Mischief Managed. Well, Some of It....

Not much to report from my own little world.  This bug has settled into a state of Moderately Annoying Near Permanence, but I haven't had much to do the past few days that have been affected by it.  So instead I've been continuing our Doc Martin binge, begun reading the Handmaid's Tale sequel, and getting my blood pressure up by reading about asshats on the Internet.  One bunch of them got shut up and shamed once the light of day got visited on them. With luck, the same will happen to the other bunch.

This November has brought very hopeful signs for the future of American politics. As I noted right after Election Day, Democrats did very well in the quest to begin undoing the damage of the past few years. Though no federal offices were contested, Virginia went completely blue, Kentucky's Republican governor lost (and eventually conceded), and closer to home, both my current and former homes elected Democratic county executives at the same time for the first time I can remember. (The good news continued this weekend, with Louisiana re-electing a Democratic Guv despite Cheeto making numerous personal appearances and pleas for him to be defeated).  Unfortunately, the next section of the GOP playbook is entitled, "How to Act Like We Won Even When We Lost." In numerous instances since 2016, Republican-controlled lejs have taken to last-minute lame duck legislation intended to cripple the powers of the incoming Democrat, through budget cuts, suddenly urgent need for "checks and balances" on their authority that were never needed before, and the like.  It's been done in North Carolina, it's happening in Wisconsin, and as of a week ago, it looked like it was going to happen in Monroe County:

Outgoing Republican Monroe County Executive Cheryl Dinolfo supports legislation that would curtail the authority of her Democratic successor, Adam Bello, to choose his own cabinet, a county spokesperson said Wednesday.

The bill was introduced late Tuesday by majority Republican county legislators at the legislature's regular monthly meeting.

Known as the CABLE Act of 2019, an acronym for "Checks and Balances for Legislative Equality," the legislation would amend the county charter to give the legislature the power to approve the county executive's choices for the directors of every county department....
The legislation was introduced as a "matter of urgency," meaning it can bypass the typical legislative process of going through committee. According to a memo introducing the legislation, the bill would be subject to a public referendum and a vote next month.

Ah, that "public referendum" turned out to be a dealbreaker for the power grabbers. State law mandates that one be held any time a municipality passes a law which curtails the power of one of its elected officials.  This proposal left such a bad taste in local mouths, even the leading conservative broadcaster in town- who made it onto Colbert the week before for his unfortunate take on the "OKBoomer" epithet- came out against it.  So GOP leaders, tails between legs, announced last week they were withdrawing the proposal.

If only their counterparts in state legislatures could be so gracious.

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Another messy batch of mischief does seem to be moving forward, though: it was first revealed in some baseball-related articles last month, but now details are coming forward that are starting to get some pushback.

To much of the country, "baseball" and "major league" are synonymous. They're what get most of the ink and the overwhelming percentage of the dollars. However, below those vaunted 30 teams is a web of history and hope reaching to some of the smallest corners of this country. Minor league teams, from the 30 highest-level ones in AAA holding baseball's biggest prospects, all the way down to short-season "A-ball" where maybe one or two players a year will make it to The Show.  New York has under a dozen of them, from three one-step-away francises in Buffalo, Rochester and Syracuse, to a number of NY-Penn League teams from Batavia to Brooklyn,....

and the in-betweenery of the Binghamton Rumble Ponies, who play in the AA Eastern League until, suddenly, it looks like they may not anymore.

Major League Baseball has a deal with all of these teams,  big and small.  The big clubs provide and pay for the players, the managers and coaches, and partner in two- or four-year affiliations with the existing league members at the lower levels.  Those teams, typically owned by small investors or communities (though increasingly the MLB teams have been buying the franchises from them, as the Mets most recently did last year with AAA Syracuse), pay for everything else: the stadium costs, promotion, security and such.  The agreement between Bigs and Littles has been renewed with little fanfare many times, but the current one runs out after next year, and a big change is afoot:

MLB has offered a proposal that, if adopted, would reduce Minor League Baseball from 160 teams—not counting the complex league teams that are wholly MLB-owned—to 120 beginning in 2021.

