Ordinarily, I’d be using a pic of Spike here to talk about the state of the system or some other wrapup of the minor-league season that just finished. But there was no season in 2020 and there’s no certainty that there’ll be one in 2021. Probability? Sure. But certainty?
As my “father” once said, “Search your feelings and you know it to be true.”
Right now, the immediate concern is the reorganization (absorption) of MiLB by (into) MLB. In my opinion, everything else is secondary: The draft, college baseball, winter baseball, international scouting – all of it is going to hinge on how that turns out.
I hope that we’ll get some answers soon, but I think what’s going to happen is MLB will allow the agreement to expire, then negotiate with the minor-league team owners individually. There has been some talk of lawsuits, particularly in instances where public monies were spent on stadiums in exchange for extended leases, but I have to wonder how much stomach attorneys general will have in pursuing these cases, given the current economic and political climates.
In the meantime, the goal is to keep the lights on with a weekly post. Just about every usual offseason milestone doesn’t really apply, given that we’re more than a calendar year into the current offseason. Even if you count the three weeks of spring training before the world went to hell, we’re still more than six months into whatever we’re in now (post-preseason? pre-offseason? limbo?).
There will be no season reviews, no AFL, no truly new watchlist; 2021 is probably just going to be the 2020 list plus 2020 draft picks minus 2020 graduates, not unlike the Top 30 lists for BA and MLB Pipeline over the past few months.
Like 2020 itself, this is all new and we’re just trying to muddle through.