "divisions." They made a clearly conscious choice not to. The name of the IL was already an endangered species as of a year ago, when the Lords changed the name of the major league "disabled list" to "injured list" and assigned those abbreviation letters to it.  But it is a circuit older than the American League; was truly more international than MLB has ever been with teams formerly in Canada and Cuba; and was Jackie Robinson's first stop, with the IL Montreal Royals, on his way to making history with the Brooklyn Dodgers.

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Making this transition even weirder, on the home front, is the chance that the Bisons will be sharing their home stadium with their parent club.  AAA games were canceled last year, enabling the Blue Jays to take up sole residence there for most of their home schedule in our downtown ballpark when COVID closed the border; but so far the word from Sahlen Field is "wait and see, eh?":

Most observers expect the Blue Jays to open their 2021 season at their spring home in Dunedin, Fla., and then transition elsewhere later in the season if they can't return to Toronto because of ongoing border issues. While it seems unlikely at first glance that the Jays could return here for games while the Bisons are playing, it's notable that Blue Jays branding both inside and outside the ballpark remains intact and the sides remain in contact about solutions to share the stadium.

"It doesn't necessarily put that out of contention," Bisons General Manager Anthony Sprague told The News on Friday afternoon when asked if a Herd season makes Blue Jays games unworkable. "We have a schedule more to do with the rest of our new league. That's happening one way or another. If the Jays were to play here, we're the anomaly and we have to figure it out while working with them."

Blue Jays president/CEO Mark Shapiro and GM Ross Atkins have said multiple times during the offseason that the club remains focused on playing in Toronto. But the course of the pandemic continues to make it clear that's a long-term proposition and not something that will happen when the home schedule opens April 8 against the Los Angeles Angels.

One oddity I noted earlier is that the Mets have announced their 2021 schedule, with the AL East as their crossover division for interleague games beyond the obligatory rivalry with the Bronx Cheers.  It includes home-and-home games against Boston, Baltimore and Tampa, but only Citi Field games with Toronto.  So once again, it looks like I will have no chance of seeing my former hometown heroes in my current hometown venue, despite them being there for three glorious days with no fans or television coverage last September.

New York Mets have left and gone away, hey hey hey, hey hey hey....