The proposal is described as a preliminary offering subject to alteration. But if the proposal, or some version of it, is adopted, it will lead to the most dramatic restructuring of the minor leagues in more than half a century. Under the proposal, not only would more than 25 percent of MiLB teams be eliminated, but the remaining leagues would also be dramatically reworked with some leagues getting much smaller, others getting bigger, and teams switching classification levels all around the country....

At the root of the disagreement is a preliminary proposal MLB has offered to reduce its number of Player Development Contracts (the affiliation agreement by which MLB teams provide players and staff to MiLB teams) from 160 to 120. That reduction would completely eliminate the four, non-complex Rookie-level and short-season classifications from the minor leagues.

The proposal also completely reorganizes the full-season minor leagues. While there would still be Triple-A, Double-A, high Class A and low Class A, those four levels would be completely reworked to make the leagues much more geographically compact. In Triple-A, the Pacific Coast League would shift from 16 teams to 10. The International League would grow to 20 teams. The 14-team low Class A South Atlantic League would be turned into a six-team league with a new Mid-Atlantic league springing up.

The short-season Northwest League would move to full-season ball.

Under MLB’s proposal, some teams would be asked to move from Class A to Triple-A. Others would be asked to move from Triple-A to Class A, and there would be other less dramatic moves as well.

Bill Madden of the New York Daily News got into some of the details of this plan this weekend, and for the minor league contingent in this state, it is not pretty:

 

Three New York-Penn League teams are being saved in the plan by being upgraded to full season leagues, including Hudson Valley being moved to a new-formed Class-A league and Brooklyn, the Mets affiliate, which will be moved to the Double-A Eastern League, replacing Binghamton. That club is being put out of business despite the fact that the owner, John Hughes, has raised a considerable amount of private equity to upgrade NYSEG Stadium. And, by the way, Binghamton will be the host venue for next year’s Eastern League All-Star Game!

Won't that be a fun night at the ballpark?  So Brooklyn and Hudson Valley would survive, along with a third still-unnamed NY-Penn franchise. Given recent history, I can just about bet the rent that it won't be Batavia.  Many other franchises at these levels would be simply shown the clubhouse door despite their owners having put untold thousands into stadium upgrades to meet the existing major league demands.

The consolation prize for these abandoned owners?  Again, Bill Madden:

...has MLB got a deal for them! If they wish, they can put their team in what MLB has dubbed a “Dream League” — which would be an independent league operated by MLB, with minimal cost to MLB. In addition to stadium maintenance and taxes which they’re already paying, the cost of players, managers, coaches, trainers and equipment people’s salaries and workers comp insurance would now all fall on the owners — between $350,000-$450,000 per year. When it was pointed out by the minor league negotiators there was no way these minor league owners, after losing all the equity in their teams, could then afford to own a “Dream League” team, the MLB response was: “Well they didn’t pay all that much for their teams in the first place so it’s only paper money.” Tell that to David Glass, who bought the Kansas City Royals in 2000 for $96 million and recently sold them for $1 billion. Or as one minor league negotiator told me: “I guess that means it’s OK they should be punished for being good business operators.”

So far, little of this is likely to affect things at the closest-to-home AAA level. There's even mention in here somewhere about the International League being expanded, which would almost certainly end the unfairness of New York's three teams being stuck in a six-team division while southern and western franchises only play against four. 

Some of the impetus for this is the pitiful treatment of minor league prospects that MLB has been trying to justify while pulling hundred dollar bills out of their asses for decades.  Last year, it was the one Canadian team in the club- our own parent Blue Jays- who announced their proposal to double minimum salaries throughout their system to end the injustice of paying players in Batavia less than minimum wage while superstars keep getting million-dollar checks decades after their retirements.

Unfortunately, these owners can't be voted out next November. But we can vote with our feet, and with our voices, to let them know that this wholesale slaughter of decades of tradition is just plain wrong.