By Steve Bailey
Dec 9, 2020
CLEVELAND, OH – The Cleveland Indians are excited to announce the club has invited the Columbus Clippers, Akron RubberDucks, Lake County Captains and Lynchburg Hillcats to become our affiliates in MLB’s new Player Development structure.
The current structure calls for the Columbus Clippers to remain the Triple-A affiliate while Akron will continue to serve as the Double-A level club. Lake County will now serve as our Advanced Single-A club with Lynchburg assuming lower level Single-A status.
The Office of the Commissioner has been engaged with stakeholders across the game – including all 30 MLB Club Baseball Operations Departments, Minor League owners and government officials – over the past two years to modernize the sport’s Player Development system and maintain baseball in every community in which it is currently played.
save, essentially, minor league baseball. okay, so major league baseball has about 150 minor league teams. what minor-league baseball wants to do is shut off the bottom 40. i m sorry. bottom 40. these are the appellation leagues. this is training leagues. this is the new york pennsylvania league. these are single-a and below. they want to shove those off into something else so that they can focus on the core business of the hundred 20 or so remaining people. if you live in a town where one of those smaller teams are, you re probably upset. bret: so, there s a bipartisan letter to the commissioner in which it says, reducing the number of minor-league clubs is not in the best interest of the overall game of baseball, especially when major league baseball s revenues are at an all-time